Read Dancing in the Streets Online
Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich
Dancing in the Streets (2 page)
Later catalogers of “primitive” ecstatic behavior, like T. K. Oesterreich, recognized a more mundane European analogue to the bewildering rites of “savages” in the familiar tradition of carnival, where otherwise sober people costumed themselves, drank to excess, danced through the night, and otherwise inverted the normal staid and Christian order. “It must ⦠be admitted,” he wrote, “that civilized people show a high degree of autosuggestibility in certain circumstances. By way of example we may quote the peculiar psychic intoxication to which in certain places (e.g., Munich and Cologne) a large part of the population falls victim on a given day of the year (Carnival).”
26
Critics of the traditional European festivities sometimes drove home their point by imagining the colonial encounter in reverse, with a “savage” registering shock at the behavior of European carnival-goers. In 1805, for example, a founder of the Basle Bible Society published a brochure entitled
Conversation of a Converted Hottentot with a European Christian During Carnival Time
, in which the “Hottentot” concludes that Basle is partially inhabited by “barbarous non-converted heathens.” At the end of the nineteenth century, a similar pamphlet featured a visiting “converted Hindu,” who confides that the wild doings at Basle's
Fastnacht
festivities put him in mind of “the idolatrous feasts and dances of my fellow-countrymen who are still heathens.”
27
26
Critics of the traditional European festivities sometimes drove home their point by imagining the colonial encounter in reverse, with a “savage” registering shock at the behavior of European carnival-goers. In 1805, for example, a founder of the Basle Bible Society published a brochure entitled
Conversation of a Converted Hottentot with a European Christian During Carnival Time
, in which the “Hottentot” concludes that Basle is partially inhabited by “barbarous non-converted heathens.” At the end of the nineteenth century, a similar pamphlet featured a visiting “converted Hindu,” who confides that the wild doings at Basle's
Fastnacht
festivities put him in mind of “the idolatrous feasts and dances of my fellow-countrymen who are still heathens.”
27
It was among their social inferiors, however, that Europeans found a more immediate analogue to the foreign “savage.” By the eighteenth century, the anthropologist Ann Stoler writes, “strong parallels were made between the immoral lives of the British underclass, Irish peasants, and âprimitive' Africans.”
28
The English saw parallels between their own lower classes and Native Americans:
“Savage slaves be in great Britaine here, as any you can show me there.”
29
Similarly, a mid-nineteenth-century visitor to rural Burgundy, in France, offered the caustic observation that “you don't have to go to America to see savages.”
30
And who were those people whose revels disrupted whole cities during carnivals in Germany, France, England, and Spain? By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were likely to be peasants and the urban poor, with respectable folk doing their best to stay indoors during these dangerously licentious times.
28
The English saw parallels between their own lower classes and Native Americans:
“Savage slaves be in great Britaine here, as any you can show me there.”
29
Similarly, a mid-nineteenth-century visitor to rural Burgundy, in France, offered the caustic observation that “you don't have to go to America to see savages.”
30
And who were those people whose revels disrupted whole cities during carnivals in Germany, France, England, and Spain? By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were likely to be peasants and the urban poor, with respectable folk doing their best to stay indoors during these dangerously licentious times.
So when the phenomenon of collective ecstasy entered the colonialist European mind, it was stained with feelings of hostility, contempt, and fear. Group ecstasy was something “others” experiencedâsavages or lower-class Europeans. In fact, the capacity for abandonment, for self-loss in the rhythms and emotions of the group, was a defining feature of “savagery” or otherness generally, signaling some fatal weakness of mind. As horrified witnesses of ecstatic ritual, Europeans may have learned very little about the peoples they visited (and often destroyed in the process)âtheir deities and traditions, their cultures and worldview. But they did learn, or imaginatively construct, something centrally important about themselves: that the essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world.
Science Confronts the Ecstatic
With the rise of the social sciences, and especially the anthropology of the 1930s and thereafter, Westerners began to view the ecstatic practices of non-Westerners in an ostensibly more open-minded way. Words like
savage
and
primitive
dropped from the ethnographic vocabulary, along with the notion that the people who had once borne these labels represented a biologically less evolved form of
Homo sapiens.
