Dancing in the Streets
A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Advance Praise for Dancing in the Streets
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From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian, a fascinating exploration of one of humanity’s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy.

In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species’ attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites’ fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.

Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.

Advance Praise for Dancing in the Streets

"Ehrenreich writes with grace and clarity in a fascinating, wide-ranging and generous account."
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

"A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Barbara Ehrenreich shows how and why people celebrate together, and equally what causes us to fear celebration. Here is the other side of ritual, whose dark side she explored in Blood Rites. Ranging in time from the earliest festivals depicted on cave walls to modern football crowds, Ehrenreich finds that dancing has been a way to address personal ills like melancholy and shame, and social ills as extreme as those faced by American slaves. Dancing in the Streets is itself a celebration of language—clear, funny, unpredictable. This is a truly original book."
—Richard Sennett, author of The Culture of the New Capitalism

"A fabulous book on carnival and ecstasy, skillfully arranged and brilliantly explained." —Robert Farris Thompson, author of Tango: The Art History of Love

"The same brave, brilliant writing that Ehrenreich has always used to expose the dark underside of human nature, she now employs to illuminate sources of communal joy and bonding that we as a society have historically denied and continue to sweep under the rug. Tracing the long history of Europe’s fight against its better impulses, she ends with the return of the repressed—the rock rebellions of the 1960’s, the carnivalesque that often pervades protest movements—as she joyously draws ecstasy out of its hiding places and urges us to let it back into our lives."
—Wendy Doniger, author of The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was