Dancing in the Streets (15 page)
Read Dancing in the Streets Online
Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich
So if we are looking for a common source of depression, on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities, on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanization and the rise of a competitive, marketbased economy favored a more anxious and isolated sort of personâpotentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalizing depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. All this comes together in a man like John Bunyan, a victim of severe depressionâor so we would say in secular languageâand a fierce opponent, in his years as a preacher, of traditional festivities, not to mention pleasure in any form. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change,” both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernization. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?
Certainly, in some instances, the destruction of carnival left a residue of sadness and regret. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet bemoaned a childhood devoid of festivals: “My childhood never blossomed in the open air, in the warm atmosphere of an amiable crowd, where the emotion of each individual is increased a hundredfold by the emotion felt by all.”
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The writer Jean Rhys recalled her childhood envy, in around 1900, of the lower-class celebrants she was forbidden to join.
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The writer Jean Rhys recalled her childhood envy, in around 1900, of the lower-class celebrants she was forbidden to join.
The three days before Lent were carnival in Roseau. We couldn't dress up or join in but we could watch from the open window and not through the jalousies. There were gaily masked crowds with a band. Listening, I would give up anything, anything to be able to dance like that, the life surged up to us sitting well-behaved, looking on.
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There is no evidence, though, of an innate human need for communal pleasure, which, if thwarted, leads to depression or other mental diseases. Obviously, millions of people forgo such pleasures without developing clinically recognized disorders, and it would trivialize the torments of a man like a Bunyan, for example, to ascribe them to his abandonment of dancing and games. But I am not the first to suggest that the suppression of festivities could have played a role in the etiology of the nervous disorders that so plagued European culture from the early modern era on. Speaking of hysteria, which had been viewed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the female equivalent of melancholy, the historians Stallybrass and White note that “carnival debris spills out of the mouths of those terrified Viennese women in Freud's âStudies on Hysteria.' âDon't you hear the horses stamping in the circus?' Frau Emmy von N. implores Freud at a moment of particularly abject horror.”
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Freud was so determined to find a purely sexual source for mental illness that he was not prepared to pick up on such clues. “In one way or another,” Stallybrass and White remark, “Freud's patients can be seen as enacting desperate ritual fragments from a festive tradition,
the self-exclusion from which
had been one of the identifying features of their social class.”
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Freud was so determined to find a purely sexual source for mental illness that he was not prepared to pick up on such clues. “In one way or another,” Stallybrass and White remark, “Freud's patients can be seen as enacting desperate ritual fragments from a festive tradition,
the self-exclusion from which
had been one of the identifying features of their social class.”
57
If the destruction of festivities did not actually cause depression, it may still be that, in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective
cure
for it. Robert Burton suggested many cures for melancholyâstudy and exercise, for exampleâbut he returned again and again to the same prescription: “Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company ⦠a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsover else may procure mirth.”
58
He acknowledged the ongoing attack on “Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays” by “some severe Catos,” referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: “I ⦠was ever of that mind, those May-games, Wakes, and
Whitsun-Ales, &c., if they be not at unseasonable hours, may justly be permitted. Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bag-pipes, &c ⦠, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best.”
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In his ideal world, “none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings ⦠like that Sacred Festival amongst the Persians, those Saturnalia in Rome.”
60
His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the sixteenth century. While the disruptively “mad” were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be “refreshed & comforted” and “gladded with instruments of musick.”
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cure
for it. Robert Burton suggested many cures for melancholyâstudy and exercise, for exampleâbut he returned again and again to the same prescription: “Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company ⦠a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsover else may procure mirth.”
58
He acknowledged the ongoing attack on “Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays” by “some severe Catos,” referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: “I ⦠was ever of that mind, those May-games, Wakes, and
Whitsun-Ales, &c., if they be not at unseasonable hours, may justly be permitted. Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bag-pipes, &c ⦠, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best.”
