Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets Plot Summary

Introduction

Throughout human history, collective celebration has been a fundamental expression of our social nature. From prehistoric cave paintings depicting dancing figures to modern rock concerts, humans have consistently sought ways to come together in joyful communion. Yet this seemingly natural impulse has faced repeated suppression across different eras and cultures. The tension between ecstatic celebration and social control forms one of history's most fascinating and overlooked narratives. What drives this persistent conflict between celebration and authority? Why have powerful institutions from the Roman Empire to modern governments viewed collective joy with such suspicion? By examining this struggle across millennia, we gain profound insights into power dynamics, social control, and human psychology. This historical journey reveals how the suppression of communal festivities paralleled the rise of melancholy in Western societies, and how moments of collective celebration have repeatedly served as both safety valves and revolutionary sparks. Whether you're interested in anthropology, political history, or simply understanding our innate drive for connection, this exploration of humanity's dance with joy offers illuminating perspectives on our shared past and present condition.

Chapter 1: Prehistoric Foundations: Dance as Evolutionary Advantage

Archaeological evidence reveals that communal dancing has been central to human societies for at least 20,000 years. Cave paintings across Africa, Europe, and Australia depict groups of people dancing in circles, often wearing masks or costumes. The Israeli archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel notes that dancing scenes were "almost the only subject used to describe interaction between people" in Neolithic and Chalcolithic art, suggesting these activities held profound importance for our ancestors long before written language or agriculture. These prehistoric dances served crucial evolutionary functions. Anthropologists suggest that synchronized movement helped humans form larger social groups than our primate relatives could sustain. While language facilitated cooperation, dance provided what Robin Dunbar calls "a more primitive emotional mechanism to bond our large groups" when verbal communication alone proved insufficient. Through rhythmic synchrony, petty rivalries and factional differences could be temporarily forgotten, creating a powerful sense of unity that enhanced group survival against predators and rival bands. The neurological basis for this phenomenon is remarkable. When humans move together in rhythm, our brains literally synchronize, triggering what neuroscientists describe as "an intensely pleasurable, ineffable experience." This collective synchrony offered something unique: a kind of transcendent pleasure that came from feeling part of something larger than oneself. The stimulation from rhythmic music and coordinated movement drives cortical rhythms that produce profound neurochemical rewards, making dance what one researcher calls "the biotechnology of group formation." Far from being a primitive impulse, dance represented a sophisticated social technology. Prehistoric communities invested considerable resources in creating music, perfecting dance steps, and preparing elaborate costumes and masks. These seasonal gatherings likely served reproductive functions as well, providing opportunities to find mates outside one's immediate kin group. The talent for music and dance may have been sexually selected traits, explaining their universal presence across human cultures despite the considerable energy expenditure they required. This evolutionary heritage helps explain why ecstatic rituals emerged independently in virtually all early human societies. The archaeological record suggests that long before humans built permanent settlements or developed writing, they were dancing together in ways that strengthened social bonds and created powerful experiences of collective joy. This fundamental human capacity would continue to shape societies even as more complex civilizations emerged, setting the stage for both elaborate festivities and increasingly sophisticated attempts to control them.

Chapter 2: Sacred Ecstasy Meets Social Control (3000 BCE-500 CE)

