Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Participants know under what circumstances trance states should appropriately occur, and achieve them only through practice and training. As a scholar of Caribbean literature writes, again of the Vodou rites: “This experience of election [possession trance], its shock of communion, is not evidence of psychic disruption, or proof of pathology, but rather a result of the most intense discipline and study. Not everyone can be possessed, for not everyone can know how to respond to the demands and expectations of her god.”56 So the ecstatic rites of these diaspora religions were not mad orgies, as whites often perceived them, but deliberately nurtured techniques of ecstasy, derived from ancient traditions.

  For the most part, it was West African religions that inspired the rites of blacks in the Americas.57 In the Caribbean, the ecstatic tradition preserved in diaspora religions is almost entirely African, since African slaves were imported only as the indigenous Caribs and Arawaks rendered themselves unfit for labor by dying off from European diseases and mistreatment. Brazilian Candomblé, however, also draws on certain indigenous Brazilian Indian ecstatic rites observed by Europeans when they first started arriving in the sixteenth century. For example, an early French traveler found Brazilian Indian women (of what locality or tribe I do not know) gathering to dance and sing in a circle, after which they would begin to foam at the mouth and “suddenly become possessed with the devil.”58 But the African connection remains strong in Brazil, where particular candomblés (meaning religious subcommunities) are sometimes distinguished by their Yoruban or Dahomean roots and possession is believed necessary to physically summon the gods from their homes in Africa.59 If the slave could not escape back to Africa, her religion could bring Africa to her—or, at the very least, the memory of freedom. As one nineteenth-century observer put it, “In dancing and singing, they forget their ills and servitude, and only remember their native country and the time that they were free.”60

  Like carnival, diaspora religions provided a springboard for rebellions throughout the nineteenth century. Some of the reasons for this are obvious even in the most rationalist European terms: Religious rituals offered an excuse for slaves to congregate; religious institutions fostered organization among slaves belonging to different owners; religious training nurtured leadership, often among women as well as men. So we find the candomblés serving as “centers for insurrection” in early-nineteenth-century Brazil61 and Santeria gatherings in Cuba linked to slave revolts on that island. In Trinidad, where Obeah prevailed, some revolts were led by religious leaders, or obeah men.62 Haiti provides the most spectacular—and successful—case of insurrection inspired in part by diaspora religion.63 The nocturnal danced rituals of Vodou served to rally slaves to the cause and were, until the achievement of independence in 1803, a constant target of French repression. Samba Boukman, one of the revolution’s first leaders, was himself a houngan (Vodou priest) guided by a loa (spirit) of African derivation. As the case of Haiti demonstrates, the memory of freedom—kept alive in ecstatic dances and visions—could also be its source.

  Ecstatic Revolution

  But the response of subjugated peoples to colonialism was not only conservative, in the sense of keeping old traditions alive. As anthropologists have often noted, imperialism seemed, perversely, to encourage the emergence of new and often defiant ecstatic religious cults. Perhaps we should count diaspora religions like Vodou among the “new,” since these involved creative amalgams of African and European religions, but there were many more such inventions—often short-lived and usually at least implicitly opposed to white rule. Imagine the distress of the missionary who had, with the help of colonial authorities, stamped out indigenous religious practices, demolished local shrines, pulled the children into his mission schools—only to find the “natives” forsaking Christianity for some fresh form of “deviltry.” The explanation often given by anthropologists is that collective ecstasy serves as a form of escapism: Sorely stressed by colonialism, the colonized people sought, through ecstatic forms of worship, a fleeting alternative to the horrors of their actual situation.