Medical science could find no differences in the
brains of the former primitives to account for their different behavior; colonialists necessarily observed that yesterday's “savage” might be today's shopkeeper, soldier, or servant. As humanity began to look more like a family of potential equals, Westerners had to concede that the ecstatic behavior found in traditional cultures was not the hallmark of savage “otherness” but the expression of a capacity that may exist, for better or for worse, in all of us.
savage
and
primitive
dropped from the ethnographic vocabulary, along with the notion that the people who had once borne these labels represented a biologically less evolved form of
Homo sapiens.
Medical science could find no differences in the
brains of the former primitives to account for their different behavior; colonialists necessarily observed that yesterday's “savage” might be today's shopkeeper, soldier, or servant. As humanity began to look more like a family of potential equals, Westerners had to concede that the ecstatic behavior found in traditional cultures was not the hallmark of savage “otherness” but the expression of a capacity that may exist, for better or for worse, in all of us.
By the 1930s, anthropologists had begun to think of the rituals of small-scale societies as
functional
, meaning in some sense rational. Humans are social animals, and rituals, ecstatic or otherwise, could be an expression of this sociality, a way of renewing the bonds that held a community together. In the functionalist anthropology that reached full bloom in the 1940s and '50s, many of the formerly bizarre-seeming activities of native peoples were explained in this way: as mechanisms for achieving cohesiveness and generating feelings of unity. Americans tried to achieve the same thing through patriotic and religious rituals; the “natives” simply had a different approach.
functional
, meaning in some sense rational. Humans are social animals, and rituals, ecstatic or otherwise, could be an expression of this sociality, a way of renewing the bonds that held a community together. In the functionalist anthropology that reached full bloom in the 1940s and '50s, many of the formerly bizarre-seeming activities of native peoples were explained in this way: as mechanisms for achieving cohesiveness and generating feelings of unity. Americans tried to achieve the same thing through patriotic and religious rituals; the “natives” simply had a different approach.
But right up to our own time, even the most scientific and sympathetic observers have tended to view the
ecstatic
rituals of non-Western cultures with deep misgivings, when they choose to view them at all. A certain distaste for the proceedings infects the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano's 1973 description of ecstatic rites conducted by the Hamadsha brotherhoods of Morocco. “The drumming, by this time, was beginning to have a dulling effect on me,” he reported, “and the music of the ghita an irritating one ⦠The smell of all the hot, close, sweating bodies was stifling.”
31
ecstatic
rituals of non-Western cultures with deep misgivings, when they choose to view them at all. A certain distaste for the proceedings infects the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano's 1973 description of ecstatic rites conducted by the Hamadsha brotherhoods of Morocco. “The drumming, by this time, was beginning to have a dulling effect on me,” he reported, “and the music of the ghita an irritating one ⦠The smell of all the hot, close, sweating bodies was stifling.”
31
Or consider a curious silence in the anthropologist Victor Turner's famous study of “the ritual process.” Perhaps more than any other anthropologist of the mid-twentieth century, he recognized collective ecstasy as a universal capacity and saw it as an expression of what he called
communitas
, meaning, roughly, the spontaneous love and solidarity that can arise within a community of equals. In
The Ritual Process
, Turner admitted to an initial “prejudice against ritual”
and tendency to discount “the thudding of ritual drums.”
32
Setting out to correct this oversight, he launched a detailed study of the Isoma cult ritual of the Ndembu people, which he introduces to the reader as consisting of three parts. The first two parts, which involve the manipulation of symbolic objects, are described in great detail and subjected to a thorough structuralist analysis. But the third and final phase, the Ku-tumbuka, or “festive dance,” which one might imagine was the climax of the entire business, is never mentioned again. Apparently Turner decided to skip that part.
b
communitas
, meaning, roughly, the spontaneous love and solidarity that can arise within a community of equals. In
The Ritual Process
, Turner admitted to an initial “prejudice against ritual”
and tendency to discount “the thudding of ritual drums.”
