Graham St John
Soulclipse 2006. Photos by dead-dreamer, and Superblasta
Since the early 1990s, what became known as psytrance (or psychedelic trance) has flourished with scenes proliferating around the globe. Global Trance Culture will be the achievement of over ten years of research experience in the world of psytrance.
Drawing on the author's fieldwork experience at events and within scenes on five continents, the book explores the interfacing of youth culture, religion and technology in a multi-sited nomadic ethnography. A critical ethnography of global psytrance culture, the book investigates the reputed religious and spiritual claims perculiar to this "trance-national" dance phenomenon. The book addresses specific countercultural and popular musical tensions informing the evolution of psytrance. In particular, it explores the ecstatic (or expressive) and visionary (reflexive) pathways travelled, amplified and remixed by the "trance community". With chapters addressing experiential spirituality, techno-tribalism, neotrance, extreme and conscious rituals, and technological utopias and revitalization movements, the project affords insights on popular trance, neoshamanism, new music technologies and religion, and alternative cultural movements offering a useful contribution to the anthropology of contemporary religion.
This comprehensive study of psytrance draws upon a multi-sited ethnography to chart the role of new technologies and non-traditional religion in the contemporary. Rooted in dance events held on the beaches of Goa, India, in the 1980s and incubated within ‘Goa Trance’ scenes in San Francisco and London in the mid 1990s, psytrance (or psychedelic trance) would become a truly global cultural phenomenon by the turn of the millennium. Inheriting substantively from the earlier counterculture and sharing music production technologies, DJ techniques and a dance party culture in common with escalating club and rave scenes, Trance would develop its own sonic and visual aesthetics, organizations and events, discourse and practice. By 2005, it enjoyed massive international appeal among an alternative, highly mobile and techno-savvy subculture. Networked with the assistance of the internet, psytrance music, style, fashion and discourse are evident in scenes the world over.
Offering valuable insights on the character of dance and religion in contemporary life, the book pursues several lines of inquiry:
How do the ecstatic and visionary dimensions of the counterculture manifest within psytrance culture?
What is the character of ‘trance’ within this culture?
What is the self-identified "tribal" character of psytrance organizations, music and culture; and how might the recognition that psytrance is inherently self-experiential further delineate this tribalism?
What is the role of cultural appropriation (e.g. of indigenous cultures and Eastern religions) within this culture?
If and how does psytrance constitute ritual? What might it mean to squat the liminal and defer what, in his study of rites of passage, van Gennep called "aggregation"?
Why has this sophisticated movement become a widely assumed catalyst for liberation, freedom and becoming?
Boom 2006. Photo by thehospages.com
About the Author
Dr Graham St John is a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary research interest in contemporary electronic dance music cultures, counterculture, ritual and performance. He has published widely in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, Australian studies and studies in religion. He recently edited Rave Culture and Religion ( New York: Routledge, 2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor. Altona: Common Ground (download FreeNRG e-book). He is author of Technomad: Global Raving Counterculture, and editor of Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn, 2008).