Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets
Barbara Ehrenweich

Chap 7: an Epidemic of Melancholy
Beginning in England the 17th CCE, the European world was stricken by an epidemic of depression. It affected old and young, and written about singling out men of genius-John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas gray, John Donne, and Samuel Johnson.
In 1733, Dr George Cheyne lamented “frequency and wanton…self murders…by this distemper” and speculated that the English climate combined with sedentary life style and urbanization…scarce known to our ancestors…afflicting such numbers in any known nation.(1).
Samuel Johnson…fell prey to it in 1729 at the age of 20, after being forced to leave Oxford for lack of funds.(3).
English called it “the English malady”…all of Europe was afflicted (6). By the 18th CCE, it was as much a German as English…with the paradox that “the Enlightenment should be characterized by black gall and melancholy persons(7). In France…Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Bauddelaire. By the 19th CCE, In Russia Leo Tolstoy, in Germany Max Weber and in America William James.
WHO-Depression is now the fifth largest cause of death and disability…with ischaemic heart disease trailing in the sixth place (10). Far from being an affliction of the famous, strikes the poor more…and women more commonly than men.
Could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be related to the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnivals?
Melancholy, as it was called until the 20th CCE, was described by Hippocrates in the 5th CCE, by Chaucer in 14th CCE, late medieval churchmen knew it as acedia which was technically a sin.
The notion that melancholy was an exclusively elite disease was common enough to be a subject for satire. Physicians were eager to diagnose melancholy in their better off patients, to wrest the treatment from away from the clergy.
Melancholy did not become a fashionable pose until a full century after Burton (17th CCE) took up the subject.
The question is if melancholy is the same disease as depression. To day’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the definitions seem fuzzy, but Burrton’s account, except for the prolix language substitutes well for a modern definition of depression. William Styron’s 1900 book Darkness Visible, lists “self hatred” as a symptom (23). Styron also mentions externalization of terror.(24).
The Anxious Self.
Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972 “historians of European culture are in…agreement that in the 16th and 17th CCE, something like a mutation in human nature took place”928). The change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self…all people, in all history, have some sense of selfhood, and capacity for subjective reflection, we are talking about an intensification…of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous “I” separate from …”them”. European nobility had undergone this sort of shift in their transformation from a warrior to a courtier class…in the late 16th and 17th CCE, it affected even the artisans, peasants and laborers.
Historians infer this shift to changes occurring in early modern period among the urban bourgeoisie-mirrors, self portrait, autobiographies. Public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated form private quarters, more decorous entertainment-plays and operas…alternative to promiscuously interactive …carnival (30). The very word self, as Trilling noted, ceases to be merely reflexive…and achieves the status of …reflecting some inner core, not readily visible to others.
In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be, and any attempt to assume another status…sumptuary laws barred the wealthy commoner from dressing in colors…deemed appropriate only to nobles.(31). But in the late 16th CCE, upward mobility was beginning to be a possibility. The merchant who craved an aristocratic title…had to lean to play the part…system of etiquette was devised in royal courts…books …in how to comport himself…choose a socially advantageous wife.
Hence the fascination with the theater, with its notion of an actor different from his/her roles…fascination with plots involving deception, Shakespeare’s Portia as doctor of law, Rosalind as a boy, Juliet feigns her own death. Burton, writing a few years after Shakespeare’s death bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre.
So highly is the “inner” self honored with in our own culture that it seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress, as Trilling called it “the emergence of modern American and European man “of an untrammeled freedom to ask questions and explore, as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan has put it. (34). Which is preferable, individualism or medieval personality mired in community and ritual…can barely distinguish a “self”.
From the perspective of our own time, we have known nothing else.
But the price to be paid for the upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, as Tuan write “isolation, loneliness, loss of innocent pleasure…reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to call it (35). One circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation or as Durkhiem calls it; anomie (36). As he further says “originally society is everything, the individual nothing…but gradually things change…the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that all human” (37). The flip side…is radical isolation…depression…
The new kind of personality that arose in 16th and 17th CCE Europe was by no means as autonomous as claimed. . the individual is preoccupied with expectation of others “how am I doing?” historians speak of interiorization meaning “the capacity for introspection and self-reflection, but it looks like “humans around one and their likely judgments of oneself.
The concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of oneself. What seems to most concern… is the opinion of others. The crushing weight of other people’s opinion , imagined or real, would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure. This is not autonomy, but dependency.
