ABSTRACT
In the introduction to her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, the American journalist and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich tells the reader that ‘jarring to European sensibilities [during their campaigns of conquest and exploration of new worlds] was the almost ubiquitous practice of ecstatic ritual, in which the natives would gather to dance, sing or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes trance’. Her repertoire of examples is wide, both geographically and chronologically. For instance, on the corroboree rite of Western Australians, she quotes Charles Darwin as reporting that:
The dancing consisted in their running either sideways or in Indian file into an open space, and stamping the ground with great force as they marched together. Their heavy footsteps were accompanied with a kind of grunt, by beating their clubs and spears together, and by various other gesticulations, such as extending their arms and wriggling their bodies. It was a most rude, barbarous scene, and, to our ideas, without any sort of meaning.2
