Once upon a time there was public ecstasy; then capitalism and Calvinism conspired to rout it out. […] Ecstasy and Enlightenment failed to hit it off. In the eyes of an emergent middle-class order, popular festivity was that most scandalous and opaque of all activities, that which is done purely for its own sake. All over Europe, revelry was stamped on. […]
Like most Fall fables, this one cuts a few conceptual corners; but it is full of fascinating vignettes all the same. We learn, for instance, of the dance mania that gripped parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. In Utrecht 200 people danced on a bridge and refused until it collapsed, drowning all the dancers.
That was Terry Eagleton on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan, 2006). There is a lot more to the review, even, and to the book, I am sure, which is about the ambiguity of the carnavalesque. As I have said before, although not on this blog, the idealization of Carnival is naïve.
The lack of communal affirmation, on the other hand, is similarly disquieting. Ehrenreich has an excellent riposte to the current idealization of the family, which is, as she notes, regressive: “Humans had the wit and generosity to reach out to unrelated others; hominids huddled with their kin.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 