No abstract

No abstract

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 h e n . 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. THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY of Australia's alternative lifestyle movement,I this article undertakes a twofold revision of the Tumerian project. ConFest is regarded as: (a) an alternative cultural heterotopia, a matrix of performance zones occupied by variously complementary and competing neotribes and identity clusters, and; (b) a realm of liminoid embodiment-a pleasurescape of transgressive sensuousness and carnal sociality. I explore such dimensions through attention to pilgrimage/tourism research, Foucault's inquiry into space and the ideas of Michel Maffesoli and Hakim Bey. Through a detailed investigation of a contested and sensuous counter-community, drawing upon contemporary social and cultural theory, I reconfigure the limen to propose a post-structuralist heuristic of public events.

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'.

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 rave; youth subculture; dance culture; trance; neo-tribe; ritual phenomenon would soon go global. Youth were committed to being 'on one', getting 'loved up' and becoming 'ardcore' in abandoned warehouses, in open fields and clandestine clubs. The tabloid media had labelled this commitment 'rave', the parent culture waged a moral panic, the scene was legislated against, and cultural and music studies scholars were either unprepared or uninterested. The discipline most likely to make sense of all this (given its early investigation of youth subcultures) is rooted in a cultural Marxist tradition ill-equipped to consider questions of play and the body, and indeed offering little insight into religious experience or spiritual life within youth cultures. As Angela McRobbie (1990) noted in 1980, dance-the domain of girls and young women in Britain in the 1970s-was dismissed by the mostly male researchers at Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), who enlisted heroic, spectacular and aggressive subcultures to support their models of class 'resistance', however styleladen, 'imaginary', 'inconsequential' and ultimately 'tragic' such turned out (Clarke et al. 1976;Hebdige 1979). 3 If disco was dismissed because of its remoteness from the heroic-tragic model, and dance dismissed within cultural and music research paradigms devoted to the verbal, aural and visual, then how would commentators respond to acid house and the (post)rave phenomenon? Lamenting rave as its 'pleasures come not from resistance but surrender ', Stuart Cosgrove (1988, in Melechi 1993) supplied the answer. But while critics were tu...