32
Setting out to correct this oversight, he launched a detailed study of the Isoma cult ritual of the Ndembu people, which he introduces to the reader as consisting of three parts. The first two parts, which involve the manipulation of symbolic objects, are described in great detail and subjected to a thorough structuralist analysis. But the third and final phase, the Ku-tumbuka, or “festive dance,” which one might imagine was the climax of the entire business, is never mentioned again. Apparently Turner decided to skip that part.
b
Turner's theories have been widely credited with giving ecstaticâas well as merely spontaneous and unrulyâgroup behavior a legitimate place in anthropology. In fact, it was a marginal and second-rate place he offered it. To Turner, the central thing about a culture was its
structure
, meaning, essentially, its hierarchies and rules. The function of ecstatic ritual, he proposed, was to keep the structure from becoming overly rigid and unstable by providing occasional relief in the form of collective excitement and festivity. But only very
occasional
relief. The thrills of
communitas
had to be “liminal,” or marginal, in Turner's scheme; otherwise social breakdown might ensue, “speedily followed by despotism.”
33
Hence his irritation with the hippies of his own mid-1960s American culture, who, in his description, employed “âmind-expanding' drugs, ârock' music, and flashing lights ⦠to establish a âtotal' communion with one another,” and who imagined that “the ecstasy of spontaneous communitas” could be prolonged into a routine condition.
34
This “Edenic fantasy” seemed utterly irresponsible to Turner, whoâapparently not noticing that many of these hippies were involved in
subsistence agriculture and other productive venturesâreminded his reader that we do have to worry about “the supplying of humble needs, such as food, drink, clothing.” Echoing the conventional Western cultural bias toward individualism, he added that it's a good idea to keep a certain “mystery of mutual distance” between individuals.
35
structure
, meaning, essentially, its hierarchies and rules. The function of ecstatic ritual, he proposed, was to keep the structure from becoming overly rigid and unstable by providing occasional relief in the form of collective excitement and festivity. But only very
occasional
relief. The thrills of
communitas
had to be “liminal,” or marginal, in Turner's scheme; otherwise social breakdown might ensue, “speedily followed by despotism.”
33
Hence his irritation with the hippies of his own mid-1960s American culture, who, in his description, employed “âmind-expanding' drugs, ârock' music, and flashing lights ⦠to establish a âtotal' communion with one another,” and who imagined that “the ecstasy of spontaneous communitas” could be prolonged into a routine condition.
34
This “Edenic fantasy” seemed utterly irresponsible to Turner, whoâapparently not noticing that many of these hippies were involved in
subsistence agriculture and other productive venturesâreminded his reader that we do have to worry about “the supplying of humble needs, such as food, drink, clothing.” Echoing the conventional Western cultural bias toward individualism, he added that it's a good idea to keep a certain “mystery of mutual distance” between individuals.
35
Other anthropologists turned to psychology to explain the extravagant rituals of non-Western peoples. Where European and American travelers had once seen savagery, they now saw mental illness, perhaps even nutritional in origin; Crapanzano wondered whether the Hamadsha ecstatics might be suffering from a calcium deficiency.
36
The most frequent diagnosis was
hysteria
, a term invented to describe the neurotic symptoms of upper-middle-class Viennese women near the turn of the century, but now blithely applied to Haitian villagers, Sri Lankan peasants, and anyone else whose behavior defied rational analysis. Alfred Métraux, the renowned ethnographer of the ecstatic Haitian tradition of Vodou, or voodoo, thought that “the symptoms of the opening phase of trance are clearly psychopathological. They conform exactly, in their main features, to the stock clinical description of hysteria.”
37
And in a 1981 book on female ecstatics in Sri Lanka, another anthropologist judged that “many of these women are, in a purely clinical sense, hysterical.”
38
36
The most frequent diagnosis was
hysteria
, a term invented to describe the neurotic symptoms of upper-middle-class Viennese women near the turn of the century, but now blithely applied to Haitian villagers, Sri Lankan peasants, and anyone else whose behavior defied rational analysis. Alfred Métraux, the renowned ethnographer of the ecstatic Haitian tradition of Vodou, or voodoo, thought that “the symptoms of the opening phase of trance are clearly psychopathological. They conform exactly, in their main features, to the stock clinical description of hysteria.”
37
And in a 1981 book on female ecstatics in Sri Lanka, another anthropologist judged that “many of these women are, in a purely clinical sense, hysterical.”
