Collective Joy

I'm reading a book by Barbara Ehrenreich called 'Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy'. 

Isn't that a lovely title? Doesn't it make you feel great reading it? Tumbling it over in your mind - don't the words and ideas just make you smile? 

It makes me smile. But what's more, she delves into the nature of communal festivals, especially what she calls ecstatic rituals. These are rituals that involve the kinds of things I've been talking about in my own study of Carnival. It speaks about trance and dancing, especially in the frenzy of large groups. Her study looks at different types of these rituals all over the world. I am only a quarter way through the book so far, but it's made me really hopeful, seeing someone speak about these things in a realistic way, without satire or judgement. 

I've wondered for a long time where the intellectual bias began against things like sex, dancing and boisterous outbreaks of expression. I mean what's really wrong with these things? Why do people constantly feel the need to crystallise and re-crystallise some illusion of who or what they are through archaic intellectual roles and anachronistic impressions of what people fundamentally are? Is it a method of control? Is it power? Or elitism? Is it the backlash of conservative Christianity? Or have we become too afraid as people to express our animalistic selves through anything more than war? 

In any event, it's a great book. I'm really enjoying it and it's helping me to form my ideas in a more lucid way.