observed the San medicine dances, typically beginning after dusk when everyone would hang out by the fire.

Author : houseaso112

Publish Date : 2021-01-09 19:21:05

Inrecent years, there has been a fad for taking cues from our early ancestors to improve our health today. We know that we didn’t evolve for our current sedentary lifestyles, and we understand the ways our bodies were optimized for endurance exercise like long-distance running. But one under-discussed element of our fitness evolution is the hours-long dance party.
Take, for instance, the San people of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. In the 1950s, anthropologist Laurence Marshall and his family spent months at a time with these indigenous people, who were then still hunter-gatherers. About once a week, they observed the San medicine dances, typically beginning after dusk when everyone would hang out by the fire. As both men and women sang joyously and clapped to ancient songs,

a handful of men would start dancing in a winding, twisting line around the group, stomping out the song’s beat, often adding extra light steps. Men would do most of the dancing, but women would also dance a turn or two when the mood was upon them. As the night drew on and the fervor of the hypnotic dance steadily increased, more men joined in, and by dawn some begin to enter a trancelike state, which they call “half-death.” The San believed there was great power in this half-conscious state, which freed the medicine men’s spirits to communicate between this and other worlds, to draw out manifest sicknesses and as-yet-unrevealed ills, and to protect people from unseen but lurking dangers.
Like long-distance running, dancing can go on for hours, requiring stamina, skill, and strength.
The San didn’t dance to get fit, but dancing all night once a week requires and develops phenomenal endurance. Further, their dancing traditions are the rule in world history, not the exception. I know of no nonindustrial culture in which men and women didn’t dance for hours on a regular basis. The Hadza of northern Tanzania, for example, sometimes dance joyfully after dinner until the wee hours. On dark moonless nights, the Hadza also perform the sacred epeme dance to heal social rifts and bring good hunting luck. The Tarahumara of northern Mexico have three or four different kinds of dances that often last between 12 and 24 hours and in some communities happen as many as 30 times per year. And as anyone who’s read Jane Austen knows, English balls of the Regency period could go on all through the night. In Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Willoughby danced “from eight o’clock till four, without once sitting down.”
Dancing isn’t running, but it’s usually more fun, and such a universal, valued form of human physical activity that we should consider it another human gait akin to running. Indeed, while dancers sometimes use their legs like stilts as in a walk, most often they jump like runners from one foot to the other. Like long-distance running, dancing can go on for hours, requiring stamina, skill, and strength. And like running, dancing can be a lifelong pursuit; just as crowds regularly cheer for octogenarians completing marathons, elderly couples light up the dance floor all over the world.
One rarely-considered parallel between running and dancing is how both can induce altered states. Long periods of vigorous exercise stimulate mood-enhancing chemicals in the brain including opioids, endorphins, and, best of all, endocannabinoids (like the active compound in marijuana). The result is a runner’s or dancer’s high. I’ve never danced all night, but sometimes on a long, hard run I feel euphoric and relaxed, and my perception of sights, sounds, and smells becomes heightened. Blue things become bluer, and I hear every singing bird, honking car, and footstep with astonishing clarity. I hypothesize this intensified state of awareness evolved to help running hunters track animals. Ultra-runners report that after many miles they sometimes enter a trance state like San medicine dancers, and in one account conservationist Louis Liebenberg describes how he felt himself transform into a bull kudu on a persistence hunt with San hunters in the Kalahari.
Few of us are gathering for in-person celebrations these days; if you’re wise, you won’t be hitting the dance floor at a wedding anytime soon. But perhaps as we make our way through what will hopefully be the final stretch of the Covid-19 pandemic, we can consider incorporating a Friday-night dance party into our weekly routines. D-Nice and Club Quarantine had the right idea: communal gatherings to move our bodies to the beat might be just what we need to keep our bodies fit in a year of so much sitting still.

Catagory :general

observed the San medicine dances, typically beginning after dusk when everyone would hang out by the fire.

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