Can’t stop, won’t stop – an enactivist model of Tarantism

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-25 (forthcoming)
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Abstract

History is full of references to dancing plague, dance mania, ecstatic dance, collective effervescence, choreo mania, collective psychosis, and Tarantism. In each of these cases, groups of people come together in joint activity (typically dance) and reach a prolonged ecstatic state in which they cannot stop the movement. To this day, academic literature in medicine, psychology, history, and cognitive science has not been able to answer the question; why does ecstatic dance lead to a loss of executive control? I here focus on the case of group dance and provide an enactive embodied account of the loss of executive control. I argue that dancing crowds are scaffolded, self-organizing, self-perpetuating, dynamical systems. Within such systems, the majority of affordances provided to the individual agent lead to the perpetuation of the system, leading to more dancing. The embodied impact of the crowd, as an emergent entity, on the individual also leads to change in the sense of agency. Dancers experience being “unable to stop” because the sense of “who” is initiating the movements changes within crowd dance interaction. If it is unclear who is moving, then the interaction is experienced as outside individual control.

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Christian Kronsted
Merrimack College

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How the Body Shapes the Mind.Shaun Gallagher - 2007 - Philosophy 82 (319):196-200.
Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition.Hanne De Jaegher & Ezequiel Di Paolo - 2007 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4):485-507.
Meaningful affordances.Roy Dings - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1855-1875.

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