Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview1статья из журнала
Аннотация: Abstract This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially 'ecstasy' and 'trance'); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the 'vibe' and 'tribes'); and EDMC as a new 'spirituality of life'. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as 'ineffectual' and 'tragic', and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an 'implosion of meaning', recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of 'religion'. Keywords: raveyouth subculturedance culturetranceneo-triberitual Notes 1. I would like to thank Gordon Lynch and François Gauthier for their comments on an earlier draft. 2. By which I mean the rave and club developments evolving from disco, house, garage and techno and whose progeny includes jungle and psy-trance dance cultures. 3. There were other reasons why dance would be neglected. Social dance, and embodied pleasures more generally failed to conform to accepted understandings of 'the political' (see Dyer 1990 Dyer, R. 1990. "In defence of disco". In On record: rock, pop and the written word, Edited by: Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. 410–8. New York: Pantheon. [Google Scholar]; McClary 1994 McClary, S. 1994. "Same as it ever was: Youth culture and music". In Microphone fiends: Youth music, youth culture, Edited by: Ross, A. and Rose, T. 29–40. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Pini 1997 Pini, M. 1997. "Cyborgs, nomads and the raving feminine". In Dance in the city, Edited by: Thomas, H. 111–29. London: Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 113–114) and faced general neglect from a rationalist sociological paradigm (Ward 1993 Ward, A. 1993. "Dancing in the dark: Rationalism and the neglect of social dance". In Dance, sex, and gender, Edited by: Thomas, H. 16–33. St Martin's Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Music scholars (especially historians of jazz and rock) had regarded dance as a seductive force weakening critical faculties (Straw 2001 Straw, W. 2001. "Dance music". In The Cambridge companion to pop and rock, Edited by: Frith, S., Straw, W. and Street, J. 158–75. Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 159). Cultural studies is also largely 'text based' with analyses of popular culture concerned with 'verbal or visual cultural products, not kinaesthetic actions', and academia is noted to have possessed an 'aversion to the material body, as well as its fictive separation of mental and physical production' (Desmond 1997 Desmond, J. 1997. "Embodying difference: issues in dance and cultural studies". In Meaning in motion: new cultural studies of dance, 29–54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar], 30). 4. Thus 'when instituted forms no longer provide for the vividness of the instituent experience we witness the appearance of savage quests for the vivid fervour of the instituant that shun any regard for domestication' (Gauthier 2004a, 67; see also Fontaine 1996 Fontaine, A. 1996. Raver, Paris: Anthropos. [Google Scholar]; Gauthier 2001 Gauthier, F. 2001. Consumation. La religiosité des raves. Religiologiques, 24: 175–97. [Google Scholar], 175–197). The perennial dialectic (instituant/instituted) indigenous to Bastide's theory possesses intriguing parallels to the processual paradigm (anti-structure/structure) of Victor Turner. 5. Also underlying Sylvan's approach is the argument that rave is a beneficiary of a 'hidden religious sensibility' transmitted from West African possession religions via African American secular entertainment musics (especially blues) appropriated and translated by white youth who, beginning with rock, were raised 'with an experience of the West African spiritual sensibility, albeit in a radically transformed context' (2002, 68). Other commentators articulate EDMC's inheritance of African-American gospel musical traditions (see Fikentscher 2000 Fikentscher, K. 2000. 'You better work!' Underground dance music in New York City, Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press. [Google Scholar]; O'Hagan 2004 O'Hagan, C. 2004. "Sounds of the London underground: Gospel music and baptist worship in the UK garage scene". In Rave culture and religion, Edited by: St John, G. 185–96. