Customer Reviews

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

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Good research comes from good questions. Barbara Ehrenreich's book is the result of two excellent questions that she writes are prompted by a sense of loss: "if ecstatic rituals and festivities were once so widespread, why is so little left of them today? If the `techniques' of ecstasy represent an important part of the human cultural heritage, why have we forgotten them, if indeed we have?"
Going chronologically from the stone age cave drawings where the collective experience of dancing and feasting was felt so important as to record it, Ehrenreich sweeps through to present times, to what she calls an age of spectacle and sports. Along the way, Ehrenreich tells you about anthropologists who in the beginning neglected dance altogether and psychologists who are still too busy studying only the depressed individual to take any notice of those of us who experience joy. She takes a long hard look at Calvinism through the immensely troubled life of John Bunyan and tracks the dance mania in the 13-15th century Europe that ended in a crackdown on bodily movement from both Church and State in the 16th century. Ehrenreich cleverly posits this crackdown could very well be linked to the European Depression in the 17th century and she cites evidence in the novels, poetry, and autobiographies of the times. She finds only sporadic outbreaks of collective joy in present times, one such episode emanating from the sixties culture.
Coming to this book as a dancer and knowing the joy of dance I interpret Ehrenreich's work as demonstrating the struggle that exists in the physical body when you dance. In other words, to move or not to move. In reference to society, the ability to dance and feast and move the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and social position versus the habit of sitting still for fear of losing both self-control and social positioning.
Ehrenreich's examples are interesting, her connections are insightful, and the book is easy to read. If humans for so many years devoted so much time and energy to the pursuit of collective joy what threatens us from pursuing this experience now? She does answer her questions. You'll have to read the book to find out what they are.

This book explains how and why our western European culture (among others) systematically represses our natural human inclination to cut loose and enjoy ourselves, and why it is so important for our emotional and political well-being that we continue to do so! Very thorough in explanations and examples. I now see acts of community celebration, music and dance to be highly important demonstrations of our personal freedom and political rights.

I listened to the audio version of this book.

I found this book to be fascinating and stimulating. As a life-long Roman Catholic, I thought the earlier reviews that decry the author for her 'church bashing' and 'Stalin'-like approaches were rather unfair and unnecessarily ad hominem. The author clearly put a great deal of time and effort into this book (either that, or she has an amazing team of researchers working for her! ;-D). It was fascinating for me to listen as she wove disparate pieces of information into a beautiful tapestry about the history of collective ecstatic dance in the Western world. (These kinds of books are very difficult to write. If you haven't tried to write a book such as this, I would strongly invite you to do so ... you'll gain a new appreciation for authors such as Ehrenreich who make it look so easy.)

I picked this book up because I very appreciated the author's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. I appreciate the author because she is focusing on issues that, in my opinion, should deeply concern today's Christians, such as the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

As a mental health professional, I also found her discussion on depression and mental health issues to be very insightful.

The person who read the audio book did a wonderful job. I found her voice very easy to listen to. The only critique I would offer to the publisher is that I sometimes found it difficult to tell where a particular quote ended and where the text resumed (in several cases knowing where they quote ended made a significant different in understanding the text).

For people interested in historical Christianity, collective healing rituals, mental health, dance, martial arts, and other forms of physical movement, I would highly recommend this book.

As a purported book on joy, this is an incredibly joyless book for anyone but the truly biased atheist who is looking for only one thing: to blame every bit of misery in the history of the world on Christians.

We have a chapter on Jesus and Dionysus--Bacchus to those more Roman--and for some weird reason the author decides to compare the two. Well, the reason isn't that weird, for they represent two sides of the coin. Jesus being holy and calling all to follow him and his example, Dionysus being the god of wine and the party, calling the world to follow that example. Or, to bottom line it, the comparison of good and evil. Using a route of convoluted logic to diminish Jesus and anything good that could possibly come from his teachings, the author tries desperately to convince the reader that Jesus never existed, or if he did his disciples used the unreported details of Dioynsus as basis for Jesus. The fact that the gospels are eye-witness accounts of Jesus and his life must never have been considered by someone who read none of them and is striving for a world without Jesus. She is not the only atheist to do so.

Other chapters attempt to blame "the church" for a lack of fun, and go so far as to suggest the outcroppings of fascism were simply people trying to replace the pageantry of Catholicism. I guess we all need someone to blame.

The author fails in many ways, but two stand out above the rest. The first is the origin of joy, or humor, in the first place. She would argue, if depth of intellect led her that far, that it was an evolutionary device which we willed into existence to get through the bad times. But she doesn't.

The second thing she ignores, as being to busy blaming Christianity for all the world's ills, is the incredible amount of suffering that has come from the religion called atheism. Stalin, Lenin and Hitler all used Darwinism as reasons for their type of "survival of the fittest" which they wished to impose on the world. Their godless doctrine brought about the deaths of 40 million people in the last century alone. The unknown number who died during the Crusades or Inquisition--the very highest estimate being 5,000 for both, or just 2,000 more than on 9/11--surely outweigh the millions upon millions killed in the name of Darwin.

This is a sad effort by a very sad and troubled person, and my only solace is the lack of interest in this book reflecting (hopefully, joyfully) a low number of titles sold.