Dancing in the Streets, by Barbara Ehrenreich

ELLE
Aug/Sept 2006

Prehistoric cave art suggests that our forebears had no compunction about indulging in communal revelry. So when and how, Barbara Ehrenreich asks pointedly in her new cultural historhistory, Dancing in the Streets (Metro pol itan), did "collective joy" become something that we fantasize and sing about but all too rarely partake in? In this book she retraces the descent of man's ability to let it all hang out.

Anthropologists view African-derived traditions of dancing, swaying, and group chanting as a way for communities to foster unity; Ehrenreich speculates that such bonding and interacting in unison may even have conferred a cooperative evolutionary advantage. She also draws an intriguing connection between the decline of the medieval festival and the worldwide-epidemic of depres sion that seemingly originated in seventeenth-century England. And she explores how elites have attempted to suppress ecstatic rituals, apparently for fear of losing control of the plebes—and of themselves. While Ehrenreich's reliably nimble prose is freighted a bit here with anthropological studies, quotations, and historical references, she accumulates a compelling case for the benefits of serious partying. The way things have been going, America could use some unity-building—and singing and dancing would be a salutary place to start.