38
In very basic ways, psychology was ill-prepared to shoulder the burden anthropologists tried to throw its way. The new science aimed at a universal theory of human emotion and personality, but its theories were derived entirely from studies of the various compulsions, phobias, tics, and “neuraesthenias” afflicting affluent, urban Westernersâdisorders that seemed to have no counterpart among “primitives” in their native lands.
39
Not only was the science of psychology narrowly culture-bound; its emphasis on pathology largely precluded any careful study of the more pleasurable emotions, including the kind of joyâgrowing into ecstasyâthat was the hallmark of so many “native” rituals and celebrations. In the
psychological language of
needs
and
drives
, people do not freely and affirmatively search for pleasure; rather, they are “driven” by cravings that resemble pain. To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.
40
39
Not only was the science of psychology narrowly culture-bound; its emphasis on pathology largely precluded any careful study of the more pleasurable emotions, including the kind of joyâgrowing into ecstasyâthat was the hallmark of so many “native” rituals and celebrations. In the
psychological language of
needs
and
drives
, people do not freely and affirmatively search for pleasure; rather, they are “driven” by cravings that resemble pain. To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.
40
There was one form of pleasure that deeply interested psychologists, from Sigmund Freud on, and that was sexual pleasure. If the festivities and ecstatic rituals of “primitives” had routinely culminated in sexual acts, either public or private, psychology might have been more comfortable with them. The music, the excitement, the close-packed bodies could then all be understood as aphrodisiacs, allowing people to throw off their normal restraints. This is in fact how many Westerners chose to interpret the rituals they observed anywayâas indecent, wanton, and surely sexual in aim.
Some ecstatic rituals did indeed include sexual actsâmost commonly pantomimedâor at least ended with couples drifting off together in the night. The Australian corroborree, for example, sometimes featured sexual intercourse of a deliberately “incestuous” kind; that is, involving men and women of the same tribal subunit, which is normally taboo. But even in that case, sex was only part of the proceedings, and by no means the grand climax, so to speak. More commonly, ecstatic rituals were rather chaste undertakings, involving women and men of all ages, following careful scripts, and serving a function that is perhaps best described as “religious.” The self-loss that participants sought in ecstatic ritual was not through physical merger with another person but through a kind of spiritual merger with the group.
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of “primitives” emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to
anotherâfrom the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the “love” that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual. Durkheim's notion of
collective effervescence
and Turner's idea of
communitas
each reach, in their own ways, toward some conception of love that serves to knit people together in groups larger than two. But if homosexual attraction is the love “that dares not speak its name,” the love that binds people to the collective has no name at all to speak.
Communitas
and
collective effervescence
describe aspects or moments of communal excitement; there is no word for the loveâor force or needâthat leads individuals to seek ecstatic merger with the group.
anotherâfrom the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the “love” that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual. Durkheim's notion of
collective effervescence
and Turner's idea of
communitas
each reach, in their own ways, toward some conception of love that serves to knit people together in groups larger than two. But if homosexual attraction is the love “that dares not speak its name,” the love that binds people to the collective has no name at all to speak.
Communitas
and
collective effervescence
describe aspects or moments of communal excitement; there is no word for the loveâor force or needâthat leads individuals to seek ecstatic merger with the group.
Freud, the patriarch of Western psychology, was unprepared or unwilling to shed any light on the subject. It is doubtful that he ever witnessed, much less experienced, anything in the way of collective ecstasy. He was aware of the European tradition of carnival, for example, but saw it through the usual prejudices of his class. In a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, he agreed with her that the behavior of the lower-class revelers at the town fair in Wandsbeck was “neither pleasant nor edifying,” especially when compared to the more acceptable and bourgeois pleasures of “an hour's chat nestling close to one's love” or “the reading of a book.”
41
In his theoretical work too, he could see nothing very edifying about the emotions linking people in groups or, as he put it, crowds. As the anthropologist Charles Lindholm writes, Freud was much taken with the “expansive and intoxicating self-loss” accompanying the love between two individuals, while “in his discourse on the group the emphasis remains on guilt, anxiety and repressed aggression.”
42
What people found in the crowd, Freud opined, was a chance to submit to a leader playing the Oedipal role of “primal father”âa “witch doctor,” presumably, or demagogue.
