Technoshamanism: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture Scott R. Hutson Introduction This paper explores the rave as a form of socially produced spiri- tual healing. Raves come in many different forms, but can be defined generally as all-night dance parties featuring loud “techno” music.' Though the precursors to the rave are many and diverse, as we will see below, raves as I have defined them became important landmarks in British subcultural topography in the mid to late 1980s. The earliest raves were underground, often illegal phenomena, taking place in and around London in venues like warehouses, outdoor fields, and clubs with tightly restricted door policies, such as Shoom and The Project. By the early 1990s, raves had emerged from the underground and reached the center of British youth culture. The scale was “huge and ever increasing” (McRobbie 168) as the raves became a fully licensed, multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry (Thornton 15). Following their growth in England, raves gained popularity on the Continent and in the United States, though to a much smaller degree than in Great Britain. To those familiar with raves, “techno” refers to one of many differ- ent types of music common at raves. For those not familiar with raves, “techno” is a catch-all term for any type of “electronic” music domi- nated by percussion rhythms and averaging about 120 beats per minute. “Electronic” refers to the fact that most techno (in the catch-all sense) is produced synthetically by mixing beats from drum machines with other prerecorded sounds. In the late 1990s, mainstream record companies often replaced the general term “techno” with “electronica.” At raves, disc jockeys (DJs) use two turntables and a mixer to play vinyl techno tracks in continuous succession. Within the catch-all category techno, there are various types of dance music, such as house, trance, drum ’n bass, speed garage, trip hop, and big beat, which were popular in 1998, when this paper was first drafted. However, the different genres of techno evolve rapidly: drum ’n bass, big beat, and speed garage did not exist five years ago, in 1993. 5354 + Popular Music and Society As of 1999, the traditional rave—semilegal and located in make- shift, secretive locales—is a rarity. In cities with a long history of raves, the rave “scene” has fragmented into many subscenes, usually centered around a variety of techno music. For éxample, a fan of drum ’n bass living in San Francisco can find, on any night of the week, a dance club devoted exclusively to drum ’n bass. The drum ’n bass scene, though it evolved out of earlier raves more than anything else, could in fact be considered closer to the hip hop subculture than to rave subculture since it features two traditional ingredients of the hip hop scene: rapping and break dancing. Though the rave might be out of date in some places, rave’s various offshoots retain features that were central to earlier raves and are critical to my analysis: large groups of people dancing for long periods of time and occasionally reaching ecstatic experience. Much of the academic discourse on raves focuses on the rave as a form of escape from the social order. Writers who support this position argue from a “neoconservative” (Foster 2) postmodern perspective which emphasizes the prominence of nostalgia and meaninglessness in modern amusements. Though I find this “rave-as-empty-joy-of-disap- pearance” thesis both plausible and informative, it is incomplete because it ignores the poignant and meaningful spiritual experiences that ravers say they get from raves. Based on testimonials of the rave experience, I analyze rave as a form of healing. References to shamanism and catch- phrases about self-empowerment and spiritual healing permeate raver discourse and invite an anthropological perspective similar to that applied to nonbiomedical healing in small scale, nonwestern societies. In this paper, I summarize and critique the interpretation of rave as escapism, present materials that suggest that meaningful spiritual trans- formations occur at raves, and, with a symbolic anthropological analysis (Geertz, Turner), attempt to explain why raves are described in such therapeutic terms, Specifically, I argue that the DJ acts much like a shaman who, aided by key symbols, guides the ravers on an ecstatic journey to paradise—a presocial state of nondifferentiation and commu- nitas. It is this return to paradise through altered states of consciousness which brings spiritual ease to ravers facing an anxious and uncertain society. Finally, after presenting these arguments, I present three lines of reasoning that challenge my interpretations of spiritual healing and dis- cuss how each of these challenges may be accommodated. A small body of scholarly literature (Tagg, Russell), accompanied by a modest quantity of popular writing (Rushkoff, McKay), focuses on the rave as a form of resistance. According to this literature, raves con- tinue in the tradition of countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s by rejecting the dominant social order of capitalism. The “rave asTechnoshamanism + 55 resistance” stance is a minority position that has been successfully cri- tiqued elsewhere (I encourage readers to consult Redhead [The End, “The End”], Hesmondhalgh, McRobbie, and Thornton). I do not have the space to reproduce these critiques in full. Nevertheless, before aban- doning the topic, I will present a brief sketch of the direction a rebuttal might take. Many problems arise when post-1970s youth subcultures such as rave are given the same “countercultural” label that was attrib- uted to the “folk devils” that came before them (mods, teddies, rockers, hippies, punks). First, the British sensationalist press was heavily (though not solely) responsible for generating the type of public and legal opinion that placed the rave in such a historical lineage of trouble- makers. Second, the notion of a strict dichotomy between “mainstream” and “counterculture” has been shown to erode under close scrutiny (Thornton, McRobbie). Third, the commercialization of youth cultures, said to be full-blown by the 1980s, handicaps the attempt to classify ravers as countercultural subversives. Whereas the symbolic warfare against “mainstream” consumerism waged by punks of the late 1970s teflected their predominantly