  Whatever the explanation, we find ecstatic and millenarian cults springing up from the era of first contact almost into the present time. In Africa, some of these took institutional form in the so-called Independent Churches, which, like the diaspora religions of the Americas, drew on Christianity as well as indigenous religions. Frequently led by women, these were “often contrasted to the mission-founded Churches by their wearing of flowing white garments and headgear, their use of drums and responsive chanting, and their emphasis on spiritual healing.”64

  Ecstatic responses to white conquest were a global phenomenon, arising in Indonesia, Melanesia, and North America as well as Africa. In North America, the Menomini Indians of upper Wisconsin launched their “Dream Dance” cult in 1879, in which the central rite was a dance revolving around a large drum embodying the Great Spirit: “The rhythmic beating, gradually speeding up to a climactic pitch, produces a state of excitement and frenzy strongly imbued with the dancers’ feeling of oneness.”65 Better known is the Ghost Dance, which arose in the late 1860s among the Paiute and spread from them to the Cheyenne, Shoshone, Sioux, and others. Here, too, the central ritual was a dance leading to trance states.

  The Ghost dancers, women as well as men, paint their bodies to indicate the revelations they have received, and arrange themselves in concentric circles, the arms of each dancer resting on the shoulders of both neighbors, so that the vibrant rhythm of the dance sways the worshippers as if they were a single body. The mood quickly created by the dance is conducive to collective exaltation and trance, the dance being usually performed at night.66

  For a more explicitly revolutionary case, consider the Maori Hau-hau cult that arose under British rule in 1864, a time when many of the Maori had converted to Christianity. The British settlers, irritated by the continuing Maori presence on land that could be more profitably used for farming, had begun to behave in a decidedly un-Christian fashion—driving the Maori from their villages so that thousands died of exposure and starvation. The Maori responded by taking up arms against the whites and deconverting from Christianity en masse. In its stead, they embraced the new Hau-hau cult, which combined traditional religious themes with bits of missionary learning, or at least songs sung in “an extraordinary jumble of Hebrew, English, German, Greek and Italian.” Here again, the central ritual was a danced one, performed, the Italian ethnographer Vittorio Lanternari reports, “for the purpose of producing a state of ecstasy in the participants.”67 Candidates for initiation into the cult assembled around a sacred pole, where,

  because of the strain, combined with the heat of the day, the shouting of the worshippers, and the furious pace of the dancers going round and round, the candidates for initiation were hypnotized; their bodies were then seized by others and tossed repeatedly into the air until they became unconscious. As soon as they recovered, they were considered initiated into the cult, and were pushed summarily into the march [against the British].68

  Anthropologists and other scholars have often tended, in recent decades, to view such rites with impatience, if not disgust. Dancing in circles does not, after all, as was claimed in some cases, make men immune to bullets or cause colonizers to depart in their ships. From a modern European vantage point, this is “irrational” behavior, akin to mental illness.69 Thus the anthropologist Lucy Mair saw similarities between the visions of millenarian (and often ecstatic) cults and the “fantasies” and “hysterical phenomena” common to mental patients.70 Even the deeply sympathetic Lanternari described the ecstatic rites of colonized people as “collective psychoses” and a “means of evasion.”71 More recently, the sociologist Bryan Wilson notes condescendingly:

  Cargo cults, and other movements among simpler peoples, are frequently attended by manifestations of what observers might call “hysteria” or “frenzy.” Undoubtedly, these responses can be induced in some circumstances, but there is no reason to suppose that they are not usual
ly spontaneous … The psychic benefit from such exercises, we may note parenthetically, is, sociologically speaking, the only sort of salvation that is really to be attained.72

  But it is this smug Western vantage point, rather than the rituals of “simpler peoples,” that cries out for psychological interpretation. The danced rituals of rebellious colonized peoples would probably not, after all, have seemed so strange to a medieval European carnival rebel or, for that matter, to one of the sixteenth-century German Anabaptists who danced triumphantly through the streets of Munster until more orthodox Protestants subdued them. What had changed between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries was the Western idea of revolution. Medieval European peasants, like nineteenth-century colonized peoples throughout the world, seem to have imagined revolution as a fairly sudden transformation, coming up from below and leading swiftly to abolition of the hated hierarchy, to a “world turned upside down.” But European revolutionaries of the post-Reformation era faced absolutist monarchs who possessed vast armies and police apparatuses. In this situation, revolution appeared to be a painstaking project, requiring many months or years, and similar to war in its demand for discipline and planning.

