Social Sciences

"The most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and 'vibe-tribes' of the 1990s and beyond.... Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, St John’s book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I’ve read in some time."
Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
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Global Tribe explores the visionary arts dance movement of psytrance, which has mushroomed globally since its beginnings in Goa in the 1970s/1980s. Based on extensive international research, as the first detailed work on psychedelic trance, the book investigates the diverse roots and global proliferation of this music and festival culture. Consideration of comparative aesthetics, spiritual technologies and controversies with studied attention to internal dynamics will strike appeal among those holding academic and popular interests at the intersection of ritual, music and culture.

Investigating the significance of carnivalized methods of protest in the present, this article explores the characteristics and recent history of the protestival, the carnival of protest which has flourished with the advent of the alter-globalization movement. Heir to the carnivalized politics of the 1960s, and drawing from radical avant-garde movements and guerrilla theatre, the
‘protestival’ inherits much from the kinds of ‘symbolic challenges’ thought posed by post-1960s social movements. Immediately downstream from Reclaim the Streets, demonstrating a resurgence
of autonomism, anarchism and direct democracy, and developing within the context of global opposition to neo-liberalism and the War on Terror, the Global Day of Action would become the
template for popular direct action: in particular those events nominated ‘Carnivals Against Capitalism’ or ‘For Global Justice’. While new social movement theorists have recognized the
significance of movement cultural politics, new approaches are needed to understand the festal and carnivalesque character of the contemporary activism. Recently scholars have indicated that summit sieges, autonomous convergences and other recent reflexive  events constitute transnational ‘carnivalesque rituals’, politico-religious ‘pilgrimage’ destinations, or spatial reconfigurations critical to the renewed opposition to capitalism. The ‘protestival’ provides an ambiguously nuanced
heuristic sufficient to comprehend those performative moments simultaneously transgressive and progressive, against and for, by which the marginal may take their grievances to the physical and
symbolic centres (‘summits’) of neo-liberalism, where alternative logics and spectacles are performed. Unpacking its expositional and revelatory logic, the article uncovers the roots of the ‘protestival’, undertaking an exploration of intentional carnival, festal hacktivism, direct theatre, tactical frivolity and (un)masking to reveal a significant action template in the present."

"This article takes issue with Victor Turner’s influential, yet essentialist, category
of the limen. While acknowledging Turner’s continuing significance in the
analysis of public events, I draw upon detailed ethnography of one of Australia’s
contemporary pilgrimage centres, the alternative lifestyle event ConFest, to
reconfigure his project. Although ConFest may prove to be an exemplary field of
liminality, as a decidedly contested and sensuous landscape, it demands reevaluation
of the implicitly consensual and non-carnal limen. I offer the concepts
of alternative cultural heterotopia and liminoid embodiment, with the purpose of
fashioning new directions in the study of alternative lifestyle, and other public
events. Attending to contemporary pilgrimage research, spatial analysis and
applying the ideas of Michel Maffesoli and Hakim Bey, this is a post-structuralist
contribution to the anthropology of public events."

"On Australia Day 1988, the Chairman of the Northern Land Council, Galarrwuy
Yunupigu, announced that ‘Australia’s too old to celebrate birthdays’. In the
subsequent decade, mounting sympathy for such views revealed the population’s
anxiety with a nationhood founded on the ‘beautiful lies’ about which noted
paleontologist Tim Flannery has made ample public comment. In a recent essay,
Flannery articulated that the ‘founding’ and most far-reaching deceit—the
doctrine of terra nullius—is ‘central to the dilemma we [Australians] face in
defining ourselves as a people’. While the Howard Government wound back
advances in the cause of Indigenous justice, and, in conjunction with state
governments, continued to destroy natural heritage underwritten by what Flannery
sees as the keynote delusions circulating since settlement, other movements
rallying to Indigenous rights and ecological causes would seek popular redress.
The 1990s saw an increase in local community reaction to the ecological impact of
corporate and state controlled ‘developments’. In response to Prime Minister
Howard’s obstinacy, the decade also witnessed the rise of a mass movement of
‘sorry people’ engaged in the performance of a ‘proliferation of apologies’ made
to Indigenous Australians. It was the ‘decade of reconciliation’."

