Projects
Photo by Jonathan Carmichael (aka Ronny Simulacrum)
Current Projects
Fear and Raving: Panic and Desire in Electronic Dance Music Culture.
The brutal repressive measures by states against electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) appear to have become more prevalent in recent times. Notorious among them was an incident on August 20 2005 which saw a large scale police paramilitary operation mounted south of Salt Lake City, Utah, to disperse the Drum 'n Bass festival "Versus II". There were many arrests and widespread reports of police brutality in the home of the so called "RAVE Act". Alongside tightening regulatory standards, public order acts and "quality of life taskforces", violent state responses have impacted a range of EDMCs around the world. Often justified as a means to protect 'vulnerable youth', and as disiplinary measures (i.e. to preserve values and moral order), interventions by official culture on transgressive dance formations possess a long legacy in the west.
This project investigates the transit of this legacy into the present, seeking motivations for an empassioned war on contemporary dance music cultures. At the same time, the project addresses the flip-side of this historical drama; those who pursue the collective ecstatic dance experience within the context of electronic music scenes, organisations, and festivals globally. Not only does EDMC constitute one of the most irrepressible forms of popular ecstasis and trance, of popular carnival, but various groups and networks mobilize in the face of moral and juridical pressures ranged against them.
Addressing the contemporary adversaries of dance, exploring the tensions unfolding at a range of global sites contested by those with competing investments and commitments, this project explores how EDMC has become an impassioned interface for the politics of fear and poetics of desire performed within contemporary culture.
Global Tribe: Religion, Technology and Psytrance
Since the early 1990s, what became known as psytrance (or psychedelic trance) has flourished with scenes proliferating around the globe. Forthcoming with Blackwell, Global Tribe is 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 peculiar to this transnational 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, cosmic liminality, the dark carnival, 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 an important contribution to the anthropology of contemporary religion.
The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (edited collection, Routledge 2010, forthcoming)
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 scenes, neotribes and the Internet, the carnivalesque and the aesthetics of nonsense, festivals and the logics of sacrifice, and other topics besides, Psytrance: Local Scenes, Global Culture will strike interest across anthropology, sociology, and studies in popular music, culture, media, history and religion.
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox 2009)
Now published, a cultural history of global electronic dance music countercultures, Technomad offers a detailed exposition of the pleasurable and activist trajectories of post-rave. The book documents an emerging network of techno-tribes, investigating their pleasure principles and cultural politics. Attending to sound system culture, electro-humanitarianism, secret sonic societies, teknivals and other gatherings of the techno-tribes, intentional parties, revitalisation movements and counter-colonial interventions, Technomad explores how the dance party has been harnessed for transgressive and progressive ends, for manifold freedoms. Seeking freedom from moral prohibitions and standards, pleasure in rebellion, refuge from sexual and gender prejudice, exile from oppression, rupturing aesthetic boundaries, re-enchanting the world, reclaiming space, fighting for "the right to party", and responding to a host of critical concerns, electronic dance music cultures are multivalent sites of resistance.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic, netographic and documentary research, Technomad charts the post-rave trajectory through various local sites and global scenes, with each chapter attending to important developments in the techno counterculture: e.g. Spiral Tribe, teknivals, psytrance, Burning Man, Reclaim the Streets, Earthdream. The book offers a nuanced theory of resistance to assist understanding of these developments. Written in an accessible style, this cultural history of hitherto uncharted territory will be of interest to students of cultural, performance, music, media, and new social movement studies, along with enthusiasts of dance culture and popular politics.
Past Projects
Performing the Country: Youth Culture and Post-Settler Identity. A research project on contemporary performative contexts for the (re)production of 'Australianness' in the wake of historical and ecological re-evaluations. A major component of this research was a study of new youth formations and activist performance culture in
Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature As coordinator for Religions, Nature and Culture in Oceania, from 2001-2003, I was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature.
Rave Culture and Religion An edited collection published by Routledge, 2004 (now in Paperback).
FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor An edited collection (in print and fre-ebook) on Australian doof dance culture.
Writings on Earthdream2000 A technomadic festival around Australia (Earthdream links here).
The ConFest thesis The anthropology PhD thesis on the Australian alternative cultural event (other related digressions also here).
Edgecentral Blog An occasional blog is kept here on my nomadic wanderings.