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Rietveld 1998 Rietveld, H. 1998. This is our house: House music, cultural spaces and technologies, Aldershot: Ashgate. [Google Scholar]), with O'Hagan discussing parallels in the roles of MCs and Baptist preachers. Other commentators make much of a generalised inheritance: of 'non-Western traditions of salvation and release through communal music and dance' leading to the 'exquisite integration of the erotic and the spiritual' in house and its successors (Apollo 2003 Apollo. 2003. Electronic dance music and social liberation: Sacred sweet wicked ecstasy. Fifth Estate, 22 Summer [Google Scholar], 24); or of a pagan heritage passing into contemporary 'trance', or 'psy-trance', culture (see ENRG 2001 Enrg. 2001. "Psychic sonics: Tribadelic dance trance-formation". In FreeNRG: Notes from the edge of the dance floor, Edited by: St John, G. 157–69. Altona: Common Ground. [Google Scholar]). 6. While there is a desire to render rave-oriented dance forms as 'ritual', 'shamanic', 'cultic', or 'tribal' (for example, Fritz 1999 Fritz, J. 1999. Rave culture: An insider's overview, Canada: Smallfry Press. [Google Scholar], 168–177; Saunders and Doblin 1996, 35) without providing detail about how this might be so, others make useful contributions. Broaching 'ceremonial constants', Tramacchi (2004 Tramacchi, D. 2004. "Entheogenic dance ecstasis: Cross-cultural contexts". In Rave culture and religion, Edited by: St John, G. 125–44. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) draws parallels between 'community focused entheogenic dance rituals' in three cultures (Mexican Huichol, Barasana of Columbia and the Fang and Metsogo of Gabon West Africa) and psychedelic dance cultures. In a less favourable comparison, Gore (1995, 137–138) claims that, compared with trance or possession states within cults of the Southern Nigerian Bini, rave is 'a rite of passage leading nowhere … It is a ritual without content, an ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. It is a game of chance; its trance is aleatory and dizzying'. 7. As it is loosely in Malbon (1999 Malbon, B. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, ecstasy and vitality, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), and more thoroughly in Gauthier (2004b Gauthier, F. 2004b. "Raves et espaces urbain: Bricolage d'un rite de passage à l'âge adulte?". In L'imaginaire urbain et les jeunes: La ville comme espace d'expériences identitaires et créatrices, Edited by: Boudreault, P.-W. and Parazelli, M. 237–57. Québec: Presses de l'Université du Québec. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], forthcoming, 2005 Gauthier, F. 2005. "Orpheus and the underground: Raves and implicit religion, a critical analysis". In Journal for the study of Implicit Religion Vol. 8, 3 [Google Scholar]). 8. See St John (2007 St John, G. 2007. "Trance tribes and dance vibes: Victor Turner and electronic dance culture". In Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance, Edited by: St John, G. New York: Berghahn. [Google Scholar]) for a discussion of the way (post)rave constitutes not so much a transitional/'liminal' moment, but a transitional world for contemporary youth. As 'heterotopia', EDM events can be indeterminate transitional zones (see Gauthier 2005 Gauthier, F. 2005. "Orpheus and the underground: Raves and implicit religion, a critical analysis". In Journal for the study of Implicit Religion Vol. 8, 3 [Google Scholar], 26; St John 2001a St John, G., ed. 2001a. "Alternative cultural heterotopia and the liminoid body: Beyond Turner at ConFest". In The Australian Journal of Anthropology Vol. 12, 47–66. (1) [Google Scholar], 2004a St John, G. 2004a. "The difference engine: Liberation and the rave imaginary". In Rave culture and religion, Edited by: St John, G. 19–45. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 33–34). 9. Maffesoli is especially influential within the Francophone academic community (see Gaillot 1999 Gaillot, M. 1999. Multiple meaning techno: An artistic and political laboratory of the present, Paris: Editions des Voir. [Google Scholar]; Gauthier and Ménard 2001 Gauthier, F. and Ménard, G., eds. 2001. "Technoritualités religiosité rave". In Religiologiques Vol. 24, [Google Scholar]; Hampartzoumian 1999 Hampartzoumian, S., ed. 1999. "Effervescence techno". In Sociétés, Vol. 65, Paris and Bruxelles: De Boeck. [Google Scholar], 2004 Hampartzoumian, S. 2004. Effervescence techno ou la communauté trans(e)cendantale, Paris: L'Harmattan, Coll. Logiques sociales. [Google Scholar]; Petiau 2001 Petiau, A., ed. 2001. "Pulsation techno, pulsation sociale". In Sociétés, Vol. 72, Paris and Bruxelles: De Boeck. [Google Scholar]; Racine 2002 Racine, É. 2002. Le phénomène techno: Clubs, raves, free-parties, Paris: Imago. [Google Scholar]). 