Zagreus
Zerzan, John
Zeus (Jupiter)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Progressive, she has been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine.
She can be reached at www.barbaraehrenreich.com.
Notes
a The anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano defines trance as “a complete or partial dissociation, characterized by changes in such functions as identity, memory, the sensory modalities, and thought. It may involve the loss of voluntary control over movement, and may be accompanied by hallucinations and visions.” (The Hamadsha, fn, p. 195.)
b At a conference on ritual and festivities at Bowling Green State University in 2003, the Ghanaian anthropologist Klevor Abo presented a fascinating account of the Hogbetsotso festival of the Anlo-Ewe people, focusing on how elements of the ritual re-created historical events. When I asked, in the discussion that followed his presentation, whether there was any music and dancing involved, his face brightened and he said that that was in fact his favorite part. Then he proceeded to briefly demonstrate the dance that accompanied the ritual—which somehow had not seemed important enough to mention in his formal presentation.
c Another anthropologist asserts: “The vocabulary of festival is the language of extreme experiences through contrasts … The body is made into an object of dressing up, costuming, and masking … And, of course, singing and dancing and other kinds of play are part and parcel of festive celebrations, again with the idea of overextending the self. All of these motives underscore the spirit of increase, of stretching life to the fullest, that lies at the heart of festive celebrations.” (Roger D. Abraham, in Turner [ed.], 1982, pp. 167-68.) Or, as Richard Schechner, a historian of theater, put it: “Dancing, singing, wearing masks and costumes, impersonating other people, animals or supernaturals (or being possessed by these others); acting stories, retelling the hunt … rehearsing and preparing special places and times for these presentations—all are coexistent with the human condition.” (Quoted in Garfinkel, p. 40.)
d It would be interesting to know the minimal group size for an effective danced ritual, but I have found no published work on this topic.
e This is an experimentally testable proposition. Hungry predatory animals, such as lions and leopards, could be confronted with different human groups—some standing still, some moving in place but in a nonsynchronous way, and some moving synchronously. For safety’s sake, invisible electric fences could be used to protect the human subjects from the predator animal. I look forward to learning the results, should anyone be courageous enough to undertake the experiment.
f If, indeed, they drank wine. In Euripides’ account, they did not, and the scholarly consensus seems to be that while male worshippers of Dionysus drank freely, female worshippers required no chemical assistance in their rites. (Roth, pp. 41—42.)
g The popular American Life Application Study Bible struggles, in a footnote, to explain the socialistic nature of the early Church as follows: “The early church was able to share possessions and property as a result of the unity brought by the Holy Spirit working in and through the believers’ lives. This way of living is different from communism because (1) the sharing was voluntary; (2) it didn’t involve all private property, but only as much as was needed; (3) it was not a membership requirement in order to be a part of the church.” (Life Application Study Bible, New American Standard Bible, updated edition [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000], p. 1895.)
h According to the historian William H. McNeill, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today’s churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting. (Personal communication with the author, June 1, 2006.)
i Technically, carnival refers to the specific holiday preceding Lent, but the term is also used in a generic way to denote similar festivities occurring throughout the year.
j Some separation of the classes can be found in many kinds of festivities around the world. At carnival time in Rio de Janeiro in the late twentieth century, the upper classes were likely to leave the city for the quiet of the countryside. On the Swahili coast of Africa in the nineteenth century, major holidays were celebrated mostly by “persons of low status,” while “powerful Arabs … generally stayed out of holiday rituals altogether, except as occasional patrons.” (Glassman, p. 170.)
k The historian Robert Kinsman states that “melancholy in Renaissance art, both pictorial and literary, became a central point of reference,” and offers a number of German examples, including the work of Dürer. (Kinsman, p. 310.)
l This is a limitation of Kay Redfield Jamison’s fascinating book Touched with Fire, which endeavors to link manic-depressive disease to artistic creativity, chiefly by enlisting a long line of highly creative sufferers. To begin with, she does not clearly distinguish manic-depressive, or bipolar, disease from “unipolar” depression, throwing a number of unipolar victims—like Samuel Johnson—into her mix. Then, to establish that depression in any form was more common among eighteenth-century writers and poets than other people, she compares its rate among the poets of that time to rates among the general population today (p. 73). But what were the rates of depression among the general population in the eighteenth century? And why should we count as poets and “highly creative” people only those who achieve publication and subsequent fame? At any rate, she never comments on the fact that none of the celebrated victims whose cases she discusses lived earlier than the seventeenth century.
m For more on the complex, and often antagonistic, relationship between missionaries and the colonial effort, see Elbourne.
n Colloquially, Voodoo. I avoid that term because of its implications of black magic and “irrationality” generally, as in the expression voodoo economics. Other versions of the word include Vudun and Voudun.
o Jitterbugs, devotees of the Lindy in the late 1920s and early 1930s, had come in for much of the same kind of criticism. According to Katherine Stern, “the jitterbugs carried away with them … an encounter with black power, with black victory, or jubilation, the implications of which made them ‘jitter,’ and made the media in turn splutter over the jitterbugs, calling them ‘poison,’ ‘a plague,’ or the ‘victims’ of some perilous infection.” (Personal communication with the author, February 3, 2006.)
p The custom of dressing for games in team colors may have been started in Brazil, the land of carnaval, by a fan named Jayme de Carvalho. Alex Bellos reports that “Jayme was a lowlevel state functionary, a job as anonymous as it was possible to get. Yet on the terraces he was a celebrity … He dressed up in club colours and brought flags and banners.” Since club color clothes were not commercially available at the time, he relied on his wife to sew his costumes. (Bellos, p. 126.)
q According to USA Today (August 28, 1997), 44 percent of the National Football League’s fan base were women, up from 33 percent in 1990. The “feminization” of sports fandom deserves investigation in its own right, but I haven’t found a satisfactory account.
r Whether this is an inherent feature of civilization, we do not know, though advocates of genuine democracy can only hope that this is not the case. Contemporary anarchists and socialists differ on this point, with some proposing complex methods of grassroots democratic planning that would presumably abolish hierarchy of all kinds while preserving modern means of production. For an example of such a proposed system, see Michael Albert’s book Parecon (London: Verso, 2003). Others, most notably the anarchist thinker John Zerzan, argue that the problem goes much deeper, and that we cannot achieve true democracy without eliminating industrialization and possibly the entire division of labor.
Copyright © 2006 by Barbara Ehrenreich All rights reserved.
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First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrenreich, Barbara.
Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy / Barbara Ehrenreich.—1st ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-5724-9 ISBN-10: 0-8050-5724-2
1. Festivals—History. 2. Fasts and feasts—History. 3. Spectacular, The—History. 4. Collective behavior—History. 5. Happiness—History. I. Title.
GT3940.E47 2007
394.26—dc22
2006046673
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Originally published in hardcover in 2006 by Metropolitan Books
First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2007
Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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