Toti O'Brien: A Review of “The Dancing
Goddesses, Folklore, Archeology, and the Origins of European Dance” by
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 11, 2013) – Hardcover, 429 pages, $35.00
Elizabeth Barber’s “The Dancing Goddesses” is a book about a million of things: all absolutely fascinating. This wide range of contents is typical of the author, due to her encyclopedic knowledge in fields such as anthropology, archeology, linguistics and cognitive sciences – to mention a few.
But encyclopedic
is not the right word: Barber’s notions have been acquired hands on, during a
lifetime of field research, explorations and travels. Body and soul are
involved as much as the mind in treating her subjects.
The declared scope
of “Dancing Goddesses” is to clarify the origins of folk dance, an activity the
author has long taught and performed. Folk dance has been popular in the US
since the Great Depression (as a cheap form of entertainment). When World War
II left women without their male partners, couple dancing gave way to older
line dances of European origins.
After the war,
line dances remained in fashion, having gained wide favor. They provide - as
Barber explains - a large deal of pleasures. By means of shared rhythms, hand
holds, synchronized motions and patterns, they create community bonding while
giving a natural high – of a Zen quality – that relieves stress and centers the
psyche.
There’s enormous
joy, of course, attached to these psycho-physiological benefits. That is why
folk dance has thrived for about eight millennia: for its origins deepen into
the Bronze Age, among farming societies settled in the arm of the Danube. It
all started – Barber says – as a way to influence the flow of life, literary
channeling female fertility into the ground.
Life causes
motion, as it is easily observed. Dance is motion for motion’s sake - unrelated
to effort towards direct results. Thus it seems to summarize life’s essence -
in other terms divinity. Through dance, humans mimicked gods to entice them
into delivering more life, meaning first of all water, then crops, food,
survival. Also health and – last but not least – babies. That’s how the
tradition begins.
Barber doesn’t
theorize it. Startled by the illustration of a dancing goddess (a supernatural
female figure) in a Russian fairy tale, for fifteen years she tracks similar
images in Balkan, Celtic, Latin, Greek artifacts. She connects them with
linguistic clues, written documentation and oral living tradition, to achieve a
coherent understanding of her role and significance.
*
Dancing is not a
women’s only domain. Men always shared in it, with different functions and
nuances. But the invoked/pleased divinities were originally female. Through a
myriad cultural variations they became known as Willies, Mermaids, Nymphs,
Fairies. Those over potent spirits – believed to almost perpetually dance –
held the keys to abundance, generation and resurrection. They could withhold
such things as well as allow them.
Those entities
were believed to be ghosts of women dead before they bore children, having not
used yet their generative potential (the most magic of powers). Such treasure
couldn’t be wasted. Ritual dance in the appropriate conditions and times caused
it to be passed on to the living.
Women dead before
marrying and procreating… often drawn… suicidal, perhaps?… not rare an
occurrence… Now forever bond to the water, haunting water - this quintessential
matrix of all genus. Long haired, lose haired, the mermaids: hair like tears,
like rivers, in contrast with the braided, pinned, hidden hair of wed mothers.
But – in other
traditional instances, other moments of the calendric cycle – folk dancing also
honored mothers, overlapping in fact the two female statuses: maiden
(archaically represented with arms up, in a w) and mother (arms down, to hold
the child) were one. The Christian Virgin/Mother, Mary, belongs to the
lineage. Thus the maidens, the Willies (among a million excursuses on
trance, shamanism, healing herbs, costume design, masks, calendars, festivals,
pottery, poetry) constitute the motif of Barber’s first part.
*
The third part of
the book draws an exhaustive map of folk dance evolving through space and time.
It also defines the means of its endurance, the miracle of its defying all
attempts of obliteration by the Church.
In part number
two, the longest, a tribute is paid to a specific character: the Frog Princess,
honored by Barber with particular devotion. Hard not to share such love, since
here is a powerful figure of Russian lore - though of course the author traces
her in other contexts as well, since prehistoric eras.
She appears in
ancient Indo-European and non Indo-European cultures as the “girl with the very
long sleeves.” Yes: she danced in those. Complementing (and again overlapping)
the fish-lady, she is the bird-girl. Hyper long sleeves pretending to be wings,
motions suggesting the flight of migratory birds are pervasive elements of
western folklore.
Maidens doubling
as swans, living an avian existence of freedom - until someone married them and
they lost, relinquished or were stolen their feathered attire (or seal-skin:
it’s the same) -populate millennia of oral telling. Traces might have spread
place to place or – as the bird versus seal discrepancy suggests – they could
have analogically originated in different sites.
Such ample
resonance derives from the woman status, as inherent to all archaic rural
cultures. Systematically, the bride had to leave home, moving into the grooms’
family, village, region, land. Severed off her previous identity/skin, no doubt
she often dreamed of recovering it –flying back to her former life, native
landscape, home, friends, memories.
Was the
swan/bird/long-sleeved female dance a rite of nostalgia? Celebrating longing?
Or freedom? Maybe longing for a freedom that dance temporarily allowed: through
the joy of shared motions, to the rhythm of flapping fabrics - spun, woven,
sewn by those same tireless arms.
Also by Elizabeth Wayland Barber: Women’s Work – The
First 20,000 Years, Norton, N.Y. 1994
AN INTERVIEW WITH
ELIZABETH WAYLAND BARBER
When we sat at her breakfast table - so piled
up with books we had to dig a place for the microphone - I gave to Elizabeth
Barber a list, asking her to pick the word or phrase that she wanted. She
immediately chose: “plurality of interests."