working-class backgrounds (Hebdige), the consumer choices of youth cultures in the 1980s and thereafter can be said to have reflected the dominant value system of hypercapitalism (Redhead, “The End” 1, and cf. McRobbie). Rave subculture exhibited a paradoxical “hedonism in hard times” in which self-expression pro- ceeded through extravagant consumption (Redhead, “The End” 4; Thornton 15). The fact that this sort of consumption generated billions of dollars of yearly revenue in Great Britain alone suggests that a counter- cultural, anticommercialist stance is untenable without further research into the microeconomics of the rave. Despite the apparent commercialism, Tagg and McKay have argued that an antiindividualist, anticapitalist aesthetic pervades rave subculture, as seen in the structure of techno music and the style of dance, thus qual- ifying it as a legitimate heir to the 1960s countercultural movements. However, the antiindividualism noted by Tagg is found only in certain genres of techno music (Hesmondhalgh), and the antiindividualist style of dance—dancing while facing nobody in particular—is only occasion- ally observed at raves. Though I do not support the “rave as resistance” argument, there are similarities between rave subculture and previous subcultures. In partic- ular, ravers in both Britain and the United States share much with Ameri- can hippies of the 1960s and consciously acknowledge certain influences. Some of the major features shared both by ravers and hip- pies—spiritual journey and altered states of consciousness—are main concerns of this paper. I have therefore chosen to refer to aspects of56 + Popular Music and Society 1960s subcultures throughout the paper in the hopes that such a compar- ative perspective will add historical depth and help sharpen our under- standing of the rave. Research Methods and Demography of Subject Population The arguments presented in this paper are based on a mixture of participant observation at raves in the Nashville and San Francisco met- ropolitan areas, a limited number of semi-structured interviews in both cities, testimonials posted publicly on the Internet from 1993 to 1997, participation on listservs based in Washington, D.C., and the Southeast- ern United States, and techno discography. The testimonials, which supply most of the colorful quotes reproduced in this paper, were posted mostly by people living in undisclosed parts of Great Britain and the United States. The unfortunate consequence of using web-based testimo- nials to illustrate my points is that the voices I sample can be pinpointed in time and in cyberspace but not in real geographical space. The partici- pants on the listservs are mostly from Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, Nashville, and Birmingham, Alabama. Demographi- cally, my subject population—those who attend raves, often called “ravers” (Mooney)—is mostly between the ages of 15 and 25, thus making rave a “youth” subculture (see Epstein). The socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of ravers are not nearly as predictable as their age. For example, early raves in Great Britain attracted people of various races, mostly from the working classes (Reynolds, Generation 64). This mixed-race tradition continues today in the UK Drum ’n Bass scene (Reynolds, Generation 259). At the other extreme, in the midwestern United States, most ravers are white and middle class. Though slightly more males than females attend raves, the organizers, producers, and musicians behind the rave scene are predominantly male (McRobbie 168; Tomlinson 198; Reynolds, Generation 274; Richard and Kruger 169). The Rave as Postmodern Disappearance Taking a stance typical of neoconservative postmodernism, various scholars (Melechi; Rietveld; Redhead, “Politics”) have argued that rave is a culture of abandonment, disengagement, and disappearance. To Fredric Jameson (60, 64), postmodernism is typified by the disappear- ance of the subject. As both ravers and analysts frequently point out (McKay 110; Melechi 33-34; Rushkoff 121; Russell 128-29; Tagg 219), raves lack individuality and subjectivity. Whereas performers at other music events, rock concerts for example, are elevated on a stage and illu- minated by spotlights, rave DJs are rarely subjectified so eminently:Technoshamanism + 57 there is no stage, the lights do not focus on anything in particular, and the dancers supposedly do not face the DJ. There are no “stars” at a rave. Furthermore, DJs at raves are not even performers in the traditional sense reserved for musicians who play guitars and other “authentic” “live” instruments. A DJ’s performance consists of mixing prerecorded music, much of which was originally composed not with traditional instruments like drums or piano but with replicas of their sounds synthe- sized by computers. Generalizing on the nature of techno music, Melechi declares that “the presence of a founding voice [the subject] is sacrificed into a digitally complex wall of reconstituted sound” (34). MDMA (known chemically as 3, 4 Methylenedioxymethampheta- mine), the drug of choice at raves for most of the 1990s, also helps erase subjectivity. In a comprehensive study of the effects of MDMA (more widely known as Ecstasy, but also referred to as E, Adam, and X), Saun- ders concluded that the drug breaks down individual inhibitions and sub- dues the dominance of the ego.” Rave is also a disappearance in terms of space and time. By holding raves in secretive, out-of-the-way places at times when the rest of the population is usually asleep, ravers slip into an existential void where the gaze of authority and the public do not penetrate. In sum, through music, dance, and drugs, ravers create a seductive void and experience great joy in erasing their subjectivity (Melechi 33-34; Rietveld). Ravers fill the void of subjectivity with a collage of fragments, the archetypal form of postmodernist expression (Jameson 64). According to Connor, “sampling,” in which DJs and producers use advanced audio technology to appropriate and combine pieces of music previously recorded by other musicians, “provides the clearest exemplification of the postmodernist aesthetic of the fragment” (207). The result is what Reynolds (Generation 41-45) calls “Sampladelia,” a disorienting hetero- topia of disembedded and recontextualized fragments. Recycling, as seen in sampling’s reuse