Book Review: Dancing in the Streest: A History of Collective Joy

Barbara Ehrenreich's latest work is a series of meditations on the concept of what she calls 'collective joy', and while she aims “to speak seriously of the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation,” it is apparent that the lines cannot be so clearly drawn. Collective outpourings of emotion have been around for as long as the cultural mind remembers, but 'joy' is a slippery concept indeed.

She begins with ancient Classical rituals, then moves through early Christianity, medieval European carnivals, the effects of Calvinism on social life, non-European rituals in the New and Old Worlds, and then moves into fascism, the 'carnivalization of sports' and contemporary rock music.

This isn't the cultural history of the party buzz she promises, but her tangents are both necessary and interesting: a chapter on the rise of 'melancholy' and the roots of modern depression, the complicated questions about events like fascist spectacles (a Nazi rally wasn't so joyous to behold if you were a Jew), and the changing contextual meanings of carnivals and festivals.

It is unfortunate that she relies somewhat heavily on the idea of 'Dionysian rituals' and that some of the anthropological and archaeological evidence she uses in her earlier chapters is either outdated or haphazardly applied. But A History of Collective Joy is a mixed bag mainly because when a writer tries to stay too close to a single theme unified, not by historical or social realities but by a publisher's requirements, it's bound to fray at the edges.

We can't be sure past people experienced anything like 'joy' in its contemporary sense, and perhaps the idea doesn't come into its own until the rise in the melancholy which the repression of ecstatic rituals may have evoked. Even Renaissance depictions of saintly ecstasy were extremes of pleasure and pain. Is, then, the rise of 'joy' and concurrent rise of 'melancholy' a result, not so much of repression, but from the Enlightenment that forcibly divided them? Was
there joy before there was acute joylessness?

The 'authorities' have always feared the potential unruliness of a crowd, and perhaps the real fear is as much in these crowds' dissolution of the boundaries between celebration and unrest, protest and party, but in the way they expose the artificiality of that boundary. The 'sublime' these gatherings may have invoked was appropriate for contemplating nature, not a street party for the masses.

Ultimately, though, Ehrenreich is optimistic in the power for collective joy (whatever 'joy' even is) to be a force for positive change, and for all of its flaws in research and intellectual contradictions, this is a thoughtful narrative experiment, respectful to humans and relentlessly thought-provoking.

(From Totally Dublin, November 2007)