41
In his theoretical work too, he could see nothing very edifying about the emotions linking people in groups or, as he put it, crowds. As the anthropologist Charles Lindholm writes, Freud was much taken with the “expansive and intoxicating self-loss” accompanying the love between two individuals, while “in his discourse on the group the emphasis remains on guilt, anxiety and repressed aggression.”
42
What people found in the crowd, Freud opined, was a chance to submit to a leader playing the Oedipal role of “primal father”âa “witch doctor,” presumably, or demagogue.
In Freud's scheme of human affinities, there was only one kind of love: the dyadic, erotic love of one individual for another. This is
the problem he set forth in
Civilization and Its Discontents:
“The antithesis between civilization and sexuality [derives] from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization is founded on relations between a considerable number of individuals.”
43
Unfortunately for civilization, Freud could not imagine a kind of love binding such larger groups of persons. Eros, he said, could unite people two by two, but “he is not willing to go further.” Hence the excitement of groups could only be derivative of the individuals' dyadic love for the group leader; never mind that ecstatic groups, of the kind observed in “primitive” ritual, often had no leader or central figure at all.
the problem he set forth in
Civilization and Its Discontents:
“The antithesis between civilization and sexuality [derives] from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization is founded on relations between a considerable number of individuals.”
43
Unfortunately for civilization, Freud could not imagine a kind of love binding such larger groups of persons. Eros, he said, could unite people two by two, but “he is not willing to go further.” Hence the excitement of groups could only be derivative of the individuals' dyadic love for the group leader; never mind that ecstatic groups, of the kind observed in “primitive” ritual, often had no leader or central figure at all.
But Western psychology was disabled from comprehending the phenomenon of collective ecstasy in a more philosophically profound way as well. Psychology, almost by definition, focuses on the individual self; its therapies are aimed at bolstering that self against the force of irrational or repressed emotion. But the
self
is itself a parochial concept, far more meaningful in early-twentieth-century Cambridge or Vienna than in the distant outposts of nineteenth-century European colonialism. As Luh Ketut Suryani and Gordon Jensen, ethnographers of Balinese ecstatic ritual, observe: “The sense of being in control of one's self is prominent and highly valued in Western personality and thought. This trait is not characteristic of the Balinese, whose lives have in the main been controlled by their families, their ancestors, and the supernatural.”
44
self
is itself a parochial concept, far more meaningful in early-twentieth-century Cambridge or Vienna than in the distant outposts of nineteenth-century European colonialism. As Luh Ketut Suryani and Gordon Jensen, ethnographers of Balinese ecstatic ritual, observe: “The sense of being in control of one's self is prominent and highly valued in Western personality and thought. This trait is not characteristic of the Balinese, whose lives have in the main been controlled by their families, their ancestors, and the supernatural.”
44
To the “self”-admiring Western mind, any form of self-lossâother than the kind associated with romantic loveâcould only be pathological. And that is how modern psychology has tended to categorize it. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(fourth edition), or
DSM-IV,
the standard psychiatric guide to mental disorders, lists something called
depersonalization disorder
, which involves a feeling of being “detached from, and as if one is an outside observer of, one's mental processes or body.”
45
As Lindholm comments, the psychological model for understanding collective ecstasy
“is strongly value loaded. It assumes that the desire for self-loss
must
be a result of antisocial and regressive id drives.”
46
Those dancing, exulting practitioners of ecstatic ritual may have thought they were communing with the deities, building community solidarity, or even performing acts of healing. But in the eyes of Western psychology, they were only manifesting the symptoms of their illness.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(fourth edition), or
DSM-IV,
the standard psychiatric guide to mental disorders, lists something called
depersonalization disorder
, which involves a feeling of being “detached from, and as if one is an outside observer of, one's mental processes or body.”
45
As Lindholm comments, the psychological model for understanding collective ecstasy
“is strongly value loaded. It assumes that the desire for self-loss
must
be a result of antisocial and regressive id drives.”
46
Those dancing, exulting practitioners of ecstatic ritual may have thought they were communing with the deities, building community solidarity, or even performing acts of healing. But in the eyes of Western psychology, they were only manifesting the symptoms of their illness.
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