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Four out of five stars for the idea, two out of five stars for execution. Ehrenreich's introduction to Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy points out a quizzical disconnect in modern Western culture. We put an awful lot of time and effort into studying depression, malaise, the things that make us happy and the things that isolate us, but very little effort into studying the things that make us happy or which bring us together. Ehrenreich traces the history of expressions of commu...
Great history book that not just tells the history of street dancing, but also the history of Western culture, imperialism and capitalism. This book starts as a regular anthropological study, but after 100 pages it turns in a quasi anarchist "peoples history" book, that argues that to create a centralized state and capitalism the cracking down of street dancing and collective spontaneity was "necessary". In the end this book argues that all the mental illnesses and depression that people suffer
I chose not to finish this book; being a fan of both joy and dance, this made me sad. As an investigative reporter, Ehrenreich might be quite skilled. But I am not impressed with her grasp of religious history nor her style of psychological conjecture to support her points. There are better sources than this book for cultural theories. If I'm going to spend time on the history of an event, I want more hard facts.
Points were made
Ehrenreich leads the reader through ecstatic rituals' persistent effervescence in spite of authoritarian campaigns against collective joy, and the solidarity it can inspire.As a white American, I have always felt an important part of myself locked down, and tied up. Ehrenreich identifies it as a practice of social movement that's been stripped from me over long generations of Orwellian memory-holes.
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my hero authors because of her books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She has written a number of other books but these two address social issues that I find particularly compelling. They are also books where her writing is quite personal and succinct. On the other hand Dancing in the Streets hammers home its points by excessive repetition. For example, in the Introduction Ehrenreich writes a twenty page thesis on ceremonies that she considers celebratory in som...
Excellent and very thought provoking. The more I read of her works the more I love Barbara Ehrenreich. This book looks at everything from the cult of Dionysus and it's parallels with the myths of Jesus, the suppression of dance by authoritarian regimes,to the subversion of sport and festival by the masses, etc. It goes all over the place and spans 2,000 years of history. I'll go back and read it again. A pure delight!
the basic premise of the book is excellent: carnival is subversive and collective joy teaches people how to overthrow hierarchies. Sadly, the author doesn't deal with this main point nearly enough. Instead, she goes on several tangents which not only add little but can be widely off the mark too. At the very beginning she makes a case for collective dancing being hard-wired in human genes, which is as biologically deterministic as they come. By the end, she makes a case for the carnivalization o...
AMAZING BARBARA! This is one of the greatest reads i've had in a while, Barbara decided to explore the history of Joy, specifically group joy in the form she sees as weaving itself throughout history from early religious sects around Jesus and Dionysus, through carnival, and continuing into the modern phenomenon of the wave, She reaches into religion, Pop culture, and leaves no other cultural stone unturned in an effort to find "the supression of these experiences". Early on she reveals while em...
In this book, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the evolution and repression of collective celebration through history and in doing so, not only proves that we are happiest when doing joyful things together, but shows that despite the many ways society has repressed collective joy, it can't be kept down but keeps finding new ways. In fact, our survival depends on it.I especially liked the image of churches without pews, where people stood and mingled. Let's have less spectacle and more celebration!
This type of book is an unexpected pleasure, because its perspective is very Big Picture. So much historical record is described, and yet the subject is always the human being, so it's immediate and relevant, but seen through a kaleidoscope of cultures through the centuries. The effect is of lifting a veil to show a reality that's always been there, but not consciously acknowledged. Now I expect I need to read her "Blood Rites" book which is the flip side of this one.
Its been a few weeks since I actually finished this book, and I am still telling people about it. Ehrenreich takes social theories that I've read about over the years, the works of Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, and ties them all together to examine the history of collective dance and ectasy. This latter term she defines using the word's root meaning--to be filled with a spirit or divine presence. Over time, this root of ectasy, planted in religion and spirituality, has been cleaved from the divine....
Ordered this on a whim, then heard it mentioned in Brian Eno's John Peel lecture so had to finally pick it up and read it! Wonderful readable history of dance - from Dionysus to Woodstock - especially good on the links between the Puritan suppression of dance and movement and the way in which colonialism and the early missionaries worked to together to stamp out collective expressions of carnival. A writer I'd not come across before, there's more of her stuff to discover too..
I was intrigued when our book group selected Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a history of collective joy and ecstatic ritual — stuff that’s pretty rare in the land of the glowing screen people. Studying humankind’s long transition from wild and free to robo-consumers, it’s easy to perceive gradually advancing emotional decay. Cultures slid further away from intimate connections to the family of life, and human societies grew from small clans of friends and family into sprawlin...
This history and exposition of ecstatic rituals and festivity by Barbara Ehrenreich is fascinating, disturbing, and ultimately uplifting. Ehrenreich posits that we as humans are hard-wired to experience collective joy, to use human community for positive rituals and activities that connect us with one another and with the divine, however we understand that. Full of examples, Ehrenreich starts with ancient civilizations and their rites and moves forward through medieval festivals to the repressio...
Emma Goldstein - "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution"Have we done ourselves the great diservice. Too disembodied from our minds and hearts to feel that human connection. Distancing ourselves from the grosser and sensual pleasures of collective enjoyment, we live luxirous privileged spoiled lives, but languish in feeling complete or fulfilled. There are ways we still connect as a group in sporting events, rock concerts, and online forums. But the story Ehrenreich tells i...
My notes: https://anaulin.org/blog/book-notes-d...
I was disappointed to find that "collective joy" was narrowly defined in a very specific sense of trancelike, community-wide ritual associated with religious festivities. This is further defined (or at least described) as being characterized by a loss of individual consciousness and orientation on a level that would be considered pathological in other contexts. Working from this restrictive definition, the author takes the view that such occasions have vanished, and that we have lost an essentia...
ON COLLECTIVE ECSTACY Starting back at the dawn of time and bringing the reader up to the present, Barbara Ehrenreich charts the history of collective joy in her recently published book "Dancing in the Streets". The book itself isn't one that's easy to pigeon-hole, in part a work of synthesis, it brings into close focus those fragments of information we have from the past that relate to her subject matter. It also reflects, and speculates on, the expressions of collective joy and ecstatic ritual...
Three and a half stars.This is not a topic about which I would have deliberately sought out information, but Ehrenreich is one of those authors who can lead me willingly into uncharted waters.The joy of which the subtitle speaks is the ecstatic variety, most familiar to modern Western readers as a relic of a bygone age, in which there might be speaking in tongues, dancing to the point of exhaustion, and other expressions in which the individual seems to lose him or herself to some greater collec...