  The historian Michael Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for the kind of ascetic, single-minded, self-denying personality that Calvinism sought to inculcate, and certainly some of the successful revolutionaries of the West would seem to fill the bill. As we have seen, the English revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist himself, railed perpetually against the festive inclinations of his troops. The Jacobin leader Robespierre despised disorderly gatherings, including “any group in which there is a tumult”—a hard thing to avoid during the French Revolution, one might think.73 His fellow revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just described the ideal “revolutionary man” in terms that would have been acceptable to any Puritan: “inflexible, but sensible; he is frugal; he is simple … honorable, he is sober, but not mawkish.”74 Lenin inveighed against “slovenliness … carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality” as well as “dissoluteness in sexual life,”75 seeing himself as a “manager” and “controller” as well as a leader.76 For men like Robespierre and Lenin, the central revolutionary rite was the meeting—experienced in a sitting position, requiring no form of participation other than an occasional speech, and conducted according to strict rules of procedure. Dancing, singing, trances—these could only be distractions from the weighty business at hand.

  We might respond in many ways to this Calvinist model of revolution, which has served to reinforce Western disdain for the ecstatic rituals of oppressed and colonized peoples. We could point out that the ascetic and militaristic Western model of revolution—though successfully applied to anticolonial struggles in the mid-twentieth century—carries a considerable risk of dictatorship as the outcome. Fear of disorderly or “irrational” behavior readily masks a fear of the people, and a leader who sees himself as a “controller” is well on his way to becoming a tyrant. Alternatively, we might make a utilitarian argument for the importance of ecstatic ritual within otherwise “Western” revolutions. What is achieved through such rituals, in a purely functional sense, is an intense feeling of solidarity among the participants—at least all accounts suggest as much—and solidarity is the basis of effective political action from below. Even the “fantasies” entertained by participants, or apprehended in trance, surely have an empowering effect. The field hand who achieves unity with a god through a Vodou possession trance, and the market woman who leads a second life as a priestess—these are potentially formidable adversaries.

  Furthermore, if ecstatic rites were only a frivolous distraction from “real” politics in the Western sense, how are we to explain the zeal with which white authorities sought to repress them? The only explanation we would be left with is that the white authorities were themselves being “irrational” and that white hysteria was a persistent feature of the colonial effort—for wherever they sprang up, the syncretic religions and mystically motivated movements of native peoples were met with harsh repression. In Africa, colonial authorities crushed any religious movement they saw as heterodox, overly enthusiastic, or simply too “African.” The first leader of an “independent” African-Christian movement—a Congolese woman who took the name of Donna Beatrice—was burned to death by the Belgians in 1706.77 As recently as the 1920s, the Belgians sentenced another independent African prophet, Simon Kimbangu, to life imprisonment, and the British even harassed the African version of the Watchtower movement, which featured long nights of drumming, hymn singing, and speaking in tongues.78 In the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century, the British governor of Trinidad launched “a kind of inquisition” against Obeah, in which suspected adherents of that religion were burned, hanged, or subjected to amputations of their ears or noses.79 Napoleon Bonaparte instigated an effort to eradicate Vodou in Haiti;80 Portuguese colonial authorities harassed and suppressed the candomblés.81

  In some cases, pure hysteria—or at least overreaction—does seem to have motivated the repression of native rituals. The Ghost Dance religion, for example, presented no immediate threat to whites; in fact, its moral code included the precepts: “Do no harm to anyone” and “You must not fight!”82 But apparently unaware of the cult’s pacifism, U.S. authorities suppressed the cult vigorously and ended up blaming it for the Sioux uprising of 1890, which culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee. After all, Ghost Dancers were subversive enough to imagine the imminent return of all the Indian dead, who would have amounted, by the end of the nineteenth century, to an impressive army.