As human societies transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture and eventually to complex civilizations around 5,000 years ago, a profound tension emerged around ecstatic rituals. While communal celebrations persisted into early urban societies, written records and artifacts reveal growing ambivalence and hostility from emerging elites. This period marks the beginning of a pattern that would repeat throughout history: authorities attempting to suppress, control, or co-opt the human impulse for collective joy. The fundamental problem was that ecstatic rituals threatened social hierarchy. As archaeological evidence from Oaxaca shows, over just a few thousand years, communal dance grounds once open to all were gradually restricted to elites and eventually controlled by priests using religious calendars. The leveling effect of traditional festivities made them inherently problematic for stratified societies. As one historian notes, "It's difficult to maintain regal dignity in the mad excitement of the dance." Masks and costuming rendered participants equally anonymous, while the experience of divine possession might choose a lowly shepherdess as readily as a queen. This tension reached dramatic expression in ancient Greece through Euripides' play "The Bacchae." The tragedy portrays King Pentheus attempting to suppress the worship of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. When Pentheus commands his officers to prepare "for an assault on the Bacchae," declaring "This is past all bearing, if we are to let women so defy us," he articulates the fear that would motivate authorities for millennia to come. The play ends with Pentheus torn apart by ecstatic worshippers led by his own mother - a stark warning about the dangers of opposing collective religious expression. The rise of militarism intensified hostility toward ecstatic rituals. In ancient Israel, the historian Robert Graves observed that maintaining independence between powerful neighbors required "a stronger religious discipline" and people "trained to arms." Their god Yahweh became the perfect disciplinarian - a war god known as "Lord of Hosts." Similarly, in Rome, the triumph of military values over communal ecstasy was complete. As Max Weber noted, the Roman nobility "completely rejected ecstasy, like the dance, as utterly unseemly and unworthy of a nobleman's sense of honor." Roman religion became a "cold and prosaic" affair designed to reinforce social hierarchy. Yet suppression created vulnerability. When the worship of Dionysus/Bacchus spread throughout Italy, Roman authorities responded with brutal repression in 186 BCE, executing thousands of followers. This pattern would repeat throughout Roman history, revealing the elite's deep fear of autonomous gatherings beyond state control. The "oriental" cults of Isis, Cybele, and Dionysus attracted followers especially among marginalized groups like women and slaves, offering emotional experiences that official state religions lacked. By the time Christianity gained dominance in the late Roman Empire, a complex pattern had emerged: official religions increasingly emphasized order and hierarchy, while ecstatic practices persisted among the marginalized. Early Christian communities actually incorporated ecstatic elements like speaking in tongues, but as the religion institutionalized, church authorities increasingly viewed such behaviors with suspicion. This tension between official religion and ecstatic practice would continue to shape Western civilization for centuries to come.

Chapter 3: Medieval Carnival: From Churches to Streets (500-1500)

The medieval period witnessed a remarkable transformation in collective celebration. Despite the early Church fathers' condemnations of dancing, Christianity remained "to a certain extent, a danced religion" well into the late Middle Ages. Church records from across Europe describe priests dancing, women dancing, and entire congregations joining in ecstatic worship - much to the dismay of church authorities who issued repeated prohibitions against such behavior. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Catholic leaders finally succeeded in purging churches of unruly celebration. However, they realized they could not eliminate festivity entirely - "if people were determined to frolic, condemnations and bans would not suffice." A compromise emerged: the laity could dance and celebrate on Church holidays, just not within sacred buildings. This compromise profoundly shaped European culture for centuries to come. Expelled from church property, dancing, drinking, and other forms of play became the festivities that filled the late medieval calendar. This period saw the crystallization of carnival as a distinct tradition. As the French historian Aron Gurevich observed, "in the early and central Middle Ages, carnival had not yet crystallized in time and space; its elements were diffused everywhere." By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, festive traditions expanded dramatically, not because of sudden creativity, but because festive behavior was increasingly channeled into specific times and places outside church walls. The Church tolerated these external festivities with considerable uneasiness, recognizing that complete suppression might drive people toward heretical movements. Medieval carnival created a "second world" alongside official culture. During carnival season, ordinary people could temporarily escape the rigid hierarchies of feudal society through masked processions, feasting, dancing, and ritual inversions of the social order. The "Feast of Fools" allowed lower clergy to parody church rituals, while the crowning of a "Lord of Misrule" symbolically overturned political authority. As the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin noted, carnival represented "the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter" - a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and established order. Yet something profound was lost in this transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized festivities. In ancient Dionysian worship, the moment of maximum revelry was also the sacred climax when the individual achieved communion with divinity. Medieval Christianity, in contrast, offered "communion" as a morsel of bread soberly consumed at the altar - and saw only devilry in the festivities that followed. This created a certain "secularization" of communal pleasure. Without a built-in religious climax, celebrations often spilled over into brawling and drunkenness. This secularization also gave people ownership of their festivities. Great passion and energy went into planning celebrations, with special organizations dedicated entirely to preparations year-round. Festivity - like bread or freedom - became a social good worth fighting for. By the late Middle Ages, carnival had become a central institution of popular culture, creating spaces where ordinary people could experience collective joy outside the control of church authorities. This uneasy compromise would be severely tested in the centuries to come.