10. Unlike the Baudrillardian moment of EDMC research where 'ecstasy' constituted the playful relationship between signifiers without material reference, Landau's 'ecstasy' attends to the corporeality, and thus the depth, of 'meaninglessness', reminding us that, as an experience of de-subjectification outside language ideology and representation, such must be meaning-less. The experience pursued by ravers (with or without the use of Ecstasy), is conveyed to be inherently ineffable, which is not to suggest that such an experience is not attributed meaning subsequently. 11. Gore (1995, 136) points out that, as in possession rituals of the Southern Nigerian cult to the god Olukan, 'apprenticeship' (psycho-physical training) is a prerequisite for achieving alternate states in rave. 12. That participants in a self-authentication-seeking 'trance' scene sometimes indulge in a kind of polymorphous 'primitive communism' implicating living indigenous cultures, is a story of possible primitivism, cultural appropriation and homogenisation deserving further research (see Fatone 2004). 13. For discussions of EDMC events contextualising the search for legitimacy and belonging within a settler society (Australia), see St John (2001b St John, G. and St John, G., eds. 2001b. "Doof! Australian post rave culture". In FreeNRG: Notes from the edge of the dance floor, 9–36. Altona: Common Ground. [Google Scholar], 2005 St John, G. 2005. "Outback vibes: Sound systems on the road to legitimacy". In Postcolonial studies: Culture, politics, economy Vol. 8, 321–336. 3[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Luckman (2003, 324–325). 14. This 'mystical consciousness' involves an individual relationship with the cosmos, a profound sense of interdependence with the world, triggered by psychedelic, or 'entheogenic', substances to use the non-pejorative and non-ethnocentric term recommended by Ott (1993 Ott, J. 1993. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources and history, Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Co. [Google Scholar]) referring to the 'engendering of god within' (see Partridge 2003 Partridge, C. 2003. "Sacred chemicals? Psychedelic drugs and mystical experience". In Mysticisms East and West: Studies in mystical experience, Edited by: Partridge, C. and Gabriel, T. 98–131. Carlisle: Paternoster. [Google Scholar]). 15. A techno-paganism developing within this complex cultural (re)constructionism has achieved notoriety in the popular techno-pharmacological millenarianism of Terence McKenna (1991 McKenna, T. 1991. The archaic revival: Speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, Shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history, San Francisco: Harper. [Google Scholar]). See St John (2004b St John, G. 2004b. "Techno millennium: Dance, ecology and future primitives". In Rave culture and religion, Edited by: St John, G. 213–35. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) for discussion of the techno-millenarian trajectories of McKenna and Fraser Clark. 16. Constituting a significant bridge from the Eastern-influenced 1960s counterculture and the 1990s electronic dance culture, sannyasins belonging to the Osho movement (of Bhagwan Rajneesh, who set up a 'meditation resort' in Poona near Mumbai, India) are implicated in the introduction of MDMA (which they used for meditation and body therapies) to clubbers in Ibiza in the late 1980s (D'Andrea 2004 D'Andrea, A. 2004. "Global nomads: Techno and new age as transnational countercultures in Ibiza and Goa". In Rave culture and religion, Edited by: St John, G. 236–55. London/New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], 244; see also this issue). This primary juncture in a 'freak ethnoscape' provides an exemplary moment in the Easternisation of the West observed by Campbell (1999 Campbell, C. 1999. "The easternisation of the West". In New religious movements: Challenge and response, Edited by: Wilson, B. and Cresswell, J. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 17. Although, as contributors to this edition (Till; Sai-chun Lau) make clear, contemporary EDMC is also a context for alternative Christian groups to express, and extend, their faith.
Год издания: 2006
Авторы: Graham St John
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Scottish journal of religious studies
Ключевые слова: Music History and Culture, Asian Culture and Media Studies, Social and Cultural Dynamics
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 7
Выпуск: 1
Страницы: 1–25