DANCING IN THE STREETS - BARBARA EHRENREICH

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This book is part of a duo that Ehrenreich wrote about mass or collective action. The other one is called BLOOD RITES and is about war and other forms of collective violence, and while it does sound interesting I my recent reading has been a bit dark so I opted for Ehrenreich’s book about collective joy and celebration. Thankfully, the book is largely as fun and exciting as its subject but it didn’t offer a true reprieve from depressing subject matter since a big subject of the book is both a theory about how Western Culture has suppressed and continues to suppress this sort of collective celebration and carnival both in itself and as part of its colonial efforts. “The essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world.” So in that sense it is in legacy with books like CALIBAN AND THE WITCH and others about the larger trends in the ways Europeans dealt with their victims all over the world. There’s lots of great anecdotes about various ecstatic cults and religious dance movements from across time and space, from Cybele to the Ghost Dance. There’s a very evo-psych explanation, that made my partner scoff when I bounced it off of her, of dance’s origins as located in synchronized movements that acted as an attempt for many people to appear as one large animal to predators. She, correctly, goes hard on Calvinism and sagely links Wahhabism and Calvinism as expressing a fundamentally similar attitude about the role of joy and pleasure. Both are religious movements based almost totally on player-hating. I would certainly agree that the modern day descendants of those religious movements are responsible for a lot of the problems we’re dealing with now. I also liked her attempts to locate these sorts of experiences in our world today. She talks about rock festivals at length but I think she could have gone more into rave and dance culture (especially places that really emphasis the group dance aspect by doing things like not putting the DJ on a stage for everyone to face) as well as the way business interest have sought to package and approximate these experiences. She also discusses protests and shouts out Seattle, 1999 WTO, specifically as a big factor in an introduction of the carnivalesque to modern protesting. The idea of how much of the protest should be an attempt to create spaces of festival vs how this festival vibe is a distraction and dilutes the deadly-serious thing we’re ostensibly here to protest is a very discussed one these days. It was, as you might imagine, a pivotal issue at the CHOP and remains an open question. Irregardless, I liked this book a lot, it read quickly, had lots of good anecdotes and the thinking was sharp. I think I’ll continue to hold off on BLOOD RITES but I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually. 1278 people dancing until it kills them. 

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