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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Dancing in the
Streets: A History of Collective
Joy
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books -
January 2007
Invitation
to the Dance
When Europeans undertook their
campaigns of conquest and exploration in
what seemed to them "new" worlds, they
found the natives engaged in many strange
and lurid activities. Cannibalism was
reported, though seldom convincingly
documented, along with human sacrifice,
bodily mutilation, body and face painting,
and flagrantly open sexual practices.
Equally jarring to European sensibilities
was the almost ubiquitous practice of
ecstatic ritual, in which the natives
would gather to dance, sing, or chant to a
state of exhaustion and, beyond that,
sometimes trance. Everywhere they went --
among the hunter-gatherers of Australia,
the horticulturists of Polynesia, the
village peoples of India -- white men and
occasionally women witnessed these
electrifying rites so frequently that
there seemed to them to be, among "the
present societies of savage men . . . an
extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much
local variation, in ritual and mythology."
The European idea of the "savage" came to
focus on the image of painted and
bizarrely costumed bodies, drumming and
dancing with wild abandon by the light of
a fire.
What did they actually see? A single
ritual could look very different to
different observers. When he arrived in
Tahiti in the late 1700s, Captain Cook
watched groups of girls performing "a very
indecent dance which they call Timorodee,
singing the most indecent songs and using
most indecent actions . . . In doing this
they keep time to a great nicety." About
sixty years later, Herman Melville found
the same ritual, by then called
"Lory-Lory" and perhaps modified in other
ways, full of sensual charm.
- Presently, raising a strange chant,
they softly sway themselves, gradually
quickening the movement, until at
length, for a few passionate moments
with throbbing bosoms, and glowing
cheeks, they abandon themselves to all
the spirit of the dance, apparently
lost to everything around. But soon
subsiding again into the same languid
measure as before, the eyes swimming in
their heads, join in one wild chorus,
and sink into each other's arms.
Like Captain Cook, Charles Darwin was
repelled by the corroborree rite of
western Australians, reporting that
- the dancing consisted in their
running either sideways or in Indian
file into an open space, and stamping
the ground with great force as they
marched together. Their heavy footsteps
were accompanied with a kind of grunt,
by beating their clubs and spears
together, and by various other
gesticulations, such as extending their
arms and wriggling their bodies. It was
a most rude, barbarous scene, and, to
our ideas, without any sort of
meaning.
But to the anthropologists Baldwin
Spencer and Frank Gillen, a similar
Aboriginal rite was far more compelling,
perhaps even enticing: "The smoke, the
blazing torches, the showers of sparks
falling in all directions and the masses
of dancing, yelling men formed a genuinely
wild and savage scene of which it is
impossible to convey any adequate idea in
words." It was this description that fed
into the great French sociologist 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.
Through the institution of slavery,
European Americans had the opportunity to
observe their own captive "natives" at
close range, and they too reported varying
and contradictory responses to the
ecstatic rituals of the transplanted
Africans. Many whites of the slave-owning
class saw such practices as "noisy, crude,
impious, and, simply, dissolute," and took
strong measures to suppress them. The
nineteenth-century absentee owner of a
Jamaican plantation found his slaves doing
a myal dance, probably derived from
an initiation rite of the Azande people of
Africa, and described them as engaged in
"a great variety of grotesque actions, and
chanting all the while something between a
song and a howl." Similarly, an English
visitor to Trinidad in 1845 reported
disgustedly that
- on Christmas Eve, it seemed as if,
under the guise of religion, all
Pandemonium had been let loose . . .
Drunkenness bursting forth in yells and
bacchanalian orgies, was universal
amongst the blacks . . . Sleep was out
of the question, in the midst of such a
disgusting and fiendish saturnalia . .
. The musicians were attended by a
multitude of drunken people of both
sexes, the women being of the lowest
class; and all dancing, screaming and
clapping their hands, like so many
demons. All this was the effect of the
"midnight mass," ending, as all such
masses do, in every species of
depravity.
Other white observers, though, were
sometimes surprised to find themselves
drawn in by the peculiar power of such
African-derived rituals and festivities.
Traveling in the mid-nineteenth century,
Frederick Law Olmsted observed a black
Christian service in New Orleans and was
swept up by the "shouts, and groans,
terrific shrieks, and indescribable
expressions of ecstasy -- of pleasure or
agony," to the point where he found his
own face "glowing" and feet stamping, as
if he had been "infected unconsciously."
Clinton Furness, a traveler to South
Carolina in the 1920s, reported a similar
experience while watching an African
American ring-shout, or danced form
of religious worship.
- Several men moved their feet
alternately, in strange syncopation. A
rhythm was born, almost without
reference to the words of the preacher.
It seemed to take place almost visibly,
and grow. I was gripped with the
feeling of a mass-intelligence, a
self-conscious entity, gradually
informing the crowd and taking
possession of every mind there,
including my own . . . I felt as if
some conscious plan or purpose were
carrying us along, call it mob-mind,
communal composition, or what you
will.
