Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Hardcover)

So far, this is fascinating stuff. But if dance is in our genes, how would evolution promote it? This would seem to be among the most important questions of the book, yet Ehrenreich's answers are not satisfactory. Too often we invoke predators to explain evolutionary puzzles -- a trap for the unwary that Ehrenreich falls into. "Anthropologists tend to agree," she writes, "that the evolutionary function of dance was to enable -- or encourage -- humans to live in groups larger than small bands of closely related individuals. . . . Larger groups are better able to defend themselves against predators." But evolutionary biologists would have said that group size is determined by the food supply, and no creatures need "encouragement" to make their best efforts against predators.

Alas, Ehrenreich then compounds the improbability. Groups "capable of holding themselves together through dance," she writes, "would have had an evolutionary advantage over more weakly bonded groups and individuals: the advantage of being better able to mount a collective defense against any animals or hostile humans who encroached on their territory." Any truly social species has multiple, redundant methods of keeping a group together and multiple reasons for doing so. And all of these species -- from ants to our direct ancestors, the chimpanzees -- combat their enemies without dancing. Dance unites us, yes, but to understand why we may have it in our genes, we need to know more about its essence and origins than we are given here.

Ironically, Ehrenreich presents facts that would address the question, but she doesn't seem to see their implications. She tells us that dances were held in the Paleolithic era, that pleasurable festivals occur worldwide and that participants seem to get the same boost from those experiences. Most significantly, she provides abundant evidence that one man's dance is another man's devil worship. In 1805, for instance, a Christianized "Hottentot" saw European festivals in the same negative light (horrid, obscene, meaningless) as Charles Darwin saw the ceremonial dances of Australian Aborigines.

If an aspect of human behavior is innate, then it first appeared in Africa, where the first people originated. If the behavior is now worldwide, that's because it left Africa with the human Diaspora; if we no longer recognize its features in other cultures, that's because, over the intervening 50,000 years, each culture developed its own version of it.

In all this, dance resembles language, and in a search for its origins, Africa would have been a good place to start. Recent DNA studies show that the entire human race descended from the San or Bushmen. Many linguists believe that a Bushman language was the original language. Archaeological evidence shows that some of their recent campsites had been occupied continuously since the Paleolithic, with few if any changes in their material culture, suggesting extraordinary cultural stability. And to this day, these First People hold communal, semi-ecstatic dances for the same reasons that Ehrenreich recognizes in her study. None of this is brought to light here. Ehrenreich mentions the First People but only in passing, saying that their dances "are understood by their participants to serve an almost medical function." Not so. If Ehrenreich had considered our African prehistory and had known that Bushmen dance to alleviate not physical ailments (or at least not often) but spiritual ones -- the disappointments, jealousies and aggressive impulses that drive people apart, causing failures of cooperation and thus threatening survival -- she would have found the paradigm and probable origin of the dancing she discusses.

Dancing in the Streets has plenty of substance, and it's unfair to criticize a book for something it doesn't include. But if dance is a primal activity, and if we get primal benefits from it, the failure to acknowledge its primal components detracts from what is otherwise an impressive work.

-- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,
author of "The Harmless People,"
"The Hidden Life of Dogs" and
"The Old Way: A Story of the First People."

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