The usual concomitant of depression-anxiety-is the other result of individualism. The self is an awareness of ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one’s behavior to the expectation of others. Play in this context means playing a role, rather pleasure.
The Tormented Soul:
Even two hundred years ago, most people would have interpreted feeling of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating self as soul, the judgmental gaze of others as God and melancholy as the fear of eternal damnation. Catholics offered palliatives in the form of rituals, Luther posited an approachable God.
Calvinism (Wahabism), in stead of offering relief provided a metaphorical framework for anomie: if you feel isolated, persecuted and damned, it was because you actually were. Robert Burton singled out religious melancholy, as an especially virulent form of the disease “ the main matter which terrifies…is the enormity of their offences…god’s heavy wrath…they account themselves …already damned…”(39).
Christianity requires that every soul ultimately confront god alone, Calvinist soul wanders forever in solitude. Friends may turn out to be false, Weber calls” the strikingly r
Frequent repetition…against any trust…even family deserves no lasting loyalty-John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress, Christian flees his home…(41).
One of Max Weber’s greatest insights was to see the compatibility between Calvinism and capitalism “the unprecedented inner loneliness (43) that a competitive, sink or swim economy imposed. Just as the soul struggled…the self toiled and schemed along a parallel trajectory in the material world. One had to engage in an endless project of self discipline and self denial, deferring all gratification, except perhaps for the pleasure of watching one’s assets grow. Weber “the most urgent task of Calvinism (Wahabism) was the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment (44). A late 18th CCE Scottish medical handbook “many persons of religious turn of mind behave as if they thought it a crime to be cheerful…”(45).
Carnival is the portal to hell, just as pleasure in any form-sexual, gustatory, convivial-is the devil’s snare. The medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.
Weber was raised by a Calvinist mother, to see pleasure in any form as a danger to be fended off through ceaseless discipline and work. In his mid thirties, at the time of enviable academic success, he experienced a total break down. (Imam Ghazali, whose influence on Sunni Muslim thought, is regarded as second only to Muhammad himself, also had a breakdown at the height of his academic career. He had to give up teaching for ? years. He recovered, but condemned ‘Ijtehad’-innovation in matters religious, legitimizing orthodoxy like no body else could, before or since).
Durkhiem found protestants in the 19th CCE, about twice as likely to commit suicide as Catholics (Taliban may be inclined to suicide bombing due to Puritanism).
The Lost Cure
Urbanization and the rise of a market based, competitive economy favored a more anxious and isolated kind of person, prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift.
The death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression. The 19th century French historian Jules Michelet bemoaned a childhood devoid of festivals (54).
Speaking of hysteria, the female equivalent of melancholy, the historians Stallybrass and White note that “carnival debris spills out of the mouths of these terrified Viennese women in Freud’s studies…”Don’t you hear horses stamping in the circus” (56). Stally and white, “Freud’s patents …enacting desperate ritual fragments from festive traditions, the self-exclusion from which had been one of the identifying features of their social class”. (57)
In abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for depression. Robert Burton “Let them use hunting, sports, merry company…a cup of good drink now and then…” (58).
A century later, even Adam smith was advocating festivities…as a means of relieving melancholy, “the state b6y giving liberty…divert the people by painting, music…easily dissipate …melancholy…” (65).
Almost 2000 years ago, the Greek musicologist Aristides Quintilianus “This is the purpose of Bacchic initiation…depressive anxiety…be cleared away…” (66).
The Kung people of Kalahari desert use their ecstatic nocturnal dances to treat “the full range of psychological, emotional…spiritual illnesses” (66). In Muslim morocco, rituals involving music, dance and trance are used to cure “paralysis…severe depression… and possession (69). In Christian Uganda in the 19990s, dance rituals were used to rehabilitate children traumatized by the Lord’s resistance army (70).
In Italy, tarantula was blamed for dancing manias, the treatment was more and passionate dancing.
Hecker reports a similar syndrome and cure in 19th CCE Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. Similarly in 20th CCE Somalia, a married woman would go into depression, often precipitated by her husband’s intention to take another wife, and a female Shaman would be called (78)
Rituals serve to break down suffers sense of isolation, and reconnect him with human community. They also encourage the sense of self-loss, release from the prison of the self, from the business of evaluating how one stands in the eyes of the group or in the eyes of the ever-critical God.