It is Sydney 1998 and, ‘like some crazed pirate galleon on wheels’, a strange bus was
seen making its way around the city. Equipped with a PA and ‘DJ booth’ facing out
from its rear hatch, the Peace Bus was reported to ‘broadside renegade dance floors or
earth destroying mining companies, with a barrage of sonic arsenal’. The ‘steel pulse of
protest techno’ was heard from speakers positioned in the luggage hatches, as the bus
made its way around Sydney ‘rattling people’s cappuccino cups’. The enthusiastic
report concluded: ‘If this is a war for the future of Australia then this brightly coloured
tank is there firing a funky arsenal designed to activate people into joining the growing
movement for a more sustainable future.’ Committed to a nuclear-free Australia, the
Ohms not Bombs techno-circus was in the driver’s seat. Likened to ‘stormtroopers
spearheading a generation’s demands’ that their continent’s ecosystems be safeguarded
from the radioactive perils of the nuclear industry (Daly, 1999, p. 9), Ohms were
multimedia activists mobilizing for a sonic assault on the comfort zones of the nation’s
psyche. But as the interventions of these and other techno-protagonists would
illustrate, there was more than a nuclear-free future at stake. Impacted by a DiYactivist
sensibility that can be traced back to the 1960s, appropriating new and alternative
technologies and operating mobile events, these young technomad pioneers were
implicated in a movement for legitimate presence and belonging in post-settler
Australia. Exploring the characteristics of a ‘groovement’ (Strong, 1994) in evidence from the early 1990s, the article tracks the ‘intimate’ and ‘tactical’ aesthetics of a
counter-colonial momentum.

In a study of an Australian ‘alternative lifestyle gathering’, I investigate the authentica (the multiplicity of discourse and practice valued as ‘true’, ‘natural’, ‘pure’) championed and performed on site. Using emic description, the article details the authentica of ‘play’ (ludic exploration via alterity, especially indigeneity), ‘Earth’ (ecological consciousness) and ‘tribe’ (the search for belonging in community) which are axiomatic to ConFest (Conference/Festival), one of Australia’s principle sites for the celebration of alternative (‘edge’) culture. In this counter-space, an outsider status I call ‘ferality’ is conditioned. A repository of authenticity for many ConFesters, the ambivalent category ‘feral’, with its particular subcultural traits, is realised in a hyper-liminal zone on the margins, the cultural hinterland, of Australian society. Using the work of Turner (on ‘liminality’) and Maffesoli (on ‘neo-tribalism’), I seek to throw light on the (re)production of alternative culture in an analysis of an event where new frontiers in the fields of leisure, health, environment, religion and community are explored

"In its most recent edition, The Macquarie Dictionary recognises as ‘feral’: ‘a person who espouses environmentalism to the point of living close to nature in more or less primitive conditions and who deliberately shuns the normal code of society with regard to dress, habitat, hygiene, etc’. A familiar persona dwelling on the edges of Australian culture is now ‘on the record’. Though more silhouette than profile, we are presented with a verification of the presence of young radical ecologists disenchanted with the parent culture’s predatory impact upon the natural world, who challenge classical scientific efforts to snuff out its mystery, who object to monotheistic religions deferring responsibility to transcendent
creators, who adopt alternative lifestyle strategies. The definition hints at an emergent subcultural milieu identifying with, and defending the rights of, indigenous ecology and peoples — natural and cultural heritage. It implicates thousands of young Australians who have ‘gone feral’."

"This lively textual symposium offers a rich harvest of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research attending to psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. With coverage of scenes in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, Italy, the US, Portugal, The Czech Republic and Australia, the collection features a dozen chapters from scholars researching psytrance in worldwide locations, employing various methods, within multiple disciplines. With chapters offering significant contributions to our understanding of globalization and music cultures, scene demise and transformation, ephemeral and cosmopolitan assemblages, counterculture and paradox, psychedelicization and genre, virtual tribes and the Internet, the carnivalesque and the aesthetics of nonsense, festivals and the logics of sacrifice, and other topics, Psytrance will strike interest across anthropology, sociology and studies in popular music, culture, media, history and religion.

Rooted in Full Moon parties held on the beaches of Goa, India, since the 1960s and incubated within Goa trance scenes flourishing around the world in the mid-1990s, psytrance culture has mushroomed globally over the past decade. Indebted to 1960s psychedelia, sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with electronic dance music scenes, and harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, psytrance would develop distinctive sonic and visual aesthetics, organizations and events, discourse and practice. This cultural proliferation would depend upon the growth of exotic sites of travel, exchange and performance (e.g. Goa, Thailand and Bahia, Brazil), and scene formation in cosmopolitan capitals world-wide. With events attracting enthusiasts from dozens of nations, by 2000 psytrance festivals had become what were likely the most culturally diverse music and dance events on the planet. By 2010, psytrance music, style and textile fashions are evident in scenes the world over. Exploring psytrance from its 1960s roots and emergence in Goa to its subsequent proliferation and translation among transnational populations the book opens the way for the study of psytrance."

Vast numbers of contemporary youth have attached primary significance to raving and post-rave experiences. This collection of essays explores the socio-cultural and religious dimensions of the rave, 'raving' and rave-derived phenomena.

Rave Culture and Religion provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. Rave Culture and Religion is essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and religious studies.

On the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection features contributions reflecting the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st Century. From anthropology, sociology and religious studies to performance, cultural and media studies, Turner has had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. The collection of 17 essays demonstrates that, in the face of challenges from poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, Turnerian ideas remain compelling with international scholars located in a range of disciplines illustrating how these ideas have been reanimated, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance and experience.

