Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich

“Suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of psychology.”

Barbara Ehrenreich opens Dancing in the Streets with this striking observation — a reminder that while we have countless theories about trauma, grief, and despair, joy itself has largely been left unexamined. What does it say about modern life that we treat happiness as an individual pursuit rather than something shared? Ehrenreich’s answer takes us far beyond modern psychology, tracing joy’s communal roots back to the earliest human rituals — long before therapy, hierarchy, or even writing.

Drawing on thinkers like Émile Durkheim and Victor Turner, she explores what happens when individuals lose themselves in the crowd. Durkheim called it collective effervescence, the moment when personal boundaries blur and people move as one. Turner described it as communitas — the feeling of deep equality and connection that emerges during ritual. For Ehrenreich, these experiences weren’t side effects of ancient festivals; they were essential to what it meant to be human.

She reminds us that for much of history, dance wasn’t performance but participation — a universal, embodied language of belonging. Archaeological evidence suggests that Paleolithic communities gathered to dance around fires, not only to celebrate survival but to strengthen social bonds. “To be fully human,” Ehrenreich implies, “was to dance.” The rhythm, the movement, and the shared emotion were ways of merging with the group — of “standing outside oneself” to become part of something larger.

But this collective joy, she argues, has been steadily exiled from our societies. As hierarchies emerged — with priests, kings, and generals demanding control — spontaneous expression began to look dangerous. Joy was no longer communal; it became something to regulate. The story that follows is, in Ehrenreich’s words, “a history of suppression” — of how the ecstatic, inclusive dance of humanity was tamed by order, hierarchy, and fear.

If Dancing in the Streets begins as a search for joy, it quickly becomes a story of how that joy was tamed. Ehrenreich draws an unlikely line between the ancient cult of Dionysus and the early followers of Christ — both populist, ecstatic movements that promised unity and release rather than hierarchy and control. “Dionysus,” she writes, “was not a god of order but of dissolution,” a deity whose rites blurred class and gender boundaries through dance, wine, and collective abandon.

Early Christianity, too, began as an ecstatic faith — a religion of shared meals, trances, and visions. Its appeal, Ehrenreich argues, lay in that same emotional intensity, the chance to dissolve the ego and experience something larger than the self. “Like the Dionysian cults before it,” she notes, “the early Church drew its strength from the dispossessed.” The poor, the enslaved, and the marginalised found in it a form of equality rarely seen elsewhere.

But that egalitarian impulse was short-lived. As Christianity became institutionalised, its leaders began to fear the very passions that had once animated the faith. Uncontrolled dancing, prophecy, or spirit possession — once seen as divine gifts — were now viewed as threats to authority. The ecstatic body became suspect, and joy itself required supervision.

Ehrenreich captures the irony beautifully: the Church inherited the Dionysian spirit only to suppress it. Over time, what couldn’t be eliminated was redirected. Religious dancing was pushed out of sacred space and into the streets, evolving into carnivals and feast days — “sanctioned outbreaks of chaos” that allowed a brief, controlled inversion of order before returning to obedience. Carnival became the compromise: a momentary release, permitted so long as it reaffirmed the hierarchy it mocked.

Through this lens, the familiar image of medieval festivity takes on a new meaning. The laughter, the masks, the mockery of priests — all were remnants of a more dangerous, egalitarian joy. What began as genuine ecstasy had become ritualised dissent, tolerated but never embraced. “The Church,” Ehrenreich writes, “could not eradicate joy, but it could contain it.”

Ehrenreich describes the centuries that followed as a “long war on festivity.” What began as religious unease hardened into political policy. Across Europe, both Church and State grew determined to control the rhythms of ordinary life — and nothing symbolised disorder more vividly than people dancing together in the streets.

Town councils banned public celebrations, sermons warned of moral decay, and laws punished “ungodly” gatherings. What was once the heartbeat of communal life — the feast, the carnival, the dance — became associated with sin and rebellion. As Ehrenreich notes, “Ecstatic ritual was a rival form of power.” Joy itself became subversive.

The Protestant Reformation brought this tension into sharper focus. Martin Luther, for all his religious radicalism, never turned fully against joy. He encouraged singing, dancing, and communal drinking — provided they were directed toward the glory of God. In Luther’s theology, celebration could be redemptive; it reaffirmed community and gratitude rather than threatening it. “He saw joy as an acceptable form of worship,” Ehrenreich writes, “so long as it remained tethered to faith.”

John Calvin, however, took the opposite view. In Geneva, he built a model of godly discipline where laughter, dancing, and spectacle were treated as gateways to sin. Pleasure was dangerous not because it distracted from faith, but because it implied self-abandon — the very dissolution of self that Dionysian ritual had once celebrated. For Calvin, salvation required control. His theology stripped life of its festivals, leaving only the austere rhythms of work and prayer.

The distinction, Ehrenreich suggests, marked a decisive turn in Western culture. Under Luther, joy could still coexist with devotion; under Calvin, it could not. The moral order demanded discipline. As she puts it, “Calvinism completed what the Church had begun — the subjugation of the ecstatic body.”

Max Weber famously described this as the spirit of capitalism: a faith that transformed restraint into virtue and work into salvation. In this new world, joy was not just sinful — it was inefficient. Festivals interrupted labour; laughter undermined authority. “The war on festivity,” Ehrenreich concludes, “was a war on community itself.” What had once bound people together was now seen as wasteful, even dangerous. The ecstatic crowd gave way to the disciplined individual — sober, industrious, and alone.

