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A History of Collective Joy
Metropolitan Books
January 2007
On Sale: January 9, 2007
336 pages
ISBN: 0805057234
EAN: 9780805057232
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
From the bestselling social commentator and cultural
historian, a fascinating exploration of one of humanity’s
oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into
the origins of our species’ attraction to war. Here, she
explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so
effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the
desire for collective joy, historically expressed in
ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in
human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century
Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and “savage,”
Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from
the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval
practice of Christianity as a “danced religion.” Ultimately,
church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the
prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized
carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism,
European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The
elites’ fear that such gatherings would undermine social
hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired
French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean
to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry
persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s
rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent
“carnivalization” of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in
the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings,
impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision,
even create, a more peaceable future.
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