59
In his ideal world, “none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings ⦠like that Sacred Festival amongst the Persians, those Saturnalia in Rome.”
60
His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the sixteenth century. While the disruptively “mad” were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be “refreshed & comforted” and “gladded with instruments of musick.”
61
A little over a century after Burton wrote
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, another English writer, Richard Browne, echoed his prescription, backing it up with a scientific (for the time) view of the workings of the human “machine.” Singing and dancing could cure melancholy, he proposed, by stirring up the “secretions.” Thanks, he said, to “the prevailing Charms of Musick, etc. that attend it, (without which Dancing would be insipid) the Mind is fill'd with gay enlivening Ideas, the Spirits flow with Vigour and Activity through the whole Machine.”
62
But if such traditional pleasures were under attack in Burton's time, they seemed to be on their way to extinction in Browne's: “Thus we may see what a vast Influence Singing has over the Mind of Man, and with Pleasure reflect on its joyful Consequences, and at the same time be amaz'd that it should be a Diversion or Exercise so little practis'd, since the Advantages that may be reap'd from it are so very numerous.”
63
Reflecting a more puritanical era, Browne recommended no “Saturnalia”âonly regular doses of dancing “in a due and regular time,” preferably “an Hour or more at a convenient time after every Meal.”
64
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, another English writer, Richard Browne, echoed his prescription, backing it up with a scientific (for the time) view of the workings of the human “machine.” Singing and dancing could cure melancholy, he proposed, by stirring up the “secretions.” Thanks, he said, to “the prevailing Charms of Musick, etc. that attend it, (without which Dancing would be insipid) the Mind is fill'd with gay enlivening Ideas, the Spirits flow with Vigour and Activity through the whole Machine.”
62
But if such traditional pleasures were under attack in Burton's time, they seemed to be on their way to extinction in Browne's: “Thus we may see what a vast Influence Singing has over the Mind of Man, and with Pleasure reflect on its joyful Consequences, and at the same time be amaz'd that it should be a Diversion or Exercise so little practis'd, since the Advantages that may be reap'd from it are so very numerous.”
63
Reflecting a more puritanical era, Browne recommended no “Saturnalia”âonly regular doses of dancing “in a due and regular time,” preferably “an Hour or more at a convenient time after every Meal.”
64
And a century later, even Adam Smith, the great prophet of capitalism, was advocating festivities and art as a means of relieving melancholy.
The state, by encouraging, that is by giving liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing ⦠would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm.
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Burton, Browne, and Smith were not the only ones to propose festivity as a cure for melancholy, and there is reason to believe thatâwhether through guesswork, nostalgia, or personal experienceâthey were on to something important. I know of no attempts in our own time to use festive behavior as treatment for depression, if such an experiment is even thinkable in a modern clinical setting. There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasuresâranging from simple festivities to ecstatic ritualsâhave served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression. Almost two thousand years ago, the Greek musicologist Aristides Quintilianus observed, “This is the purpose of Bacchic [Dionysian] initiation, that the depressive anxiety [
ptoiesis
] of less educated people, produced by their state of life, or some misfortune, be cleared away through the melodies and dances of the ritual in a joyful and playful way.”
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Similarly, a fifteenth-century Italian writerâMarsilio Ficinoâwho was himself a depressive, recommended exercise, alterations of diet, and music.
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ptoiesis
] of less educated people, produced by their state of life, or some misfortune, be cleared away through the melodies and dances of the ritual in a joyful and playful way.”
66
Similarly, a fifteenth-century Italian writerâMarsilio Ficinoâwho was himself a depressive, recommended exercise, alterations of diet, and music.
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The ecstatic rituals of non-Western peoples often have healing, as well as religious, functions (if the two kinds of functions can even be reliably distinguished), and one of the conditions they appear to heal seems to be what we know as depression. To give a few examples drawn from very different sorts of cultures: The !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert use their ecstatic nocturnal dances to treat “the full range of what in the West would be called physical, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual illnesses,” according to an ethnographer who actually participated in these rituals.