of older music, is also symp- tomatic of the postmodern condition. With the decline of the high mod- ernist ideology of style, the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but the past (Jameson 65). Eco and Baudrillard illustrate this point in their interpretations of America. According to them, in the 1970s and 1980s, a fin de siécle nostalgia prompted a touristic desire to escape the present and admire disorderly collages of simulated, “better than real” pasts. The result, exemplified by wax museums and the Hearst Castle, was a culture of roadside pastiche—a cultural void in which tourists cruise through an uncontrolled proliferation of meaningless objects. Redhead argues that rave culture is also a culture of tourism. Sampling is a perfect manifestation of both chronological and geographic tourism, as58 + Popular Music and Society DJs pillage samples from the entire historical spectrum of recorded music and extract sounds from around the globe. Additionally, Melechi (30) and Russell (119) state that the very origins of rave were grounded in tourism. While on package vacations to the Balearic island of Ibiza, Spain, in the mid 1980s, British tourists flocked to fantasy theme night clubs where they danced all night long to a seductive hybrid of dance music called Balearic beat. Back in London in the late 1980s, the rave originated as a restaging of Mediterranean tourism (Reynolds, Genera- tion 58-59). The London raves condensed the jouissance of a fortnight’s vacation into a single night or a weekend, DJs played Balearic beat (among other things), and ravers wore beach clothes (Melechi 30). The rave thus started with tourists abroad, and became a form of tourism itself where people could visit Ibiza in simulation without having to leave the country. More than a simulation, however, the artificiality of the recreation recalls Plato’s idea of the simulacrum: an identical copy of something that never really existed (Jameson 66). This artificiality is in fact noticed by ravers themselves: “The experience of rave grew out of dissatisfaction with the outside world, so an enclosed space was created . .. an artificial community, an artificial experience that is so far from reality nothing can replace it.”? Beyond real, the rave experience is said to be hyperreal. In the post- modern aesthetic, a multiplicity of surfaces replaces singularity of depth (Jameson 62) in order to keep up with a never-ending appetite for more (Eco). The hyperreality of the rave is an overload of sensory surfaces. Musically, techno provides more beats per minute than most popular music, producing a throbbing wall of sound when played loud at a rave. Brilliant, flashing, spinning lights, lasers, and fluorescent glow sticks combine with wall projections of intricately detailed and explosively colored fractals to inundate one’s eyes (McKay 111). Sensually, taking MDMA overstimulates one’s sense of touch (Saunders). Dancing brings the body to exhaustion. Because raves continue throughout the night and sometimes all weekend, the overload is temporal as well: stimulation without end. In sum, the rave is an overwhelming yet depthless barrage of the senses that transforms the dance floor into a magical megasurface, “a text of excitement” (Maria Pini, cited in McRobbie 172) that gratifies arelentless and intense desire for pleasure. The fact that Hyperreal is the name of the main rave Internet resource may not be coincidental. Reynolds, the authoritative rave journalist, summarizes the post- modern interpretation elegantly: rave culture is “geared toward fascina- tion rather than meaning, sensation rather than sensibility; creating an appetite for impossible states of hyperstimulation” (“Rave Culture” 90). Rave is simply “massification, amplification, and excitation”; a cultureTechnoshamanism + 59 without content; “‘at its heart lies a keel of tautology . . . the celebra- tion of celebration,” a love of nothing (Reynolds, “Rave Culture” 86- 89). A critique of this interpretation might begin with the supposed dis- appearance of subjectivities. Ravers claim that raves are devoid of the individualist idol worship that characterizes rock stars, and this is often true: at many raves, as well as on the Internet, DJs, promoters, and ravers intermingle. However, it would be drastic to claim that DJs lose subjectivity. At raves I have attended, many people face the DJ when dancing (see also Reynolds, Generation 61); some even bow to the DJ. Also, different DJs have their own distinctive styles, some easily recog- nizable. The most popular DJs and producers (Prodigy, Chemical Broth- ers, Roni Size/Reprazent) have attained a status indistinguishable from that of a rock star, complete with music videos, appearances across the globe, and VIP lounges backstage (Salamon, “It’s Only” and “Size”). It is also difficult to claim that the average raver loses subjectivity. Though dance at raves may be less scrutinized than at late 1970s discotheques, ravers often make individualistic spectacles of themselves through flashy dancing, wild clothing, and fluorescent accessories. The “cultural tourism” idea—that the rave began when London par- tygoers simulated fantasy Mediterranean discotheques—is a singular, linear narrative that suppresses other pathways in what was more likely a complex and plural history. For example, in Northern England there was a tradition—entitled Northern Soul—of amphetamine-aided, all-night dance parties that preceded the Ibiza scene by two decades (Redhead, “Politics of Ecstasy” 3; “The End” 23). The rave scene can also be seen as a continuation of the English festival scene (McKay 11-45, 107). As we will shortly see, the music at these early British events was not pure Mediterranean Balearic beat, but heavily influenced by house music and techno from Chicago and Detroit, respectively, the latter of which had roots in German bands like Kraftwerk. Also, to claim that rave music is a pastiche of sound with no coher- ent structure undervalues the talent and overlooks the agency of the DJ. Though DJs may only patch prerecorded sounds together, they do so ina performance that is no less artistic or authentic than any live musician (Tagg). Those who see in rave music only “a futurist celebration and rev- elation of technology . . . that minimizes the human amongst its sonic signifiers” do not acknowledge the key contribution of styles of