Ehrenreich leads the reader through ecstatic rituals' persistent effervescence despite several millennia's authoritarian campaigns against collective joy.

As a white American, I have always felt an important part of myself locked down, and tied up. Ehrenreich identifies it as a practice of social movement that's been stripped from me over long generations of Orwellian memory-holes.

To be less pretensious, this book is a 5,000 year history answering the question "why white people can't dance." Of course we can, but insofar as we can't, here's why. ( )

I was very disappointed in this book. Reading the title I expected description of different forms of collective joy in cultures all over the world. I grew more and more irritated when she stayed with Western culture, and when she mentioned cultures on other continents she quoted very archaic and usually negative sources. it felt almost racist to me.
The writing style was boring and the content repetitive. I have read several other books by Barbara Ehrenreich, but this one in the worst. ( )

Ehrenreich begins with the observation that a lot of cultures worldwide seem to have collective ecstatic rituals that usually involve dance, where individuals enter a state of ecstasy that makes them lose their sense of individuality and feel a part of a collective whole. She then asks why we don't have those rituals in modern Western culture, and then traces all the reasons why we have rejected those kinds of rituals and why we dismiss them as "primitive" when we encounter them in other cultures. It more or less boils down to the fact that the kind of community created by ecstatic ritual must be small, and it doesn't scale up to the giant civilization that developed in Europe and the areas Europe colonized. Large civilizations require political hierarchies and systems of control, and thus suppress collective rituals.

This is going to sound really snobby, but I'm a historian, and anthropology makes me really squeamish and this book is a great example of why. The book starts off by comparing ecstatic rituals throughout the world and throughout history, and arguing that these rituals share some common features. But there is absolutely no discussion of the various sources from which we have learned about these rituals. Part of her argument is that when Europeans encounter these rituals in indigenous cultures, they are critical and disdainful of them, yet Ehrenreich assumes that European descriptions of the rituals are accurate. Then she traces the history of ecstatic ritual in Western culture, starting with ancient Greece and Rome and continuing to the modern day. Yet again, she takes descriptions of rituals at face value, and draws some really huge conclusions based on her analyses (or, more often, her acceptance of other historians' analyses). There is no discussion of her sources, or how she knows what she claims to know about these rituals. She is clearly not an expert in all of the times and places she examines in this book. The whole book would fall apart if just a few of her examples were wrong (and I suspect many of them are).

Ehrenreich is arguing that ecstatic ritual is a universal human tendency, and that modern European culture is unusual for repressing it.... and yet she does not talk about whether these rituals have been repressed anywhere else in the world, and how or why.

She makes a really dubious argument that the decline of ecstatic ritual can be tied to the rise in rates of depression. It's an interesting theory, but it is unproveable, even though she tries to prove it by citing rising rates in suicide as a measure of rates of depression. There are so many things wrong with this argument and the evidence she uses to support it. Just because historical records show a rise in suicide cases does not mean there was actually a rise in suicides - it could be that they were just reported more. A rise in suicide does not necessarily correlate to a rise in depression - it could be that in different times and places, suicide is a more acceptable response to depression or other problems.

The end of the book was really unsatisfying, because Ehrenreich's conclusion seems to be "well, sure is too bad we don't do this any more." She doesn't really offer any conclusions about how our society would be better or worse with ecstatic ritual, other than to suggest that people might not be so depressed. ( )

I enjoyed this. At time I got distracted - not particularly been a fan of mass sports, this is where I drifted off - but all in all a nice listen. ( )

Really enjoyed the topic, questioned some of the conclusions. ( )