Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich
NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2006ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-5723-2
(page 2-3 ) Emile Durkheim's notion of _collective effervescence_: the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and, he proposed, forms the ultimate basis of religion.
(6) But as the anthropologist Michael Taussig writes, "It's the ability to become _possessed_... that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness if not downright savagery." Trance was what many of those wild rituals seemed to lead up to. and for Eyuropeans, it represented the very heart of darkness - a place beyond the human self.
(10) [Victor Turner] 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 that can arise within a community of equals.
(11) 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.
(23) In his justly popular book _Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language_, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues for an optimal Paleolithic group size of about 150.
(24) "Dance," as a neuroscientist put it, is "the biotechnology of group formation."
(33) As Aldous Huxley once observed, "Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other... It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine."
(44) The rise of social hierarchy, anthropologists agree, goes hand in hand with the rise of militarism and war, which are in their own way also usually hostile ot the danced rituals of the archaic past.
(67) E. R. Dodds, in his famous _The Greeks and the Irrational_, suggested that hair-tossing might be a universal hallmark of religious ecstasy.
NB: head banging
(141) The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure...
(183) Or, as some revisionist social psychologists put it very recently, the effect of fascism was to convince social scientists that "groups are inherently dangerous."
(186) We begin with an important distinction: The mass fascist rallies were not festivals or ecstatic rituals; they were spectacles, designed by a small group of leaders for the edification of the many.
NB: Society of the Spectacle - my notes are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html
(186-187) At Nuremberg, as at countless other rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the only spectacle on display was the military, the only legitimate form of motion the march.
NB: No dancing
(208) "rioting" ...according to LInda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book _Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock 'n' Roll_, "just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters; jiving in their seats; and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot - having a good time, in short. The authorities thought an audience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance."
NB: Applause in time in Europe and Latin America, English versus American debate
(211) The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others. As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that thte neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the _execution_ of that motion by the perceiver. To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving.
(214) NB: Only one footnote mentions the jitterbugs, none about ragtime and jazz
(218) Thomas A. Dorsey "Black music calls for movement!" Mahalia Jackson wrote, "I want my hands... my feet... my whole body to say all that is in me. I say 'Don't let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!' The Lord doesn't like us to act dead. If you feel it, tap your feet a little = dance to the glory of the Lord!'"
(225) For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States; soccer worldwide: These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls "Saturanalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotion which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives."
(226) Sports stadiums, however are round, so "the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators." People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A's or Manchester, but they are are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.
NB: No discussion of Roman and Byzantine sports as politics; no soccer war
(248) Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy - other people, including strangers - no longer holds much appeal. In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.
(251) The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.
(255) It is a measure of our general deprivation that the most common referent for _ecstasy_ in usage today is not an experience but a drug, MDMA, that offers fleeting feelings of euphoria and connectedness.
(259) People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.
(186-187) At Nuremberg, as at countless other rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the only spectacle on display was the military, the only legitimate form of motion the march.
NB: No dancing
(208) "rioting" ...according to LInda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book _Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock 'n' Roll_, "just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters; jiving in their seats; and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot - having a good time, in short. The authorities thought an audience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance."
NB: Applause in time in Europe and Latin America, English versus American debate
(211) The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others. As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that thte neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the _execution_ of that motion by the perceiver. To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving.
(214) NB: Only one footnote mentions the jitterbugs, none about ragtime and jazz
(218) Thomas A. Dorsey "Black music calls for movement!" Mahalia Jackson wrote, "I want my hands... my feet... my whole body to say all that is in me. I say 'Don't let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!' The Lord doesn't like us to act dead. If you feel it, tap your feet a little = dance to the glory of the Lord!'"
(225) For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States; soccer worldwide: These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls "Saturanalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotion which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives."
(226) Sports stadiums, however are round, so "the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators." People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A's or Manchester, but they are are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.
NB: No discussion of Roman and Byzantine sports as politics; no soccer war
(248) Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy - other people, including strangers - no longer holds much appeal. In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.
(251) The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.
(255) It is a measure of our general deprivation that the most common referent for _ecstasy_ in usage today is not an experience but a drug, MDMA, that offers fleeting feelings of euphoria and connectedness.
(259) People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.
Penelope Reed Doob _The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages_
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990
Gustave Le Bon _The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind_
NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1971
William H. McNeill _Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History-
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995
No _Crowds and Power_ by Elias Canetti
No _Samba_ by Alma Guillermoprieta
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990
Gustave Le Bon _The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind_
NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1971
William H. McNeill _Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History-
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995
No _Crowds and Power_ by Elias Canetti
No _Samba_ by Alma Guillermoprieta
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