On the whole, though, white observers
regarded the ecstatic rituals of
darker-skinned peoples with horror and
revulsion. Grotesque is one word
that appears again and again in European
accounts of such events; hideous is
another. Henri Junod, a nineteenth-century
Swiss missionary among the Ba-Ronga people
of southern Mozambique, complained of the
drums' "frightful din" and "infernal
racket." Other Catholic missionaries, upon
hearing the African drumbeat announcing a
ritual event, felt it was their duty to
disrupt "the hellish practice." Well into
the twentieth century, the sound of
drumming was enough to spook the white
traveler, suggestive as it was of a world
beyond human ken. "I have never heard an
eerier sound," a young English visitor to
South Africa reports in the 1910 novel
Prester John. "Neither human nor
animal it seemed, but the voice of that
world between which is hid from man's
sight and hearing." In the introduction to
his 1926 book on tribal dancing, the
writer W.D. Hambly pleaded with his
readers for a little "sympathy" for his
subject.
- The student of primitive music and
dancing will have to cultivate a habit
of broad-minded consideration for the
actions of backward races . . . Music
and dancing performed wildly by
firelight in a tropical forest have not
seldom provoked the censure and disgust
of European visitors, who have seen
only what is grotesque or sensual.
Or, in many cases, may have elected not
to see at all: When the intrepid
entomologist Evelyn Cheeseman tramped
through New Guinea in search of new insect
species in the early 1930s, she showed not
the slightest curiosity about the many
native "dancing grounds" she passed
through. At one village she and her
bearers were asked to leave because there
was to be a feast and dance that evening,
which were tambu, or forbidden, for
outsiders to witness. Cheeseman was miffed
by this glitch in her plans but comforted
herself with the thought that "it is of
course well known that it is not
particularly desirable to stop in a
strange village when the natives are being
worked up to their usual frenzy of devil
worship."
Particularly disturbing to white
observers was the occasional climax of
ecstatic ritual, in which some or all of
the participants would, after prolonged
dancing and singing or chanting, enter
what we might now call an "altered state
of consciousness," or trance. People
caught up in trance might speak in a
strange voice or language, display a
marked indifference to pain, contort their
bodies in ways seemingly impossible in
normal life, foam at the mouth, see
visions, believe themselves to be
possessed by a spirit or deity, and
ultimately collapse.
A missionary among the Fiji Islanders
described such a trance state as "a
horrible sight," but it was sight that was
not always possible for the traveler to
avoid. In her 1963 survey of the
ethnographic literature, the
anthropologist Erika Bourguignon found
that 92 percent of small-scale societies
surveyed encouraged some sort of religious
trances, in most cases through ecstatic
group ritual. In one of the many accounts
of trance behavior among "primitive"
peoples, the early-twentieth-century
German scholar T. K. Oesterreich offers
this, from a white visitor to
Polynesia.
- As soon as the god was supposed to
have entered the priest, the latter
became violently agitated, and worked
himself up to the highest pitch of
apparent frenzy, the muscles of the
limbs seemed convulsed, the body
swelled, the countenance became
terrific, the features distorted, the
eyes wild and strained. In this state
he often rolled on the earth, foaming
at the mouth.
Promiscuous sex was at least
comprehensible to the European mind; even
human sacrifice and cannibalism have
echoes in Christian rite. 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 Europeans, it represented the
very heart of darkness -- a place beyond
the human self.
Or, what was worse -- a place
within the human self. In Heart
of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's narrator
observes an African ritual and reflects
that
- it was unearthly, and the men were
-- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you
know, that was the worst of it -- this
suspicion of their not being inhuman.
It would come slowly to one. They
howled and leaped, and spun, and made
horrid faces; but what thrilled you was
just the thought of their humanity --
like yours -- the thought of your
remote kinship with this wild and
passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was
ugly enough; but if you were man enough
you would admit to yourself that there
was in you just the faintest trace of a
response to the terrible frankness of
that noise, a dim suspicion of their
being a meaning in it which you -- so
remote from the night of first ages --
could comprehend. And why not? The mind
of man is capable of anything.
To Europeans, there was an obvious
explanation for the ecstatic practices of
native peoples around the world. Since
these strange behaviors could be found in
"primitive" cultures almost everywhere,
and since they were never indulged in by
the "civilized," it followed that they
must result from some fundamental defect
of the "savage mind." It was less stable
than the civilized mind, more childlike,
"plastic," and vulnerable to irrational
influence or "autosuggestion." In some
instances, the savage mind was described
as "out of control" and lacking the
discipline and restraint that Europeans of
the seventeenth century and beyond came to
see as their own defining characteristics.
In other accounts, the savage was perhaps
too much under control -- of his or
her "witch doctor," that is -- or as a
victim of "mob psychology." The American
political scientist Frederick Morgan
Davenport even proposed an anatomical
explanation for the bizarre behavior of
primitives: They had only a "single spinal
ganglion" to process incoming sensory
signals and convert them into muscular
responses, while the civilized mind had,
of course, an entire brain with which to
assess the incoming data and weigh the
body's responses. Hence the susceptibility
of the savage to the compelling music and
visual imagery of his or her culture's
religious rituals -- which was
regrettable, since "the last thing the
superstitious and impulsive negro race
needs is a stirring of the emotions."
But if they thought about it, many
Europeans must have realized that the
group ecstasy so common among "natives"
had certain parallels within Europe
itself. For example, Catholic missionaries
setting out from France after the 1730s
would have heard about the heretical
Parisian "convulsionary" cult, whose
customary style of worship featured scenes
as wild as anything that could be found
among the "savages."
Copyright
© 2006 Barbara Ehrenreich. Reprinted
here by permission.
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
Nation, she has been a columnist at
The New York Times and Time
magazine. For more information, please
visit www.barbaraehrenreich.com.
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