(Nasir, do you recall a Birmingham University study in 1960s, that 80% of the British suffered from neurosis, and 20% from frank psychosis. They had compared that with virtual absence of either disorder in Africa, and had attributed it to the work of witch doctors.
In India too, “jhaar, phoonk’ was very popular and apparently effective. I have myself seen a trance like state. My own Nana was practically bed ridden, and very short of breath. We once took him to a ‘Qul’ of his pir. At the height of ecstatic frenzy, early in the morning when the traditional procession, called 'gagar' came in and the Qawwali rose to frenetic tempo, he got up unaided, and stood for about half an hour. He ended up being laid up in bed for several days, though.
What is your opinion on assisting the treatment of uni-polar and bipolar depression (and what exactly are those things) with festivities.

Chap 8 guns Against Drums.
Europeans, not Chinese or Zulu forcibly imposed their culture and beliefs on the whole world roughly between the 16th to 19th CCE, the period in which they discarded their own festive traditions. (Muslims did that from, roughly 7th to 16th CCE). Technological advances, and in addition the emergence of more driven personality helped Europe gain supremacy.
A historian of Tahiti described Protestant missionaries as followers of a “dour and cheerless creed”. (1)
Sometimes European destruction of ‘native’ rites was incidental to their physical destruction. One missionary outpost was abandoned “…Aboriginals becoming extinct in these districts” (3). On the whole, though, there was nothing incidental about the European campaign against the communal rituals of colonial people. It was deliberate(6).
The goal was to pacify indigenous people in a military sense, imposition of civilization was merely a plausible excuse.
The anthropologist Jon P. Kirby “missionaries in West Africa were too busy suppressing …ritual and beliefs t find out what they meant” (9).
Kirby “Most missionaries considered colonial administrations as allies in the essential task of destroying existing structures (13-part of socialization, to facilitate acceptance by natives of Europeans as superior, so would submit and work for the latter).
As the lower classes in Europe did to their elite, Colonial people might use their rituals to mock Europeans and to whip up armed resistance.
Europeans tended to equate the ‘savages’ of the new world with their own lower classes. One of the goals of the crackdown on festivities, was to instill work ethic to lower classes, and use time hitherto wasted in festivities to productive labor. “One of the chief difficulties experienced by employers in Africa is the…undisciplined character of the native…Christian teaching…can do much to remove this trouble” (23).
But the parallel between repression of their own lower class, and that of their colonial subjects went only so far. They regarded the former as fellow Christians, the latter were “a species of tail-less monkeys” or if human in any sense “nearest of all to …Orang-Outang”, this per the English in Australia. Georges Cuvier, 19th CCE Swiss comparative anatomist “Negro race…manifestly approaches to the monkey class…”(25). This attitude helped justify a casual attitude… to genocide…” (26).
In Europe, the overriding political-economic consideration was the rise of absolutism which required soldiers, and later industrial capitalism which required laborers, so the lower classes could not be destroyed, but to be disciplined.
Mark Cocker puts the death toll from four centuries of European imperialism at 50 million, a much larger percentage of the world’s population, than it would be the 20 or so million toll of the two WWs in the 20th CCE.
But conversion was only to facilitate submission of the natives. When absolute power was already in hand, many North American slave owners would flog them for attending church services or even for praying in private (30). In the English initially opposed the entry of Christian missionaries, fearing that any challenge to Hinduism would …threaten imperial profits.
The degree of concordance between the conquerors and missionaries is striking, between those who would exploit labor and resources, and those who would destroy their culture.(34). “Imperialism is a matter of religion…we need Christian imperialism…commercialism…imperial Christianity and an economic religion” (35).
Slave owners shuddered at the collective strength…rituals invoked…dance was particularly distasteful, because of “vitality it represented” (36). John Mackenzie sent to southern Africa wrote of “weakening the communistic relations…and letting in the.. stimulating breath of individualist competition’ (37).

Black Carnival
The victims of European expansionism, especially the African Diaspora to the Americas which provides striking cases of such cultural resistance, did not relinquish their traditions as swiftly and as completely as Europeans desired, and created blues, rock and roll. Hip-hop and jazz.
Between the 17th and 19th CCE, at least ten million Africans were forcibly transported, virtually naked, stripped of all cultural artifacts and kinship connections, thrown together with disparate national groupings: Yoruba, Dahomeans. Ibo and others.. they were worked ceaselessly, and often forbidden to engage in any ‘heathen’ practices, including dancing. But they, somehow, managed to preserve some of their traditional forms of communal celebrations, and used them as springboards for rebellion against white rule.