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Far to the north of the !Kung, in Islamic Morocco, rituals
involving music, dance, and trance are used to cure “paralysis, mutism, sudden blindness, severe depressions, nervous palpitations, paraesthesias, and possession.”
69
In Christian Uganda in the 1990s, danced rituals were used to help rehabilitate severely withdrawn children traumatized by their experience as captives of the murderous guerrilla movement known as the Lord's Resistance Army.
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68
Far to the north of the !Kung, in Islamic Morocco, rituals
involving music, dance, and trance are used to cure “paralysis, mutism, sudden blindness, severe depressions, nervous palpitations, paraesthesias, and possession.”
69
In Christian Uganda in the 1990s, danced rituals were used to help rehabilitate severely withdrawn children traumatized by their experience as captives of the murderous guerrilla movement known as the Lord's Resistance Army.
70
Italian folk tradition provides another example of the use of public festivity as a cure for depression. In chapter 4, we saw that the tarantula was blamed for dancing manias in Italy. In some accounts, the supposed effect of the spider bite was actually a melancholic syndrome, marked by lassitude to the point of stupefaction, for which the only remedy, according to the nineteenth-century historian J. F. C. Hecker, was dancing, preferably outdoors and for days on end. At the sound of the appropriate musical instruments, he reports, the afflicted “awoke as it were by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance.” These exertions cured themâat least for a while, because a year later whole villages full of sufferers “again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, they dispelled the melancholy.”
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As mentioned earlier, the therapeutic celebrations were eventually institutionalized as regular, seasonal festivities featuring the kind of tune known generically as the tarantella.
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As mentioned earlier, the therapeutic celebrations were eventually institutionalized as regular, seasonal festivities featuring the kind of tune known generically as the tarantella.
Hecker reports a similar syndrome and cure in nineteenth-century Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia. An individual, usually a woman, would fall into a kind of wasting illness, until her relatives agreed to “hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient's house,” where they dance and generally party for days, invariably effecting a cure.
72
Similarly, in twentieth-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we would call depressionâoften precipitated by her husband's stated intention to take a second
wifeâwould call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a
sar
spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.
73
In his description of this phenomenon, I. M. Lewis emphasizes the sufferer's potential material gains, since the shamans often recommend, as part of the cure, that the husband shower the afflicted wife with expensive gifts. But this seems to me an overly instrumental view of the situation. To believers, it is the danced ritual that exorcises the
sar
spirit, and their view deserves some respect.
72
Similarly, in twentieth-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we would call depressionâoften precipitated by her husband's stated intention to take a second
wifeâwould call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a
sar
spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.
73
In his description of this phenomenon, I. M. Lewis emphasizes the sufferer's potential material gains, since the shamans often recommend, as part of the cure, that the husband shower the afflicted wife with expensive gifts. But this seems to me an overly instrumental view of the situation. To believers, it is the danced ritual that exorcises the
sar
spirit, and their view deserves some respect.
We cannot be absolutely sure in any of these casesâfrom seventeenth-century England to twentieth-century Somaliaâthat festivities and danced rituals actually cured the disease we know as depression. But there are reasons to think that they might have. First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer's sense of isolation and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of
self-loss,
that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the nineteenth century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the “self,” he alone dared speak of the “horror of individual existence,”
74
and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading the classicsârituals in which, he imagined, “each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with himâas though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness ⦠He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams.”
75
self-loss,
that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the nineteenth century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the “self,” he alone dared speak of the “horror of individual existence,”
74
and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading the classicsârituals in which, he imagined, “each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with himâas though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness ⦠He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams.”
75
The immense tragedy for Europeans, I have argued, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a
traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European “progress,” they had done something perhaps far more damaging: They had completed the demonization of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of helpâthe mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.
traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European “progress,” they had done something perhaps far more damaging: They had completed the demonization of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of helpâthe mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.
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