music like R&B that maintain a rhetoric of body and soul (Thornton 72-76). Though some genres of techno lack such human presence, the music at the first raves built heavily on R&B- and hip-hop-influenced house music from cities like Chicago.60 + Popular Music and Society The most important criticism is that the postmodern approach does not explore the meaningful personal experiences gained at raves. Bau- drillard believes that in the postmodern world of simulacra, meaning is exterminated (10). The joy of Disneyland, raves, and other such amuse- ments lies in their ability to satisfy, on a purely sensory level, our vora- cious appetite for surfaces. Once the surfaces are interpreted as meaningless simulacra, postmodernists often stop interpreting. As a result, such interpretations (see Baudrillard’s and Eco’s tourism in Amet- ica) are not very deep (Bruner), and certainly not “thick” in the anthro- pological sense (Geertz). To take the tave as an éxample, there is no consideration of the complex ways in which symbols and surfaces con- nect, intersect, and/or conflict with the praxis of the real human beings who construct and consume them. The lives of those who consume these surfaces are certainly not meaningless, yet those who write about the tave rarely solicit the voices and experiences of people who actually go to raves. In my research, presented in the next sections, I have attempted to attend to what ravers say about the rave, and conclude that the rave is indeed a very meaningful experience to inany of those who attend. Rave Spirituality and Technoshamanism Religious and spiritual references permeate rave discourse. DJs are often referred to as “high priests,”* while some ravers refer to MDMA as the holy sacrament (Saunders). Recall that in the 1960s, LSD was also referred to as a “sacrament” (Tillinghast 1991). In Nashville, a club known as the Church hosted raves by the name of “Friday Night Mass” (Mooney). Thornton (90) reports on a rave in Great Britain that was held inside a church; the DJs operated from the altar. One raver, commenting on a rave in Orlando, said that the DJ did not just make him boogey, he made him “see God.” More than just “surfaces,” for many participants raves are genuine spiritual experiences.‘ Take, for example, the follow- ing statement: “The rave is my church. It is a ritual to perform. I hold it sacred to my perpetuality . . . After every rave, I walk out having seen my soul and its place in eternity.”” Capitalizing on the spirituality of raves, Episcopal ministers in Sheffield, England, and in San Francisco have fused traditional services with raves, creating what they called “Planetary Mass.”* In California and Florida, Christian youth groups sponsor raves. Despite these crossovers with church organizations, many ravers distance themselves from orthodox religion. According to one raver, “raves should influence people metaphysically outside of the religious sphere. In actual effect, this is the creation of a . . . religion without theo- logical foundation or unified expression.” Another raver claimed: “[OnTechnoshamanism - 61 Sunday morning after the rave] I see people headed off to church dressed in their Sunday best and I just have to smile because I know that last night on the dance floor I felt closer to God than their church with all its doctrines and double standards will ever bring them.””"° Rave is thus seen as a more direct form of spirituality than organized religion. These ideas on religion closely echo the sentiments of what Newsweek in 1967 called “the more introspective hippies” (“Dropouts” 95). For them, religion was to be first-hand, personal, and immediate (and often stemming from LSD trips). Spirituality existed as a quest for meaning, not a formalized routine of social ritual (Hardwick 1973). But just what is it about the rave that makes people “see God,” or, as one British raver claimed, “sit-up and reevaluate all your ideas, thoughts, and incidents in your life?” To begin to figure out why ravers’ experi- ences are so meaningful, I examined the many references to “tech- noshamanism” in rave discourse and sought to understand the nature of the connection between raves and shamanism. Here, the interpretation departs again from the postmodernist approach, which would assume that there is no connection in the first place: shamanism would be interpreted as one of many free-floating fantasy signifiers, not tied to the signified in any way, and therefore not worthy of special analysis. “Technoshaman- ism” refers to the DJ’s role as “harmonic navigator,” “in charge of the group mood/mind” (Rushkoff 116, 121). The DJ “senses when it’s time to lift the mood, take it down, etc., just as the shaman did in the good ol’ tribal days.”" In other words, through a tapestry of mind-bending music, the DJ takes the dancers on an overnight journey, a psychic voyage, and, with one finger on the pulse of the adventure and the other on the turta- bles, gives the dancers a safe passage back down to earth” (McKay 111; Rushkoff 123; Thornton 65). The role of the technoshaman is consistent with the anthropological definition of a shaman, as given by Michael Harner: the shaman, as keeper of ecstatic techniques, helps his/her fol- lowers embark on a mental and emotional adventure that transcends their normal ordinary definition of reality (Harner, The Way xvii). The DJ’s capacity as a technoshaman is in fact used as an advertising ploy for major DJs like Doc Martin" and Superstar DJ Keoki." The connection between music and trance, however, is not straight- forward. In a survey of ethnographic accounts of trance, Rouget found that music can undoubtedly predispose.a subject to altered states of con- sciousness, but is neither ultimately nor solely responsible for such states. Against common misconceptions that music instigates trance, Rouget found cases in which music causes trance states to subside. Also, there is no specific musical instrument that is most suited for initiating trance states (in some cases, no instruments are needed at all), nor is62 + Popular Music and Society there a perfect tempo, rhythm, nor melody for initiating trance. The only consistent patterns that Rouget noted are that the music involved in trance often has abrupt breaks or changes in rhythm as well as increases in the beats per minute accompanied by crescendos. Based on routine observations that two people react very differently listening to the same music at the same event within the same culture, Rouget concludes that music does not have any straightforward, panhuman physiological effect on consciousness. Some ravers claim that techno music itself (especially genres like Goa and the suitably named “trance”) is enough to cause an ecstatic experience on its own: “It’s the only music that lifts you out of your body without putting something down your throat first.’"