No small themes for William McNeill, a writer of big, sweeping books, from
The Rise of the West and
Plagues and Peoples to the modestly titled--and wonderful--
History of the World. Here McNeill turns his attention to the role of synchronized movement in human societies, whether in mass political rallies, the muscular bonding of military drills, or dances staged in ballrooms or mosh pits. Such motions, McNeill tells us, are "far older than language, and critically important in human history." Ranging from the Paleolithic to modern times, McNeill turns up unusual nuggets from the past: the Christian Church's abandonment of sacred dances in the 4th century, dances that survive now in the sign of the cross; and Adolf Hitler borrowing fight songs from American universities to solidify the nascent National Socialist movement.
In his imaginative and provocative book...William H. McNeill develops an unconventional notion that, he observes, is 'simplicity itself.' He maintains that people who move together to the same beat tend to bond and thus that communal dance and drill alter human feelings. (John Mueller
New York Times Book Review )
Every now and then, a slender, graceful, unassuming little volume modestly proposes a radical rethinking of human history. Such a book is
Keeping Together in Time...Important, witty, and thoroughly approachable, [it] could, perhaps, only be written by a scholar in retirement with a lifetime's interdisciplinary reading to ponder, the imagination to conceive unanswerable questions, and the courage, in this age of over-speculation, to speculate in areas where certainty is impossible. Its vision of dance as a shaper of evolution, a perpetually sustainable and sustaining resource, would crown anyone's career. (Penelope Reed Doob
Toronto Globe and Mail )
McNeill is one of our greatest living historians...As usual with McNeill,
Keeping Together in Time contains a wonderfully broad survey of practices in other times and places. There are the Greeks, who invented the flute-accompanied phalanx, and the Romans, who invented calling cadence while marching. There are the Shakers, who combined worship and dancing, and the Mormons, who carefully separated the functions but who prospered at least as much on the strength of their dancing as their Sunday morning worship. (David Warsh
Boston Sunday Globe )
[A] wide-ranging and thought-provoking book...A mind-stretching exploration of the thesis that `keeping together in time'--army drill, village dances, and the like--consolidates group solidarity by making us feel good about ourselves and the group and thus was critical for social cohesion and group survival in the past. (
Virginia Quarterly Review )
[This book is] nothing less than a survey of the historical impact of shared rhythmic motion from the paleolithic to the present, an impact that [McNeill] finds surprisingly significant...McNeill moves beyond Durkheim in noting that in complex societies divided by social class muscular bonding may be the medium through which discontented and oppressed groups can gain the solidarity necessary for challenging the existing social order. (Robert N. Bellah
Commonweal )
The title of this fascinating essay contains a pun that sums up its thesis" keeping together in time, or coordinated rhythmic movement and the shared feelings it evokes, has kept human groups together throughout history. Most of McNeill's pioneering study is devoted to the history of communal dancing...[This] volume will appeal equally to scholars and to the general reader. (Doyne Dawson
Military History )
As with so many themes [like this one], whether in science or in symphonies, one wonders (in retrospect) why it has not been invented before...[T]he book is fascinating. (K. Kortmulder
Acta Biotheoretica (The Netherlands) )
This scholarly and creative exploration of the largely unresearched phenomenon of shared euphoria aroused by unison movement moves across the disciplines of dance, history, sociology, and psychology...Highly recommended. (
Choice )