Chapter 4: The War Against Festivity (1500-1800)

The early modern period witnessed an unprecedented assault on traditional festivities across Europe. As one historian poignantly observes, "At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stopped." Carnival costumes were put away, traditional dramas canceled, and festive rituals forgotten or preserved only in tame form. The ecstatic possibility, first driven from churches, was now harried from streets and public squares in a systematic campaign that transformed European culture. This suppression took many forms. Sometimes it came swiftly when town councils suddenly broke with tradition by refusing permits for celebrations. In other cases, the change came gradually, with authorities first limiting festivities to Sundays, then prohibiting all recreations on the Sabbath. The wave of repression extended from Scotland to Italy and eastward to Russia, affecting both urban and rural communities. By 1800, many traditional celebrations had been eliminated or transformed into tamer spectacles controlled by civic authorities. The Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in this process. While Martin Luther showed some tolerance for popular festivities, more radical reformers like John Calvin viewed carnival as dangerous paganism. In Calvin's Geneva, all forms of public celebration were systematically suppressed. The English Puritans similarly attacked May Day celebrations, maypoles, and Christmas festivities as ungodly distractions. As Max Weber wrote, Protestantism "descended like a frost on the life of 'Merrie Old England,'" destroying traditional forms of group pleasure with its emphasis on individual salvation and unremitting labor. Catholic authorities, responding to the Protestant challenge, launched their own campaign against popular festivities during the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) called for purifying religious practices of "superstitious" elements, leading to restrictions on carnival celebrations even in traditionally Catholic regions. In Spain, religious processions were increasingly controlled by clergy rather than lay confraternities, while in Italy, civic authorities imposed new regulations on masking and public dancing. This suppression coincided with profound social and economic transformations. The emerging capitalist economy demanded disciplined workers who would not "waste" productive time on festivities. As historian E.P. Thompson observed, "Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent." Elites who had once participated in carnival alongside commoners now withdrew, developing distinct forms of "polite" entertainment that emphasized restraint rather than release. Etiquette manuals from this period show increasing emphasis on bodily control and emotional discipline among the upper classes. The consequences were far-reaching. Robert Burton's landmark 1621 work "The Anatomy of Melancholy" explicitly connected the rise of depression to the loss of traditional festivities, recommending "dancing, singing, masking, mumming" as cures for melancholy. The first great wave of depression in Europe coincided precisely with the post-Reformation period when both Protestant and Catholic authorities were actively suppressing carnival. This suggests that the war against festivity may have contributed directly to the spread of melancholy in Western societies - a connection that continues to resonate in our own time.

Chapter 5: Colonial Encounters with Indigenous Celebrations

When European powers expanded across the globe from the 16th through the 19th centuries, they encountered indigenous cultures with rich traditions of ecstatic celebration. From the elaborate ceremonies of Mesoamerican civilizations to the rhythmic dances of West African societies and the corroborees of Australian Aboriginals, colonizers found themselves confronted with unfamiliar forms of collective joy that both fascinated and disturbed them. European reactions to these indigenous celebrations were remarkably consistent across different colonial contexts. Colonial administrators, missionaries, and travelers routinely described native dances as "savage," "demonic," or evidence of "mass hysteria." A Jesuit missionary in Alaska characterized Yup'ik ceremonies as "a fearful worship of the devil" through "performances and feasts to please their dead but in fact to please and corrupt themselves." This language precisely echoed terms used by Protestant reformers against European carnival, revealing deep continuities in Western attitudes toward ecstatic celebration. The suppression of indigenous rituals became a central component of colonial control. In Africa, colonial authorities banned drumming, masking, and public dancing, often under penalty of flogging or imprisonment. A Methodist missionary in southern Africa proudly reported that "the Bechuana customs and ceremonies are considerably on the wane" due to his efforts. In Hawaii, American missionaries worked to eliminate surfing, hula dancing, and traditional games as "depraved" activities. This cultural repression paralleled economic exploitation and territorial conquest, forming what one scholar called "a single, multicentury, planetwide exterminatory pulse." One motivation for this repression was to instill the work ethic into indigenous peoples. European colonizers were appalled both by the apparent "laziness" of natives and by the energy they invested in "superstitious" ritual activities. The poet Samuel Coleridge once suggested that South Sea Islanders' breadfruit trees be destroyed so they would be forced to learn hard work. Christianity would solve this problem, as one English promoter of missions proposed: "Christian teaching and industrial training can do much to remove" the "unstable and undisciplined character of the native labourer." Indigenous peoples developed various strategies of resistance. In the Caribbean and Brazil, enslaved Africans preserved elements of their religious traditions by disguising them within Catholic saints' days and carnivals. Syncretic religions like Vodou in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil emerged as creative fusions of African spirituality and European Christianity. These traditions maintained the ecstatic core of African worship while adapting to new circumstances. During the Haitian Revolution, Vodou ceremonies served as sites for planning rebellion, demonstrating how collective celebration could become a vehicle for resistance. In other contexts, colonized peoples developed entirely new ecstatic movements in response to European domination. The Ghost Dance that spread among Native American tribes in the late 19th century featured dancers arranging themselves in concentric circles, creating a mood "conducive to collective exaltation and trance." Similar millenarian movements emerged across Africa and the Pacific. These movements were typically met with brutal suppression - most infamously at Wounded Knee in 1890, where U.S. troops massacred Ghost Dance participants. Despite this repression, indigenous traditions of collective celebration have persisted and even experienced revival in recent decades, testifying to their fundamental importance in human culture.