* Rouget’s research does not contradict such a claim: it simply cautions us not to generalize that the same music will affect all people in the same way. Likewise, Rouget’s conclusions about the relation between music and trance do not imply that music is unimportant. Rouget acknowledges that shamanic journeys like those of ravers are most definitely pursued through musical dimensions: “In maintaining the trance state, as opposed to triggering it, music constitutes an essential factor guaranteeing the continuity during the shamanistic voyage” (133). Rouget is merely skep- tical of universal explanations regarding music’s causal relation to trance. To more deeply explain the triggering of trance at raves, we need to look beyond music and the DJ. Lighting can contribute directly to the initiation of trance. Walter and Walter note that rhythmic light can cause visual sensations (color, pattern, or movement) unrelated to the stimulus, nonvisual sensations of kinaesthetic (swaying, spinning, jumping, ver- tigo) and cutaneous (prickling, tingling) varieties, emotional and physio- logical experiences (fear, anger, disgust, confusion, fatigue, pleasure), hallucinations, epileptic seizures, and “clinical psychopathic states” (63). Rhythmic lighting and other elaborate visual effects, such as spinning lasers and wall projections of fractals, are frequent components of raves in both areas of my participant observation. In fact, at a series of raves in San Francisco, the lighting team consciously programmed its displays with the goal of emotionally and physiologically affecting ravers. Dance must also be considered. Dance is perhaps more important than music or lighting because it is a motor activity. Dance directly affects one’s physi- ological state, and, as pure physical expenditure, dance is cathartic (Rouget 118). With dance, light, and music as techniques of ecstasy, ravers claim to have ecstatic experiences in which they enter “areas of consciousness not necessarily related to everyday ‘real’ world experiences.”"” MDMATechnoshamanism + 63 is said to aid in provoking trance, but it is not necessary (Reynolds, Gen- eration 8-9). In this sense, raves are similar to the trance dances of the Dobe Ju/"hoansi of Botswana (more popularly known as the Bushmen), which do not involve any mind-altering substances. In both cases, trance states are reached by a combination of music (the rhythmic drumming of the Ju/"hoansi is in fact similar to the drumbeat-driven pulse of techno), exhaustive all-night dancing, and flickering light (Lee, Katz). Connec- tions between raves and other ethnographic shamanic traditions also sur- face in the experiences recorded by ravers in trance, specifically of flying (Harner, “Hallucinogens”). In one particular “trip,” San Francisco resident Mark Heley claims to have visited the dead and transformed into a puma and then an eagle (Rushkoff 140), recalling the type of pere- grinations that shamans all over the world experience as part of initiation (liade, Shamanism). At this point, raves evoke comparison with Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests of 1965. In the acid tests, people reached hallucinogenic trance states triggered by LSD, listened to live music supplied by the Grateful Dead, and were exposed to changing lights and messages projected on the walls. We will return to comparisons between the rave and the acid tests later, but before continuing, two major points of contrast between the two events must be noted. First, as revealed in the title of the event, LSD was the defining feature of the Acid Tests, whereas drugs are optional at raves. The second, related point of contrast between the two events is that music, dance, and rhythmic lights at raves are used both to induce altered states of consciousness and to guide shamanic journeys, whereas music and light at the Acid Tests were used only to guide journeys already induced by LSD. As in the shamanic traditions of many nonwestern small scale soci- eties, the result of the ecstatic experience at raves is to create a frame- work for spiritual healing. Indeed, many ravers claim to have experienced a positive spiritual transformation after a rave. In ravers’ own words: “raves help get me to a newer, clearer state of consciousness.”"* “The energy of rave brings inner growth. Inner peace is found; time stops.” “Rave music makes you want to leave the club and get on with your life—took it in the eye and come back inspired, willing to envision change.”” Combining these themes of inner peace, self-empowerment, and enhanced consciousness, U.S. raver Rick M. states that “Raves build . ., an awareness that promotes inner peace, open-mindedness and free expression . . . [they] release anxieties, fears and worrying . . . Raves are a therapeutic unified gathering that can continuously help an individual learn more about strength and weaknesses, help channel energy toward positive directions in life."64 + Popular Music and Society Tribalism, Nondifferentiation, Communitas The passages quoted above affirm that meaningful transformations occur at raves: participants say that anxieties are released, minds are opened, inner peace is found, and people are empowered. We have some idea as to how ravers reach trance states, but the question of what pro- duces such positive transformations while in ecstasy, and why ravers bother to go to raves rather than just tripping on drugs at home, remains to be answered. I approach these questions by paying closer attention to how ravers describe their technoshamanic voyages. When ravers “leave the real world far behind,” what world do they seek? Where does the DJ—the “harmonic navigator”’—lead them? This question leads to a set of images and symbols that is prominent in raver discourse: idioms of tribalism. By tribalism, I refer to the common use of phrases like “go tribal, go deep,” or the practice of decorating websites with pictures of “primitives” with loincloths, headdresses, body paint, and spears.” The official Ibiza rave website is cluttered with images of Native American masks.” Music is often described as “tribal,” and one genre of rave music is called jungle. At some raves, like those sponsored in San Fran- cisco by the New Moon collective or the Gateway collective, pagan altars are set up, sacred images from “primitive” tribal cultures decorate the walls, and rituals of cleansing are performed over the turntables and the dance floor.