Longing for ecstasy

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. By Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, 336 pp., $26.00.

NOSTALGIA IS inherently selective. At some level we understand that the past we idealize has its flipside--that religious traditions in their heyday, for example, were perfunctory as well as inspiring, and that small-town life was oppressive as well as intimate. Watching Shakespeare in Queen Elizabeth's London must have been thrilling, but only if the groundling next to you wasn't coughing up untreatable germs. Nostalgia is a vision of retrospective hope, but the lenses we gaze through remain smeared with our needs.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, has provided a deeply nostalgic meditation on the place of ecstasy in human societies. Motivated by a "sense of loss," Ehrenreich wonders why ecstatic rituals and festivities, once pervasive, are so rare today. Inside a culture fragmented by individualism and diluted by commercialism, the problem is not just the loss of community--plenty of others have explored that terrain. For Ehrenreich, the problem is a loss of the carnival rituals that once encouraged a "spiritual merger with the group" and promoted what Emile Durkheim called "collective effervescence." Ehrenreich wants us to dance, and in the festive, spontaneous way that our ancestors did.

Can we lead-footed, inhibited types be forgiven for wondering whether the traditions she celebrates--Dionysian rituals, medieval fairs--are outdated or duly modernized already? Surely we have our equivalents, or else we have abandoned the rites for good reason. But Ehrenreich is not so sure, and like Nickel and Dimed, this book feels like a provocation--learned and measured, but still a cry of the heart more than a convincing argument.

The scope here is ambitious. Ehrenreich wants to convince us that group ecstasy is a universal human experience and thus a fundamental human need. To range from prehistoric cave drawings and Greek festivals, through the birth of Christianity, and on--via the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution--to the Beatles and Super Bowl halftime shows requires quick, anecdotal treatment.

Ehrenreich is something of a pilgrim historian, moving from glimpse to glimpse rather than lingering to prove her case. A single page shifts our attention from a female shaman in Somalia to Friedrich Nietzsche, and a discussion of the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert follows hard on the heels of an analysis of Burton's famed Anatomy of Melancholy. The canvas is broad, the brushstrokes are big. The resulting portrait serves not so much to illuminate the past as to mine it for examples of ecstatic rituals, and also of their suppression.

In Ehrenreich's account, these rituals are part of what we need because we are human, but they also pose important challenges to social hierarchies. Dancing is a kind of democratic assertion: "It is tempting to divide the ancient temperament into a realm of Dionysus and a realm of Yahweh--hedonism and egalitarianism versus hierarchy and war." This struggle persists in the modern world, and while in the West the forces of hierarchy triumphed, the impulse of spontaneous celebration never dissolved; it survived in peasant and Anabaptist movements during the Reformation, and in marches and demonstrations during the French Revolution; it takes perverse form in fascist rallies and occurs at rock concerts and in sports arenas in our own time.

These celebrations mimic older carnivals and testify to their power. And although their importance is partly emotional and psychological ("feeling part of something larger than ourselves"), the activity is also invariably political, as the authorities who suppress such gatherings know well. Carnival-style activity is both indulgent and subversive, mocking authority (through figures such as the king of fools) and dissolving class and gender barriers (through costumes and masks). Ehrenreich notes that face paint and team colors, chants and dancelike rituals (think of the "wave") generate a carnival atmosphere at sports events--although stripped of subversive intent. The same features appear at other venues: at Mardi Gras, of course, but also at political party conventions, where delegates wear all manner of strange hats and break into ritualized chants.

The contemporary world preserves these festive remnants, but for Ehrenreich they are either too infrequent or too remote from most people--who watch sports on TV, for example. Indeed, the very possibility of collective joy has been "largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young." Even evangelicalism, with its "born-again moments of individual religious revelation," is, "by and large, a cold and Calvinist business."

Throughout the book Ehrenreich shows an awkward apprehension of religious experience and religious terms. She refers by turns to "ancient Israelis," "'Anglicism," a "theologist" and "Christian evangelicists." Given the prevalence of commentary about evangelicals in the press, the latter slip is particularly odd. Surely the participatory dynamic of many charismatic and Pentecostal churches is closer-and on a weekly basis--to what Ehrenreich idealizes than are the rock spectacles she describes. Yet Pentecostalism, in this whirlwind overview, warrants but a single sentence.