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Dancing in the Streets
A History of Collective Joy
First published 2007 · 336 pages
A fascinating historical exploration of humanity's irrepressible urge to gather, dance, and rebel through collective joy.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like uncovering a hidden, jubilant history of human nature. It moves at a steady, engaging pace, guiding the reader through centuries of ecstatic revels, from ancient Greek festivities to 1960s rock-and-roll rebellions. The mood is both intellectually stimulating and deeply rebellious, balancing a celebratory tone with a critical eye toward the elites and institutions that have historically sought to suppress communal joy. The prose is analytical yet passionate, weaving together biology, culture, and history to reveal how feasting and dancing are not just leisure, but acts of social defiance. It is perfect for readers who love cultural history and want to understand the profound, enduring power of community life and collective exuberance.
- Mood
- intellectually stimulating
- rebellious
- uplifting
- Tone
- analytical
- passionate
- critical
- celebratory
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- power of collective joy · suppression of communal celebration · social hierarchy and rebellion · human biology and culture · persistence of festivity
- The writing
- Scholarly yet accessible, blending historical analysis with a passionate defense of human exuberance.
- The arc
- Moves from a celebration of innate human joy through a sobering history of its suppression, culminating in a hopeful recognition of its enduring, rebellious spirit.
- Who it's for
- Readers fascinated by cultural history, sociology, and the hidden, rebellious power of human celebration.
Content notes
- historical suppression of culture
- colonialism
About the book
"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse 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. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christianity. Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, 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 uprisings and revolutions from France to 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.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress
Description from Open Library.
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