* Ravers present the tribal world as a direct contrast to western civi- lization. “Somewhere along our historical chain of events, humankind took the wrong turn and kept on going.”* Ravers search for “a memory of a time before cement cages and aloof societies; a humanity that was part of the world, not apart from it.” Without this “root memory of bliss—the divine ecstasy . . . we miss the warmth of love that nurtures our soul.””’ In ravers’ opinions, the music facilitates the return to these forgotten “tribal” roots. “Techno music is similar to tribal rhythms: the pulsating drumbeats that have had people dancing for millennia. Western music has forgotten this theme . . . techno brings us back to our roots.” For one raver, techno and raves bring the soul back in touch with Gaia, mother earth.” The therapeutic journey to this primordial destination resembles what John Rocco sees as the neotranscendentalism of the 1950s Beats and the 1960s hippies, or, in the words of Kesey and his pranksters, going “Furthur.” More specifically, this neotranscendentalism consisted of “a way of seeing the self in relation to the universe that relied on intuition, a close relationship to nature, and a new emphasis on experi- ence” (10). The ravers also seek closer relations to nature and expeti-Technoshamanism + 65 ences unrestrained by the straitjacket of modernity. As we delve further into the rave experience, however, important differences between ravers and the bohemians of the 1950s and 1960s will present themselves. The composite and often incoherent image of utopialike small-scale societies that emerges from rave discourse certainly qualifies as a simu- lacrum; such “psychobabble” about the nature of noble savagery is a grossly romantic and idealized misrepresentation of premodern cultures. It would be easy to question the authenticity of the ravers’ cavalier appropriations of “tribal” images and buzzwords. But the question of authenticity is not so clear-cut: “It is always a false problem to want to restore the truth behind the simulacrum” (Jean Baudrillard, qtd. in Bruner 407). All cultures are caught in a process of inventing and rein- venting themselves (Bruner). From such a constructivist perspective, authenticity in the sense of fidelity to an original model is not quite so important, Given that idioms of tribalism clothe such poignant experi- ences, it might instead be more valuable to ask why the imagery of prim- itive paradise is so popular. When ravers are free to consume any part of the world’s cultural heritage, why do they choose a utopian global vil- lage as opposed to Colonial India or Dynastic Egypt? Answering this question aids in understanding the mechanism that might account for the healing that ravers claim to undergo. A.useful way to begin to answer is to consider what anthropologist Mircea Eliade, an authority on shamanism, has called the “myth of eter- nal return” (“Yearning”): the nostalgic desire to return to an original, pri- mordial, timeless land of perfect and total joy; a presexual age of innocence in which there is no social discord, no differentiation between the self and other. The rave might even compare to the primordial state of being in the womb, where maturity, individuation and separation have not yet occurred. The rave also matches the sensory experience of being in the womb. Raves are dark, humid (due to mistmakers), and warm (due to sweating dancers), while the dance beat replicates the mother’s heart- beat. The timeless, undifferentiated, presexual, joyful paradise theorized by Eliade closely matches ravers’ conceptions of their tribal roots and serves as a model destination for the rave journey. Beyond doubt raves are joyful, but they are also timeless: they are long and occur in the interstices—the “carnivalesque inversion” (Reynolds, Generation 66)— of normal time; in the nocturnal, dark void when others are asleep. Ravers even describe how time stops.” Raves are also non-differenti- ated, as I will shortly explain. Finally, and congruent to Eliade’s par- adise, they are presexual, a paradoxical characteristic that I will return to in the section on contradictions.66 + Popular Music and Society Nondifferentiation, unity, and solidarity figure prominently in my source material. Explaining unity, the third pillar of the rave motto PLUR (Peace Love Unity Respect), ravers state that “[rave] has the abil- ity and power of transcending all of the minor details, no matter what race, creed, or religion.”*! “We rave because boundaries must be broken.”” “English or French, Black or White, oldskool or newskool,”” openness and inclusion are part of the official attitude of a rave.* Once ravers transcend individual identity, there are neither friends nor foes, just one unified being. Ravers have expressed this state of nondifferenti- ation quite elegantly. If a rave is successful, it all “melds into one cosmic soup and everything is one and you can’t separate the music or the moves or which came first.”