Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich’s fascinating exploration of one of humanity’s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy

In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species’ attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one 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.

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and ＂savage,＂ Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a ＂danced religion.＂ Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: 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 French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from 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.

Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.

＂Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.＂--Terry Eagleton, The Nation

作者簡介

芭芭拉．艾倫瑞克（Barbara Ehrenreich）

　　1941年生，洛克菲勒大學細胞生物學博士，《時代雜誌》專欄作家，作品也常出現在《哈潑》、《國家》、《新共和》等重要刊物，是相當活躍的女性主義者與民主社會主義者。她出身於礦工家庭，讀大學時受到反戰運動啟蒙，於是放棄教職，投入寫作與社會運動，特別關注社會底層。她至今已出版近二十本著作，包括《紐約時報》暢銷榜作品《我在底層的生活》、《M型社會白領的新試煉》、《失控的正向思考》。

　　Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, and Blood Rites, among others. A frequent contributor toHarper's and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She is the winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Current Interest and ALA Notable Books for Nonfiction.
 
　　Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism. She lives and works in Florida.