Barbara Ehrenreich, the critically acclaimed cultural historian and author of more than 14 books (“Nickel and Dimed,” “Bait and Switch”) seems to be straining in her latest, “Dancing in the Streets,” to find a way to connect the dots regarding the wealth of information she has amassed about the history of collective joyous celebrations throughout the ages.
Ehrenreich’s meticulously detailed chronicle aptly demonstrates how myriad social forces, such as imperialism, capitalism, Calvinism, Christianity, modernism and various forms of religious orthodoxy, have all contributed to obliterating indigenous communal rituals of great beauty and meaning that once existed all around the world.
Ehrenreich believes these festivities contained within them magical moments of ecstatic transcendence; people coming together to sing and dance, their faces brightly covered with paint or hidden behind exotic masks, their voices raised in blissful abandon. She seems convinced we all possess the capacity for experiencing great delight in the often mind-numbing pleasures and occasional wildness of the collective gathering, and mourns the fact that modern living provides no such escape valve.
Although the reader can’t help but be moved by her warm and fuzzy notions about our humanity, her argument seems overly romantic and a bit forced, perhaps reflective of the time in which she was raised. Ehrenreich is an unapologetic intellectual hippie child of the 1960s who is proud of her activism against war and for civil rights.
Ehrenreich is at her most persuasive when discussing the role group celebrations have played in allowing the powerless to use their rituals as a means of social protest. Particularly after the Middle
Ages, these happenings took on a “decidedly political edge” where revelers often used parody and bold, subversive humor to rebel against the elite classes.
For example, she notes, the exotic masks worn by many during carnival removed the normal markings of status between people and allowed participants to begin to test the boundaries.
The controlling powers reacted with alarm. Whether it was the Protestants’ criminalization of carnival, or the Calvinists’ call for suppression, or the Catholics’ additional restrictions on holiday celebration, or the Wahhabist Muslims’ forceful attempts to stifle ecstatic Sufism, the result was usually the same: Rules were imposed on the lower classes to rein them in; to stop the dancing and the singing; to silence the women; in short, to make sure the social hierarchies in place remained there.
Ehrenreich concedes that groups can be very dangerous. There is always the possibility of violence. She cites Leslie Epstein’s chilling observation about his own sports fandom with regard to baseball. Epstein writes that even at a ballgame there is often the feeling of a “dissolution of the self, transcendence, the feeling of oneness, wholeness, unity: Who can draw the line between, on the one hand, such innocent joy, the return to childhood in the adult, the jump toward manhood in the boy; and, on the other, the echo of a Nuremberg rally …? Between, finally, the tolerated commonplace, Kill the ump! and the no less sanctioned urge to Kill the Jews?”
Even Freud, Ehrenreich says, described the street crowds he witnessed in Paris as a young man as people “possessed of a thousand demons.”
Still, Ehrenreich clings to her idealistic notion of collective joyous gatherings as a means to a more peaceable future. It’s a pleasing fantasy, but not much more than that.
Where Ehrenreich sees revelry, perhaps there is really only desperation. It’s hard to be certain about the inner state of another person; most people have difficulty accurately gauging their own emotional barometer.
Certainly, anyone who has had the courage to look at some of the video footage from the supposedly sacrosanct rock festivals of the 1960s, like Woodstock, may be surprised at what they see. Instead of the communal bliss and oneness commonly referred to, they may just see a bunch of anxious, stoned kids lost not only to those around them, but also to themselves.
Yet, if the good-natured and talented author is able to still channel her inner flower child, who are we to disagree with her? Certainly there was revolution in the air!
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
