God, and other things that are just for fun

On dancing our way to divinity

Roughly twice a week, the Savanna Pumé — a tribe located in southwestern Venezuela — hold an all-night dance. An anthropologist named Vincenzo Petrullo described the early stages as follows:

The song was first a murmur and then a shout, but maintained its steady rhythm. When the moon brightened the tropical night with its colorless light, sharpening the many shadows . . . the Yaruros forgot all about the stranger in their midst. As though on a prearranged signal, they arose and began to dance . . . they danced all night, and it was not until the sun rose above the hills of Guiana that they stopped to seek an hour or two of sleep.¹

On eHRAF, a database of ethnographic records from hundreds of human societies, this dance is described as a means for “communicating with the spirits of dead relatives.” A serious affair, then: an example of capital-R Religion, replete with snuffs and shivering and desperate outcries to the gods. Like so many other societies, the Pumé engage their beliefs through ecstasy.

Anthropologists like to explain the ubiquity of these practices in all kinds of complicated ways. We exhaust ourselves to signal the depths of our conviction to others. Our irrational minds lead us to invent ways of controlling the uncontrollable. Dancing and drumming and chanting is a form of self-deception: the resultant chaos feels like a legitimate sign of divinity.

All of these explanations probably capture bits of the truth. But there is also a simpler account: the gods are a great excuse for a party.

The Dance, by Henri Matisse

When we look only to familiar practices from Abrahamic religions, like Christianity or Islam, this possibility is easy to dismiss. Going to church may feel rewarding — but my god, is there anything more boring than sitting in a pew for three hours?

But the absence of joy in these doctrines is an exception². In many religions, ritual takes the form of festivity.

Last summer, I conducted my first round of fieldwork in southern Africa. My collaborator and I started out in Johannesburg, interviewing traditional healers in the townships — and during one of these interviews, we were invited to attend an initiation ceremony.

I couldn’t believe my good luck. A sacred event! Terrified to screw it up, I asked my collaborator what I should bring, how I should act, whether I was allowed to use my camera and notebook.

She shrugged. “You’ll be fine. Let’s just pick up some beer on the way.”

She was right. When we arrived at the house where the ceremony would take place, the presiding healer warmly greeted our 12-pack and placed it in a growing stack of alcohol. Then she went on her way.

I wandered the premises, took notes and periodically explained to a teenager that I did not know Jaden Smith. Every ten minutes or so, someone would sound a piercing whistle, and a group of initiates — waiting in a cordoned-off room — would roar loudly in reply.

The ceremony happened in a very big tent. Three adolescent boys dragged a mix of animal-hide drums and metal tubs into one corner and began to pound an utterly deafening polyrhythm. The initiates emerged. They danced before an audience — I was placed in the front row, due to my (undesired) honorary status — and followed the drums. As the beat slowed, their stomping slowed; as it quickened, so did their feet.

The dancers had reached the zenith of their training. They fell into trance and summoned ancestral spirits. I felt distinctly like there were, in fact, presences in the tent that had not been there before.

But as the night progressed, the barrier between audience and initiates broke down. Boys traded their places at the drums and danced impossibly fast for the cheering crowd. Old women rose and hit a careful two-step. At one point, an initiate swung himself wildly around a pole, and everyone whooped like they had just seen a trick from Cirque du Soleil.

Around 3 AM, I left the tent and joined several men by a fire that had been built in the courtyard. They were all very drunk. They called for me to take pictures of them: “Shoot, umlungu³, shoot!” One of the men cornered me and demanded that I finish a 40 oz bottle of beer with him. He reminded me of the strangers that would grab me at house parties during college, proclaim their undying friendship and promptly vanish into the night.

Attendees of the initiation ceremony outside Johannesburg.

We left the next morning. The party would continue without us for another day and night.

Now, the people living in townships outside of Johannesburg are obviously not traditional foragers. They are thoroughly industrialized; some attendees of the ceremony scrolled Facebook during the climactic goat sacrifice.

Yet across human societies, events like the one I’ve just described are remarkably common. My advisor, Manvir Singh, has written beautifully about the celebratory aspects of such ceremonies among the Mentawai, a hunter-gatherer group living on a tropical island off the western coast of Sumatra. Here’s how he describes a healing session:

On paper, this was a religious ritual. Yet more than anything, it felt like a party. Mangga’s ankles looked like they were decaying, but the attitude was neither solemn nor serious, but amusing and playful. Full from pig and sago flour and sweet coffee, we laughed and chatted during dance breaks. It felt less like Mangga had called these shamans to cure him and more like he was hosting an all-nighter for his younger relatives.”

Mentawai shamans dancing.

Trance dances among the San are similarly festive. Here’s a description from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas:

The women sit in a circle around the fire with their babies on their backs and sing the medicine songs in several parts with falsetto voices and clap their hands in a sharp, staccato rhythm. Behind them the men dance one behind the other and circle around slowly taking short, pounding steps in counterpoint to the rhythms of the singing and clapping. This is accompanied by the sharp, high clatter of rattles – made from dry cocoons strung together with sinew cords – that are tied to their legs.⁴

In some sense, this process is rather grave. Through the dancing and clapping and singing, healers channel boiling energy through their stomachs, transition into a state called ‘half-death’ and use their power to remove ghosts from the bodies of the sick.

Early stages of a San trance dance.

Yet the dance circle also resembles something less sacred: the spontaneous groups one might find forming in a rave. Less skilled performers bob at the edge of these circles; the bold step inside and perform grand feats of bodily imagination, much to the delight of their audience. The great ones seem to lose their soul in the crowd.

So much of what we so carefully call religion is, perhaps, just a means for collective joy.

Of course, it’s not all for fun. In Lesotho, healers told me that falling into trance is frightening and sometimes painful. One described the terror she first experienced upon surrendering her body to a spirit; she felt that her soul had been trapped on an unknown island, and she wondered if her volition would ever return. The pleasure of these ceremonies is often paired with immaculate pain.

But I wonder if we sometimes take these things more seriously than we should. A trance dance is seemingly alien: all the talk of possession strikes us as fundamentally strange. Yet we too love to lose ourselves in a spinning crowd. Call it trance, or half-death, or ecstasy. Beneath the sound and fury of our science, there is always that selfsame fire.⁵

1. My Journey to and Life with the Yaruros, 1939.

2. Of course, many Abrahamic sects are actually quite ecstatic: Pentecostal Christianity is a prime example. Catholic torpor is not only an exception to common patterns in world religion, but arguably an exception within its own creed.

3. This means “white boy."

4. Medicine Dance of the !Kung Bushmen, 1969.

5. Thanks to Noah Stark and Ethan Wellerstein for reading an earlier version of this piece. Thanks also to Lindsey Cannon, Madison McCartin, Morgan Hall, Erin Mooneyham, Tracy Pan and Carly Stark for input on the cover photo.