** It is “One nation under a groove” (Savage). Drawing on quantum physics, one raver states that “the danc- ing gives a sense of oneness as we all become part of the same uncer- tainty wave equation.” Rushkoff (120) writes enthusiastically that ravers are “phase locked”: by being on the same drugs, on the same noc- turnal schedule and under the same music, they have reached complete synchronicity. Such a state of nondifferentiation closely mimics Victor Turner’s concept of communitas. Turner (96) saw “society as a structired, differ- entiated and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic posi- tions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of more or less.” In contrast, communitas represents antistructure, “an undifferenti- ated community or even communion of equal individuals.” Like a rave, commiunitas blends homogeneity and comradeship in a moment in and out of time. Communitas cannot be a permanent state, however, because episodes of structure and social differentiation are necessary to feed the physical body. Without the allocation of roles and resources, the division of labor, the organized, restrained, rational considerations that character- ize noncommunitas states, daily needs would not be met. This possibly explains why few permanent rave communities exist, despite the abun- dant chatter about forming communities. One (anonymous) DJ from Nashville even recognizes the inevitability of the return to structure: “Raves are good because they don’t happen all the time,” he told me. The important point about this foray into Turnerian anthropology, however, is that by crossing over into a communitas state, ravers feed their spirit. This feeding of the spirit is what makes the rave so therapeu- tic. Rave culture dissipates the tension of entering a world of underem- ployment and shrinking opportunity. By manipulating symbols of tribalism, ravers are able to reaffirm what they say the world ought to be—liberation, freedom, union, communion, harmony, warmth, peace, love, family, euphoria, bliss, happiness, godliness, and health—and con-Technoshamanism + 67 front with renewed vigor what they say the world actually is—violence, fear, hatred, racism, injustice, greed, competition, division, differentia- tion, isolation, impotence and alienation.” In other words, the rave, like most properly functioning rituals, successfully unifies the “ought” and the “is” through symbols. Whether these tribal symbols are “inauthenti- cally” borrowed from other cultures is of little concern. At this point, a fuller comparison between hippie neotranscenden- talism and raver journeys can be accomplished. Like ravers, hippies also strove for nondifferentiation: a communion of equal individuals. Accord- ing to a 21-year-old woman interviewed by Newsweek in 1967, the isola- tion of sexual difference was loosening: “For the first time, men and women [were] becoming friends again . . . and that’s a very nice feel- ing—to be able to really communicate with somebody, not with a man or a woman but with a person” (“Dropouts” 92). One of the goals of the Acid Tests was to create a magical unity between people, similar to the rave possibility of melting everyone into a “cosmic soup.” The Acid Tests were rigged with microphones and speakers so that what one person said could be broadcast to others, or incorporated into the live music, or written down and projected onto screens, the effect of which was to put people on the same wavelength, the same project of explo- ration. To quote Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, “It was everybody doing bits of and pieces of something. . .. Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a roomful of other thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of” (Lydon 28). The Acid Tests notwithstanding, other sources hold that spiritual exploration for hippies was a very personal phenomenon, based on indi- vidual intuition, and therefore different from the supposedly “phase- locked” or synchronized explorations of the ravers. A clearer point of contrast between hippies and ravers, however, concerns what is actually meant by community. Whereas rave communities dissolve when the rave ends, sometimes revived over the web, community for hippies often implied a style of life that was more enduring, such as the commune and other non-virtual realities. Similarly, both ravers and hippies are anti- establishment in theory (Pearson), but whereas few ravers walk their talk, hippies often protested for peace and took beatings from police. I have read about raves for charity in England (Saunders) and have attended charity raves in Nashville and San Francisco, but this is about the extent of rave activism. Contradiction People who go to raves will detect things that contradict the quotes I have presented above and challenge my interpretations of how raves68 + Popular Music and Society are said to heal. Three of the more prominent contradictions have to do with sexuality, social hierarchy, and technology. In this section, I describe each of these three contradictions, beginning with the contradic- tion in sexuality, and, in anticipation of the criticisms stemming from these contradictions, I defend my interpretations. In my rebuttal, I do not contest these contradictions because I find each of them to be quite valid. Rather, my strategy is to show how these contradictions are overcome or accommodated by symbolism, ritual, and other actions at the rave. It is difficult to accept ravers’ statements about nondifferentiation, unity, and oneness when raves exhibit heightened sexual difference. Though paradise in Eliade’s model is a presexual state of innocence, dancing, the main activity at a rave, is highly sexual. According to Mungham, British dancehalls prior to the 1980s were sites of sexual ten- sion where “girls become objectified as ‘it’; something that’s just a kiss apart, that smells and looks good to use” (94). Dancing was a form of erotic self-expression and sexual display that young males scrutinized from the fringes of the dance floor and only joined when attempting to seduce a partner (Mungham) or when, in the 1980s, a dance style like breakdancing came along and allowed men to engage in dance as a dis- play of athleticism (Richard and Kruger). In many ways, raves expand the emphasis on sexuality documented in earlier dance subcultures. As expected from a “text of pleasure,” raves are hypersexual. The atmos- phere is one of pure physical abandon. Women often wear bra tops, hot pants and other uncharacteristically revealing clothes. Some raves fea- ture “snake slithering rooms” or “feely feely rooms” where globs of ravers can pet and grope whoever is within arm’s reach (Saunders 49). A stated goal of the DJ is to slowly bring the dancers to an orgiastic frenzy. MDMA increases sensations in the skin, making the user hypersensual (Saunders). Ostensibly, then, the heightened sexuality of the rave introduces dif- ference and threatens to transform what should ideally be a familial atmosphere of communion into an aggressive arena of display, gaze, and courtship. However, the sexual polarity of female dancer and male voyeur that typified previous dance hall subcultures dissolves at the rave because there is no narrative of romance (McRobbie 168). The