Contributions to this collection are grouped in four thematic sections: 'Performing Culture' covering new ritual, drama, media and reflexivity; 'Rites of Passage and Popular Culture' on popular 'transition' rites and popular investment in the ideas of Turner; 'Pilgrimage and Communitas' with contributions covering contemporary manifestations; and, 'Edith Turner' on her role in the Turnerian project.

Volume contributors address themes ranging from dark communitas and techno tribalism to liminal sports and the mediatisation of social dramas, from backpacking, shopping and protest pilgrimage to what Barbara Babcock calls the "gynesis" of Victor Turner's work. Applying, critiquing and reworking Turner's cultural processualism, with attention to such diverse themes as performing "sorry business" within the context of settler and indigenous Australian reconciliation, improvised ritual-theatre within a tertiary education context, pilgrimage to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, and recognition of the critical role of Edith Turner in the development of the Turnerian perspective, this collection demonstrates the broad and evolving appeal of the Turnerian project.

As an electronic dance music movement, for over 20 years, psytrance (psychedelic trance) has been a context by which sonic, visual, pharmacological and virtual media have facilitated the expression of interwoven narratives, experimental modes of performance, and the experience of intense sociality in scenes the world-over. A key theme adopted within this movement is the ‘tribe’, the discourse around which is multivalent, though here I focus on the transgressive dimensions of psytrance to which one is attached as a member of a tribe apart. The article provides detailed examination of the outlaw figure and sensibility in psytrance, illustrating how cultural producers –e.g. DJ-producers, label owners, scene writers, event management – facilitate the party vibe, and a distinct ‘psychedelic. or ‘freak’ identity via this trope. Among the chief icons of performance, prestige and tribalism sampled within psytrance music and culture, the outlaw is adapted from popular cultural sources (especially cinema) and redeployed as a means of dissolving and performing difference. The exploration of the outlaw conceit in what I call nano-media amplified by the producers of psytrance music illustrates how a psychedelic fiction is generated. Specific, although not exclusive, attention is given to Israeli producers, which offers comment on psytrance in Israel where this music is considered popular.

"Psychedelic trance music and culture (psyculture) is explored as a culture of exodus rooted in the seasonal dance party culture evolving in Goa, India, over the 1970s/1980s, and revealing a heterogeneous exile sensibility shaping Goa trance and psyculture from the 1990s/2000s. That is, diverse transgressive and transcendent expatriations would shape the music and aesthetics of Goa/psytrance. Thus, resisting circumscription under singular heuristic formulas, Goa trance and its progeny are shown to be internally diverse. This freak mosaic was seasoned by expatriates and bohemians in exile from many countries, experienced in world cosmopolitan conurbations, with the seasonal DJ-led trance dance culture of Goa absorbing innovations in EDM productions, performance and aesthetics throughout the 1980s before the Goa sound and subsequent festival culture emerged in the mid-1990s. Rooted in an experimental freak community host to the conscious realisation and ecstatic abandonment of the self, psyculture is heir to this diverse exile experience.
"

Connecting three generations of music enthusiasts, Goa Gil is an imposing figure in the world of psychedelic trance. If the title of his 2007 compilation registers intent, he is a Worldbridger. Bristling with motifs of world sacred sites and appropriated "tribal" icons, with Gil seated cross-legged upon the apex of a Mayan temple, the album's cover artwork confabulates the physical, spiritual and cultural worlds he professes to bridge. Leading world-wide "trance dance rituals" Goa Gil operates under the guise of a "techno-shaman", a "cyber-baba" and a selector/mixer of traditions whose rituals are reputedly timeless and universal. But this intent is performed amid a highly mobile lifestyle spread across diverse psychedelic music cultures, scenes and sensibilities in discrete times and places. From the 1960s Haight-Ashbury psychedelic rock scene, to the psychedelic jam band scene on Anjuna beach, Goa, India, in the 1970s, to the adoption of electronic music in a DJ-led scene in the 1980s, to the birth of "Goa trance" in the 1990s, to his selection, production and performance of dark psychedelic trance in the 1990s/2000s onwards, DJ Goa Gil's life spans a breathtaking panorama of this-worldly psychedelic scenes. Gil is a freak bricoleur, an anomalous figure who evades modest circumscription. A Californian exile and sanctioned Shaivite practitioner with a professional hankering for darkpsy (as a DJ-producer), a hippie broker of the "Cosmic Spirit" and a post-apocalyptic punk, he is a spiritual authority and cultural outlaw touring the planet with an improbable mix of semiotic and sonic baggage. What's more, celebrated as a champion of the "Goa vibe" or derogated as an accomplice to its demise, Gil is a controversial figure who is the embodiment of considerable ambivalence. This article explores this holiest of anomalies in the world of DJing.