United in a Vipers’ Nest

This chapter explores group dynamics, specifically how conviviality, rivalry, envy, and ostracism play out in, and between, dance groups. The chapter revisits Kracauer’s classic essays, together with ethnographies of Amazonia, to examine the quality of group experience. It challenges Iannaccone’s influential rational-choice model of (religious) groups, whereby “free-riders” undermine the viability of a group’s conviviality and collective aims, instead proposing that it is intimacy that threatens group cohesion: both intimacy and rivalries can be productive in propelling revival movements, in enabling groups to split and multiply. The chapter considers how knowledge is restricted and transmission processes curbed by group leaders. Throughout, it points to static and utopian ambivalences provoked by conviviality, rivalry, envy, and ostracism.