  But can the European repression of ecstatic rites everywhere be ascribed to irrational overreaction, or can we credit the whites with some ability to discern a real threat? In the Caribbean, the colonial authorities’ long-standing hostility to the African-style drum does seem to have been based on a realistic assessment of that instrument’s subversive uses. British authorities in Trinidad banned drums in 1884, with a newspaper expressing the usual dismay over “the state of civilization of people whose members can be set in movement by the repetition of such barbarous sound.”83 But we can infer a more rational and military motive, since the authorities simultaneously banned dancing, processions, and “any assemblage or collection of persons armed with sticks or other weapons of offence and numbering ten or more.”84 In Cuba, U.S. occupying forces banned “drums of African origin” in 1902, later expanding the prohibition to include “all Afrocuban ceremonial dances” as “symbols of barbarity and disturbing to the social order.”85 Military considerations played a role in the prohibition of drums in mid-eighteenth-century South Carolina, in part because slaves were using them as a means of long-distance communication.

  Finally, even supposing that the danced rituals and religions with which people worldwide responded to enslavement and colonization were entirely frivolous, nonthreatening, and politically pointless, who are we—as people operating within the Western tradition of rationality and scholarship—to judge them? If the oppressed gained nothing more from their ecstatic rituals and cults than a “psychic benefit,” to use Wilson’s phrase, we must still concede that—to people who had lost their traditions, their land, and often their freedom—a psychic benefit is no small thing. As the anthropologist I. M. Lewis wrote: “What we find over and over again in a wide range of different cultures and places is the special endowment of mystical power given to the weak. If they do not quite inherit the earth, at least they are provided with means which enable them to offset their otherwise crushing jural disabilities.”86

  Consider a fairly recent ecstatic religion, the Full Witness Apostolic Church of Zion, started by a Zulu mine worker under South African apartheid in 1956. The church’s central ritual is a circular leaping dance derived from a precolonial initiation ritual: “The whirling circle builds up a unitary momentum, like a dynamo generating the spiritual energy … The ever closer coordination of physical gestures under the driving beat and the physiological effects
of the circling motion seem to dissolve the margins between individual participants, who act and respond as one body.”87 These dancers might have been better advised, by a left-leaning anthropologist, for example, to join the African National Congress, and possibly some of them did. But if all they found in their religious ritual was a moment of transcendent joy—well, let us give them credit for finding it. To extract pleasure from lives of grinding hardship and oppression is a considerable accomplishment; to achieve ecstasy is a kind of triumph.

  Such triumphs become rarer and rarer, though, as we move from the age of conquest to the present. Despite all the efforts to preserve traditional rites—and all the flare-ups of ecstatic and defiant religious movements—the overall story is necessarily one of cultural destruction and gathering gloom. Ancient rituals were suppressed; syncretic religions marginalized and driven underground; religiously inspired revolutionary cults destroyed. To return to the Tahitians with whom we began this chapter: In the late eighteenth century, they had used one of their traditional festivities to make fun of the two Spanish priests who had come to convert them, denouncing the poor Christians as thieves, fools, and (although this insult may have lost some of its potency in translation) “shellfish.”88 A few decades later, though, the Tahitians were sufficiently worn down that the dour Protestant missionaries who replaced the priests could boast of having “restrained the natural levity of the natives” and prevailed on them to abandon their danced rituals.89

  When the Russian navigator Baron Thaddeus Bellingshausen visited the island in 1820, he found that the Tahitians now wore European clothes and that both men and women had shaved their heads since, as the historian Alan Moorehead writes, “that lovely gleaming black hair which once fell to the girls’ waists was apparently regarded by the missionaries as unsanitary.” Tattooing had been discouraged; liquor officially banned; and “where there had once been unashamed free love there now existed Christian guilt.” The missionaries must have been especially proud that “no one danced any more or played Tahitian music. Even the weaving of garlands of flowers was forbidden.”90 Defeated, converted, and “reformed,” the Tahitians had little to do but drink.