As the Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz remarked of the Tarahumara in 1905, “Dance with these people is a very serious and ceremonious matter, a kind of worship and incantation rather than amusement.”59 Even the infamously repressed English used to dance much more than they now do. In Jane Austen’s time, balls could go on all through the night. In Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Willoughby danced “from eight o’clock till four, without once sitting down.”60