When the festivals faded and the drums fell silent, something else emerged in their place: melancholy. Ehrenreich draws a compelling line between the suppression of collective joy and the rise of the solitary, introspective self. The ecstatic crowd — once a source of identity and belonging — was replaced by the isolated individual, left to find meaning within rather than among others.

This shift, she argues, carried deep psychological consequences. In societies that outlawed public celebration, joy became private, even shameful. “The ecstatic body had been subdued,” she writes, “and in its absence came the lonely soul.” The modern self was not born from liberation but from loss — a retreat inward forced by cultural repression.

Ehrenreich ties this transformation to what historians have called the “rise of subjectivity.” As communal life narrowed, emotions once expressed collectively — grief, hope, elation — were internalised. The Church and later capitalism demanded self-control; introspection became virtue. Yet beneath this discipline lurked a void. Without ritual outlets, people turned to religion, art, or philosophy to fill the emotional space once occupied by dance and festival.

She doesn’t romanticise the past — medieval life was harsh and often hierarchical — but she insists that the psychological cost of suppressing communal joy was profound. The “dance manias” of the Middle Ages, when groups of people reportedly danced uncontrollably for days, were, in her view, not madness but desperate attempts to reclaim a lost mode of expression. “They were,” she writes, “an eruption of the repressed need for ecstasy.”

The emerging modern order, by contrast, prized composure. Emotional release was suspect; public joy became vulgar. The result was a new kind of alienation — not only from others, but from one’s own capacity for joy. Ehrenreich sees in this the roots of our modern epidemics of loneliness and depression. When joy was exiled from public life, suffering became the language left to us.

Even after centuries of suppression, the hunger for collective joy never vanished. Ehrenreich argues that it simply found new — and sometimes dangerous — outlets. “The ecstatic impulse,” she writes, “cannot be eradicated; it can only be displaced.” What began as religious ritual and community celebration re-emerged in the modern age as politics, spectacle, and mass entertainment.

In its darkest form, that impulse was harnessed by nationalism and fascism. Ehrenreich devotes a haunting section to the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg — choreographed gatherings that mimicked the structure of ancient ritual. The torches, chants, and uniforms created the illusion of unity, but where the Dionysian festivals had dissolved hierarchy, fascism glorified it. “The same physical joy,” she notes, “that once bound people together in equality was now turned toward submission.” Ecstasy, stripped of compassion, became a weapon.

And yet, she also finds hope in other modern arenas. Rock concerts, for example, recreate fragments of the old ecstatic experience — the shared rhythm, the release, the sense of dissolving into the crowd. Ehrenreich recalls the first mass gatherings of the 1960s as moments when people sought “a joy larger than themselves.” Sports events, too, carry that spark. The chants, colours, and coordinated movement echo the tribal dances of early human societies. “We dress alike,” she observes, “we move together, and for a few hours, we forget who we are.”

Protest movements — from civil rights marches to anti-war demonstrations — reveal the political dimension of this yearning. Dancing and singing in defiance of power, participants reclaim joy as a form of resistance. Ehrenreich points to the carnivalesque spirit of such protests: laughter and music used not to escape reality, but to imagine a different one.

She ends Dancing in the Streets not with nostalgia but with a call for renewal. If joy once held societies together, she suggests, perhaps it can do so again — not through ideology or spectacle, but through genuine communal experience. “The task,” she writes, “is to recover the collective without surrendering to the collective’s potential for cruelty.” It’s an ambivalent but deeply human vision: that the path to healing might begin not in solitude or discipline, but in dance.

Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets reads like a history of humanity’s pulse — a rhythm we’ve been following, suppressing, and rediscovering for millennia. If you trace it chronologically, a clear pattern emerges: joy has never disappeared, only changed costume.

It begins tens of thousands of years ago in Paleolithic caves, where “conga lines” of female dancers carved on stone hint at the first communal rituals — small bands moving in rhythm to affirm their survival. Those dances evolved into the ecstatic festivals of the ancient world: the rites of Dionysus, the communal feasts of early Christians, and the village carnivals that defined medieval Europe. Joy wasn’t a side note to civilisation; it was its foundation.

But hierarchy arrived, and joy became dangerous. The Roman elite learned to scorn the loss of composure that came with dance. The early Church, determined to monopolise access to the divine, pushed ecstatic worship out of sacred spaces — giving birth, ironically, to carnival itself. By the sixteenth century, both Church and state sought to control the body as much as the soul. The Reformation split the meaning of joy in two: Luther’s faith still sang, while Calvin’s forbade the dance entirely. Then capitalism joined in, rewarding restraint and punctuality over celebration. Festivals were banned, music restricted, and pleasure quietly rebranded as sin.

Yet joy has always resurfaced where control tightens. The French Revolution resurrected pageantry and mass spectacle, using parades and chants to bind citizens in a new secular communion. Two centuries later, the Nazis borrowed that same choreography of unity — torchlit processions and rhythmic chanting — transforming ecstasy into obedience. Western militaries, too, borrowed their sonic discipline: the marching bands that stir patriotic pride trace their lineage back to the war drums of Asia.

Even the seemingly benign forms of modern collective excitement — concerts, football matches, street protests — carry echoes of that ancient impulse. Every chant, every beat of a drum, every surge of bodies moving as one recalls what Ehrenreich calls “the joy of rhythmic unity.” The settings have changed, but the yearning remains the same: to step outside the self, if only for a moment, and feel part of something larger.

Across history, joy has been alternately celebrated, feared, commodified, and reclaimed. What Ehrenreich leaves us with is not despair but possibility. The challenge isn’t to invent new ways of connecting — it’s to remember the old ones.