Everybody Dance Now
Barbara Ehrenreich bridles at what she calls the cult of cheerfulness and at the marketing of optimism and the power of positive thinking over the wisdom of taking action to create positive change. “I hate hope. There. It’s out. Let pestilence rain down on me,” she wrote in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine.
But Ehrenreich is anything but bitter. Opinionated, yes, and often outraged. But bitter, no. She is deeply optimistic, and she puts her faith in the value and power of what she calls “collective joy.”
“It’s a clunky term,” she admits, “but it was the best I could come up with.”
The author, social commentator and cultural historian is best known for her New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. But years before her research on the American workforce plunged her into the nascent living wage movement or led her to create an organization for unemployed, underemployed and anxiously employed white collar workers, Ehrenreich was fascinated with human bonding — not sexual, not familial, but communal and societal.
She first explored this topic in Blood Rites, an exploration of war, humanity’s propensity for the dark side of collective excitement. Now, with Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Ehrenreich delves into the opposite impulse — the instinctive need to gather for ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming and, most of all, dancing.
Citing prehistoric drawings that depict lines and circles of people dancing, Ehrenreich says, “There is evidence that this capacity for collective joy, especially through synchronized, rhythmic activity such as dance, is hardwired into humans. The techniques — the dance steps, the musical instruments, the costumes — are cultural, but the capacity for collective joy is innate.”
But Ehrenreich believes such rituals had other purposes as well — providing relief from work and poverty, putting aside daily worries, and even showing off talents that might not ordinarily be valued in the workplace or even within the family. “Perhaps you’re nothing more than a peasant in the rest of your life,” she says, “but if you’re a super dancer or if you can make a great costume or you’re a great musician, these festivities are a time for you to shine.”
Ehrenreich’s work examines the history of collective joy throughout cultures and centuries from ecstatic dance rituals in Africa and Europe to the worship of the Greek god Dionysus that had women leaving their chores behind to run for the hills to make merry. In many cases, these rituals were spiritual in nature, with their goal being “to achieve a state of ecstatic trance... which you could interpret as communion with a deity.” Many religions, Ehrenreich believes, including Christianity, were originally danced religions.
And so it was these two aspects of collective joy — the disregard for the distinctions of class and gender and the opportunity for anyone to gain access to a power greater than themselves — that Ehrenreich believes led to its suppression. If an elected official was no more important than a laborer, or if anyone could “glimpse the transcendent” without an intermediary, the social structures of church and state were in jeopardy. “Elites fear that disorderly kinds of events could turn into uprisings. And this fear is justified,” Ehrenreich says. “Whether you’re looking at European peasants in the late Middle Ages or Caribbean slaves in the 19th century, they were using festivity and carnival as the occasion for revolt.”
Ehrenreich cites a rise in melancholy, or what we now call depression, after ecstatic rituals had been all but eliminated. “There’s this sudden awareness of depression as a big problem in Europe in the 17th century,” Ehrenreich says, “and my guess is that there certainly is a connection to the suppression of traditional festivities.... It has to do with the fact that festivities and ecstatic rituals are traditional cures for depression.”
Spectacles — events for which there are spectators — have replaced collective celebration, Ehrenreich says, but at great cost. “We no longer participate together. We’re not creative. We’re not part of the celebration. We sit and watch while someone else does it for us.”
She finds traces of revival, so to speak, in Pentecostal churches, in the rock ’n’ roll music of the ’50s and ’60s, in today’s raves and musical festivals, as well as in the transformation of Halloween into an adult celebration. She doesn’t necessarily see any new forms of joyous expression on the horizon as much as she sees the need to recover the lost tradition. “We can live without it, as most of us do,” she says. “But why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting and dance?”
Ehrenreich graduated from Reed College with a degree in physics in 1963 and went on to earn a PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University. But her interest in social change quickly outpaced her desire for a scientific career, and her activism soon led to a prolific career as a writer and social commentator. Ehrenreich has written for Time magazine, The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic and is a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine. She is the author of 14 books and is at work on a new manuscript exploring the “cult of cheerfulness.” Ehrenreich will deliver the fall 2007 Atkinson Lecture in Smith Auditorium, Thursday, Oct. 18, at 8 p.m. Check the University website for more details as the date approaches.