Dancing in the Streets, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Catherine Shoard09.05.08
The phrase used by the South African Namaqua tribe for "one who converts to Christianity" is the same as that for "one who has given up dancing". In this postmortem for communal celebration, Ehrenreich points the finger of blame squarely at the church elites. The priests — who disliked people thinking dance gave them a direct line to God — extracted divine meaning from the festivities. The wild carnivals that remained were fair game for the Puritans. Ehrenreich is a sharp, witty writer but she ends glumly: society's desire for communal interaction, she says, is all but extinguished. Today the self reigns supreme..
Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and 'savage', Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greek's worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as a 'danced religion'. Exhilarating in its scholarly range, humane, witty and impassioned, "Dancing in the Streets" will generate debate and soul searching.