Christianity, itself, provided a disguise and a vehicle for ecstatic ritual. Both the secularized tradition of carnival and Africanized version of Christianity: Voodoo, Santeria, Candomble , became sites of black defiance and white repression.
In protestant settings like in Jamaica, and the Southern USA, salves used Christmas as an opening to establish their own festivity: Jonkonnu, as early as 1688 in Jamaica, with costuming and dancing “Rattles ty’d to their wrists and legs”(38).
A little over a century late, whites agreed to do their chores during the celebration. During the period, like the Roman slaves with their masters at the feast of saturnalia, “the distance between masters and slaves appears to be annihilated” (39).
In Catholic settings slaves quickly exploited the carnival period extending from Christmas nearly to Ash Wednesday. In Trinidad, it was an occasion for so much uninhibited revelry by the French settlers, that from 1800 on, martial law was imposed to contain white mischief (40). People of color, free or slave, were barred from participation (41).
For slaves who broke the law by wearing a mask, the punishment was 100 stripes, and if done at night, twice as many. Trinadian blacks, exhibited their courage by moving in on the white institution, finally achieving full participation on the eve of emancipation, in 1934. A similar take over occurred in Brazil in the 1880s using drums and tambourines. Whites reacted as they did in Europe in response to lower class celebrations, by retreating indoors to their own masked balls and dinner parties.
Unfortunately, we have only a few disapproving accounts by whites. The features whites most objected to-inversion and mocking attacks on authority, gender inversion, would have been familiar to a celebrant of a French medieval carnival.
The historian Elizabeth Fenn reports that 35% of all rebellions in the British Caribbean were planned for the Christmas period.(49). In Cuba 1812 and 1835 uprisings were linked with carnivals. (51).

The Preservation of Ecstasy:
African slaves, intended to occupy the same spiritual and physical space, cobbled together bits of Christianity, and remembered fragments of their original religion to create new ones, referred to earlier.
The ‘syncretic’ religions used Catholic saints as a cover for the pantheon of African-derived deities. The collective practice of these religion was and remains Dionysian, ecstatic, danced religions in which music and muscular synchrony induce a state of trance, interpreted as possession by, or transcendent unity with a god. To most Europeans, it looked like madness.(54).
Yet anthropologists agree that the rites were quite disciplined. (55).

Ecstatic Revolution:
Imperialism seemed, perversely, to encourage new and defiant ecstatic religious cults. Explanation given by anthropologists is that ecstasy is a form of escapism. Ecstatic response to white conquest was a global phenomenon, from Indonesia to Africa, and Americas, and countries in between.(66).
Maori Hau-hua cult arose under British rule in 1864, when many Maoris had converted to Christianity, but the British started driving the Maoris away from their land. Thousands died, and the Maori took up arms.(68).
The historian Michael Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for single-minded, self-denying persons like Oliver Cromwell or Robespierre, or Lenin. But the Western model of revolution carries a considerable risk of dictatorship.
If the ecstatic rites were frivolous, why did the authorities repress them so zealously (religion used extensively in 1857). The Belgians burned a Congolese woman, who took the name of Donna Beatrice in 1706. She was the first leader of the ‘independent’ African Christian movement. (77). Similar repression in British Caribbean’s and Napoleon in Haiti. And the Portuguese. (78, 79,80,81).
The
British banned drums in Trinidad in 1884. (83), but a more rational and military motive can be inferred, as they banned dancing, processions and “Any assembly….”as well (84). Americans did it in Cuba in 1902 (58).
But if it gave only “psychic benefit (to borrow Wilson’s phrase)to a people, who had lost their traditions, their land and freedom. Psychic benefit was no small thing.
Despite all the efforts to preserve traditional rites, the overall story is of cultural destruction. When the Russian navigator Thaddeus Bellingdhausen visited Tahit in 1820, he found the islanders wearing European clothes, women had shaved their heads as the lovely hair falling to their waists was deemed unsanitary by missionaries, liquor and tattoing had been banned “where thwere had been unashamed free love, there now existed Christian guilt.” Defeated, converted and “reformed”, the Tahitians had little to do, but drink.

Chap 9-Fascist Spectacles:
The mass fascist rallies were designed by a select group of people for the edification of many. Roman Empire relied on circuses, Roman Catholic church on parading statues of saints through streets.