Chapter 6: Modern Resurrections: From Rock Rebellion to Digital Age

The mid-20th century witnessed an unexpected revival of collective celebration in Western society. In the late 1950s, rock and roll emerged as a powerful new medium for communal ecstasy, particularly among young people. What began with teenagers dancing in movie theater aisles to Bill Haley and the Comets evolved into a full-fledged cultural rebellion that reached its apex in the massive outdoor festivals of the late 1960s, culminating in Woodstock's famous three days of "peace, music, and love." This rock rebellion represented a direct challenge to postwar culture's emphasis on conformity and emotional restraint. As Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver observed, white rock fans were attempting to "regain their Bodies again after generations of alienation and disembodied existence." The music's African American roots connected it to traditions of ecstatic worship that had survived in black churches, where gospel music maintained the call-and-response patterns and rhythmic participation characteristic of West African ceremonies. When Elvis Presley's gyrating hips scandalized adult viewers of the Ed Sullivan Show, he was unwittingly channeling an ancient tradition of embodied celebration that Western civilization had long suppressed. The establishment response was predictably hostile. Clergymen, psychiatrists, and civic leaders denounced rock as "jungle music" that would lead to juvenile delinquency and sexual promiscuity. This language of condemnation precisely echoed earlier attacks on carnival and indigenous rituals, revealing deep continuities in Western attitudes toward collective joy. As one music industry publication warned, rock and roll "stirs teenagers to orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves)." Despite this opposition, rock music spread globally, creating new spaces for communal experience that echoed ancient ritual practices. Parallel developments occurred in other domains of popular culture. Sporting events underwent significant transformation as fans began actively "carnivalizing" games through elaborate costumes, face painting, synchronized chanting, and choreographed movements. In soccer stadiums across Europe and South America, supporters' groups developed complex songs and rituals that turned matches into participatory celebrations. These innovations represented a grassroots reclamation of spectacle, as fans refused to remain passive spectators and instead became active creators of collective experience. The digital revolution has created new possibilities for both connection and isolation. Electronic dance music culture emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, creating spaces for collective experience that many participants described in explicitly spiritual terms. As one raver put it, "It's like going to church, but a church that really works." Social media platforms have facilitated the organization of flash mobs, protest movements, and spontaneous gatherings that would have been impossible in earlier eras. Yet these same technologies have also contributed to social atomization, as people increasingly interact through screens rather than in physical proximity. This tension between digital connection and physical communion reflects a deeper ambivalence in contemporary culture. On one hand, the human desire for collective joy remains powerful, finding expression in music festivals, sporting events, and political demonstrations. On the other hand, commercial interests continually work to commodify these experiences, while surveillance technologies enable unprecedented monitoring of public gatherings. The challenge of our time is to create authentic spaces for communal celebration that resist both commercialization and control - spaces where people can experience the ancient pleasure of moving together in rhythm, temporarily transcending the isolation of modern life.

Summary

Throughout this historical journey, we've witnessed a persistent conflict between the human impulse for collective celebration and the forces of social control. From ancient Dionysian rites to medieval carnivals, from indigenous ceremonies to rock concerts, people have repeatedly created spaces for communal joy that temporarily dissolve social hierarchies and individual isolation. Yet these expressions have faced consistent suppression from religious and political authorities who recognized, perhaps more clearly than the celebrants themselves, their potentially subversive power. This suppression intensified during periods of increasing social stratification and economic rationalization, suggesting that ecstatic celebration poses a fundamental challenge to hierarchical social orders. The implications of this history extend far beyond academic interest. In our current era of digital isolation and rising mental health challenges, the loss of authentic communal celebration represents a profound cultural impoverishment. The epidemic of depression in Western societies may be partly understood as the price paid for abandoning traditional forms of collective joy. This suggests several paths forward: we might work to create new spaces for participatory celebration that resist commercialization; we could incorporate elements of rhythmic synchrony and collective effervescence into education, healthcare, and community building; and perhaps most importantly, we might recognize that our need for periodic immersion in communal joy is not a frivolous indulgence but a fundamental human requirement. As Nietzsche understood in his analysis of Dionysian ritual, "The individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness."

About Author

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Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.

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