E.B. My dad
taught at Caltech and mom loved visitors, so I grew up with people from all
over the world, working in all the different sciences. If you’d ask what I
wanted to be when I grew up, I would name every possible discipline… Thus I
thought archeology would give me an excuse to do practically everything! When I
was twelve, dad received a fellowship and we moved to France. We also travelled
all over Europe: papa visited laboratories while I learned how to count and say
please in all of those languages. I ended up with degrees in archeology and
linguistics. The linguistics has allowed me to look at an archeological problem
in no matter what language the excavation report. If you are trying to follow a
problem - such as ancient textiles or the development of folk dance – being
able to track it across the boundaries is ideal.
T.O. Did you choose
linguistics uniquely as a tool for your searches? Were you also fascinated by
words for their own sake?
E.B. My first
reason for taking linguistics was an interest in early scripts. I intended to
write my thesis on decipherment. I specifically meant to be in Yale College,
the only place in those days where a woman could major in old world archeology.
Harvard or Princeton had it, but they were men’s schools: those were the late
fifties! So I went to Bryn Mawr and I majored in Greek and archeology.
T.O: How did your
passion for textiles start?
E.B. Mom had
taught home economics and weaving. She made all of our clothes. I grew up with
looms in the house and I learned how to use them when I was four… When I
started studying archeology I noticed weaving patterns all over: I would
mention this and scholars would say, “they could not make those things back
then.” “Well… I could when I was eight; it’s not hard.” When I finished
my degree I said to my husband: “I have a little project: I’d like to
demonstrate ancient textiles were far more elaborate and important than they
are given credit for.” Seventeen years later a book of five hundred pages
appeared! It was 1991 and there was a lot of misogyny in the field of
archeology - supposedly a men’s preserve. With great glee, the copy editor (a
woman) made my pen name E. J. W. Barber. She figured that if they thought some
un-gendered author had written five hundred pages on the subject, from a place
like Princeton Press, they would at least look at it. That’s exactly what
happened, except… no one reviewed it. The book was reviewed in England and
other countries, not in this one.
T.O. Do you see a
connection between the archeological field been misogynist, and textiles not
having been studied in depth?
E.B. Yes. In most cultures men are not taught about textiles, but if women are doing them by hand they know something about it. Since the Industrial Revolution, most people believe clothes comes off the bat, not as a result of a long chain. Both men and women don’t know much about it… but women are more likely to. If I go to the fabric store, for example, I find most entirely women. After the book came out, my husband told me: “have you noticed, when you give lectures, that all questions are about the women who made these textiles?” Representational evidence - plus the evidence from the tombs - shows that it has been women’s work until we get to late periods. I also heard complaining about a general lack of information on early women - Women Studies kind of invented a prehistory for them. That is how “Women’s work: the first twenty thousand years” was born.
T.O. The book
tackles the subject in depth… but it’s also like one of those pop-ups with lots
of side-stories, all converging and making sense in the end. How can you
condense so much?
E.B. I had a
disability they didn’t have a word for when I grew up. I am dis-graphic: I
could write only a third as fast as my classmates. When I got to senior high my
English teacher said, “you are not going to make it to college at this rate.
The only way you could write faster is by saying the same amount in half as
many words.” I spent every free period in her office. She would give me a
passage and say, “half as many words, but you can leave out neither data nor
logical connections. You can only reduce the verbiage.” I learned. Later I had
to unpack it a bit for publication - but because I had shrunk it to the
essentials, the unpacking could come in the form of gracefulness.
T.O. It shows! Would
you say something on collaboration? It is a leitmotiv through your writing.
E.B. Once our
ancestors settled down – with domestic plants and animals - if they disliked a
neighbor they couldn’t just move away. They had to learn how to get along, so
they might enjoy it as well. Writing “Dancing Goddesses” I concentrated on
dance as a means for bonding, but textiles were doing it naturally for the
women. They always did their spinning while chattering, they helped each other
set the looms. It was more efficient and much more fun.
T.O. Almost all of
your work dives into the past: do you seek lessons that could be applied to the
present?
E.B. I’m not
usually lesson-oriented. If you provide lots of interesting data people draw
their own lessons… I see lots, and I try to make it easy for others to see
them. If they come to their own conclusion they will be more likely to remember
it and to make use of it.
T.O. Was it the way
you were raised?
E.B. To some
extent. Dad was very supportive. If he had had a son, he might have felt
competition. But having two daughters he always supported us, and it was
wonderful. You have noticed I so believe in women’s potential, I don't feel it
necessary to insist. I went to girls’ school from fourth grade through college.
By the time I got to Yale, which was very much a male place (it was clear they
didn’t mind having us as students, but they didn’t want us as colleagues), I just
thought: “You don’t know what you are missing!” Once, I got two reviews on the
same day: one said I was too feminist, the other I wasn’t feminist enough. I
thought: “Ok, I hit the right place”… When I write about women I strictly
follow the data: people then can draw their conclusions.
T.O. Let’s address
the joy… there is something incredibly exuberant in your books.
E.B. As a child
I wanted to be every kind of possible scientist: I find all so interesting! I
just love the chase!
T.O. So the joy is
the pleasure you find going from surprise to surprise?
E.B. Absolutely.
Toti O’Brien’s work has appeared
in Synesthesia, Siren, Litro NY, Adanna, among other journals and
anthologies. She has contributed for a decade to various Italian
magazines.
Toti O'Brien
