The Communal Function of Dancing

For Christmas my friend Scooter (who has stamped red stars on the wrists of FSLD attendees) gave me Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy." I just started reading it this week, and, aside from some slightly dubious speculation on the evoluntionary function of dancing in early societies, it has provided some interesting food for thought. Last night I came across the following passage, which nicely sums up why I have always been interested in throwing parties and, eventually, hopefully, getting people to dance together:

[British anthropologist Robin] Dunbar is not the only one to see group dancing - especially in lines and circles - as the great leveler and binder of human communities, uniting all who participate in the kind of communitas that [Victor] Turner found in twentieth-century native rituals. Interestingly, the Greek word nomos, meaning "law," also had the musical meaning of "melody." To submit, bodily, to the music through dance is to be incorporated into the community in a way far deeper that shared myth or custom can achieve. In synchronous movement to music or chanting voices, the petty rivalries and factional differences that might divide a group could be transmuted into harmless competition over one's prowess as a dancer, or forgotten. "Dance," as a neuroscientist put it, is "the biotechnology of group formation." (24)