Book Alert / Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets -- A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books '07, $26, 120 pages, ISBN #0-8050-5723-4. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

It's difficult to categorize Barbara Ehrenreich's ouevre. Early on she wrote historical works on experts' advice to women and women healers. Next, she alleged that sex was becoming feminized, examined "the inner life of the middle class," and sought to counter Gordon Gecko's film philosophy that "greed is good." More recently, Ehrenreich has considered what drives us to war. Perhaps most tellingly, she has lately turned in tendentious works focusing  on those least able to compete in a dog-eat-dog world.

Initially, one reacts to Dancing in the Streets by scratching one's head. Why do humans group together to celebrate? Well, perhaps, Barbara, because it's fun! Come join us. But as one digs further into her newest book, it's apparent she has a deeper thesis. The celebration our author has in mind is more of the kind embodied by Brazil's Carnaval, America's Woodstock or African ritual gatherings in which the drum rules, ones capped by communal ecstacy.

And here a gap widens between Western societies and the rest. Western democracies, by and large, feel themselves to be governed by rational discourse and action, which some believe to be the antithesis of the loss of control that shows itself in bacchanalian frenzy. They are also defined by societal hierarchies, whereby social classes separate themselves into accepted gradations. Predictably, the upper levels of society feel edgy about mass celebrations in which these gradations might be blurred and in which classes might mix -- socially, economically, and (God forbid, sexually) together.

Ehrenreich draws on such authorities as anthropologist Victor Turner, who sees value in ecstatic ritual, which she says was designed "to keep the structure from becoming overly rigid and unstable by providing occasionally relief in the form of collective excitement and festivity." That is, a safety valve required by a hierarchical construct, the tightly-regimented structure of which might otherwise cause valves to explode.

Some societies have celebrations -- even those culminating in ecstacy -- regularly. Others do so episodically. Woodstock was episodic, although if a poll were taken, a great number of attendees would have voted for its essence to become not an occasional celebration but a lifestyle. Once again, Barbara Enrenreich has put frowns on our face.