Dancing in the Streets By Barbara Ehrenreich

Trafalgar Square, about a year ago: beneath Nelson's column, a festival was noisily taking place. Children were throwing themselves into noisy gameplay, cheered on by a plebeian crowd. The sober classicism of the area was festooned with carnival colours. Hip-hop and new punk blasted from storey-high speakers, causing some to dance. A giant manifesto hung from a scaffold, committing the celebrants to beauty, integrity and dignity.

By all the criteria set out in her somewhat awe-inspiring history of "collective joy", Barbara Ehrenreich could easily describe this scene as meeting all her definitions. The festival was not just a safety-valve of music, ritual and physicality to keep the lower orders from getting too disgruntled but also a platform for expressing protest (however coded) against the powers that be. But this was the London heat of Nike's Joga Bonita competition: a multi-media corporate campaign to promote the ideal of "playing beautifully" in the run-up to the World Cup finals (and maybe sell a few trainers too). Trafalgar Square had been turned into a suburb of NikeTown; the young players in their three-a-side competitions were plastered in logos.

"Diving is for dolphins and arguing is for politicians", went the graffiti of the "Manifesto Futbolista". Vigilance over Nike's record on sweatshop labour might also be "for politicians". Strangely enough, that didn't make the list of derogations.

All of which is not to downgrade Ehrenreich's achievement. Dancing in the Streets is a genuine triumph of popular critical scholarship, in which the human tradition of collective celebration - from the survival tactics of hunter-gatherers, to the Burning Man festival in Nevada - is given its rightful due. The range of references amassed, and the punchy elegance of her prose, makes this an essential purchase. Her mastery of the domain is admirable; her personal agenda, however, often sits at an uncomfortable angle to her findings.

As a child of the Sixties and Seventies, who mixed her activism with her hedonism, Ehrenreich believes that something was revived in the "rock rebellion": "the possibility of ecstasy, or at least a joy beyond anything... consumer culture had to offer". Yet the Joga Bonita experience makes me doubt Ehrenreich's hunch about how liberating collective joy might be. Within the absorptive matrix of Western lifestyles - particularly through sport - social ecstasy could be evolving into our most sophisticated safety-valve yet.

One of the book's dominant themes concerns the loss of the link between collective joy - dancing, music and physical expression - and religion. Ehrenreich reminds us that the root of "enthusiasm" means "being filled with or possessed by a deity". A long struggle (most notably through Protestantism)has led us to today's pallid, sit-down "faiths". They suppress the Dionysian sense that you don't just believe in your gods, you know your gods: "at the height of group ecstasy, they fill you with your presence".

For good evolutionary reasons, Ehrenreich would want religions to be far more carnivalesque: it was only early hominids who believed in huddling close to the family and its defensive values, while humans "had the wit and generosity to reach out to unrelated others". Yet given the way the new religiosity most often serves to assuage fears of social chaos, it seems overly hippie-chick to imagine that a new uprising of Dionysiacs will soon emerge to spiritually re-express human nature.

Despite these caveats, there are so many rich departure-points arising from this highly original book. Ehrenreich's account of the destruction of local traditions of carnival by imperialism is powerful and chilling. While our Puritans at home sought to destroy the celebrations of labourers and peasants, in the colonies it was often easier just to "destroy the celebrants". Chapters on Fascist rallies and the epidemic of melancholy in the 18th century - linked by the author to the war on festivity - are bravura displays of erudition.

Her main charge against our lazy understanding of communal ecstasy (I would say, of play in general) is well worth making. Far from being an explosion of dangerous disorder, carnival and festival is often highly disciplined, a form of ancient social cohesion that we should honour.

The political hoo-ha over the London Olympics revolves around whether its primary worth is as a participatory, regenerative festival, or an inert one-off spectacle. Our Olympic bosses would profit from a deep immersion in these pages. "Is there no other way to unite society other than through spectacles and force?" she asks. "Where is the constituency for collective joy itself?" Well, with the young Davids - Cameron and Miliband - arguing for a politics of "general wellbeing", or for citizens as "players not spectators", Ehrenreich might get her wish in the UK. But if the only consequence of her book is that Nike is inspired to rent a Motown classic as the soundtrack for its next campaign, I won't be all that surprised.

Pat Kane is the author of 'The Play Ethic' (www.theplayethic.com)

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