teleology of seducing a partner is abandoned and réplaced by the extreme bodily pleasure of dance itself. According to Richard and Kruger, “the emphasis of [rave] is on the addictive bodily pleasures of dance, rather than dating and sex” (168). Therefore, in contrast with mainstream nightclubs, the rave is not a “beer monster meat market”: women can cohabit a space with men their own age without becoming victims of the objectifying gaze of lust (Melechi 33).Technoshamanism + 69 Many things contribute to the “no sex” sexuality of raves. Though women’s dress might be highly sexual, women subvert sexualization with children’s accessories, such as pacifiers,* smiley face logos, stuffed animals, lunch boxes, or Hello Kitty backpacks. Such fashion strategies allow women to declare themselves “off limits” without having to down- play their sexuality. Subcultural style serves as a metaphor for sexual protection (McRobbie 169). Another reason why actual sex is “off- limits” in the midst of such bodily pleasure and sexual abandon is that MDMA, though it may increase sensuality, inhibits sexual stimulation and erection in both men and rats (Saunders 44-46). McRobbie and Richard and Kruger suggest that the displacement of sexuality from intercourse to dance is motivated by AIDS awareness. Either way, rave sexuality is at once nonsexual in the strict sense and even presexual given the childhood fashion trends. Without narratives of heterosexual romance, sexuality is not differentiated into male and female, and, in the words of one raver, remains “pansexual,”” thus reconcilable with the asexuality of Eliade’s paradise. As a second contradiction, it is difficult to accept ravers’ statements about nondifferentiation, unity, and oneness when certain hierarchies underlie the rave scene. Thornton points out in her ethnography of club cultures that, despite the mantras of unity and collectivity, there is a noticeable amount of selectivity and exclusivity in the rave scene, based on a scale of hipness. Unable to compete with adults for occupational status, but in many cases still supported by parents, young ravers derive self-esteem by competing for what Thornton calls subcultural capital, a concept founded in Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and symbolic capital. Hierarchies of prestige and standards of authenticity develop based on familiarity with the latest music, the latest slang, the latest fashions, etc. Those who make a living off subcultures—club owners, promoters, and professional DJs—must uphold such hierarchies of subcultural capital in order to be, successful. For example, to attract the best crowd, a club owner must be selective about which DJs can perform and who can enter the club (Thornton 102-05). The resulting exclusivity conflicts with the language of unity. Even London’s first raves, held at the club Shoom, were restricted to a small clique (including some celebrities), despite an ethos of love, peace, and unity (Reynolds, Generation 61). Though Thorn- ton’s research might not apply to the many raves organized independently of the club scene and without selective door policies, it certainly demon- strates the presence of difference and distinction within the rave, This contradiction between the egalitarian unity claimed by ravers and the hierarchical divisions documented by Thornton can be recon- ciled by conceptualizing the rave as a temporal process. I believe that the70 + Popular Music and Society fave process can be understood as a “journey,” a term which ravers also use to characterize their events.” The distinctions of hipness that Thorn- ton observes best characterize the behavior behind the organization of a rave—when decisions are made as to which DJs are given the chance to spin, who gets on the guest list of a club, or who gets invited to secretive events—and possibly at the beginning of raves—when bouncers might be selective about whom they let in to a club and when egos may inter- fere with the proper “vibe” of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect (PLUR). To repeat, many of these distinctions only pertain to raves held in night- clubs. After these distinctions have been made and the technoshamanic journey progresses, remaining differences are slowly eliminated through dance, drugs, and other rituals that transform structures of subcultural capital into antistructure. Specifically, egos can be shed and inhibitions erased by MDMA, which is renowned as a harmony-inducing drag (Saunders; McRobbie; Redhead, “Politics”). Also, ravers suggest that dancing to trance music can bind communities together.” Similarly, Rietveld states that you can lose yourself in “the anonymity of fellow ravers and in blinding music” (69). At a few raves, specific rituals are enacted to break down hierarchical divisions. For example, at raves sponsored by the New Moon collective and Gateway collective, both in San Francisco, an altar is set up on the dance floor and each raver con- tributes an item to the altar. The altar becomes an objectification of the community, and in contributing to the altar, the raver disconnects from the self and connects to the whole. The final type of contradiction to be addressed has to do with ravers’ reverence for premodern, “primitive” cultures despite their embracing of music (techno) and forms of communication (the Internet) that are utterly dependent on advanced technology. In his article “Machine Soul: A History of Techno,” Savage identifies ravers’ paradox- ical and simultaneous embrace of the material and the spiritual, and sug- gests that this paradox has been programmed into our culture since the tum of the century. The Grateful Dead and their followers in the 1960s also manifested such a paradox: though they wanted psychedelia to destroy electronic civilization, they hoped to build an “electric Tibet” in its place (“Dropouts”). Savage believes, however, that only now “at the century’s end, a form [techno] has come along which can synthesize the encroaching vortex of the millennium” (21). Savage does not elaborate on just how techno and raves might achieve this synthesis, but a sym- bolic analysis might help. Turner has argued that the effectiveness of rit- uals is based on the ability of symbols to unite what we want to do with what we need to do. Though what we desire to do might be antithetical to what we should do (our virtues), symbols unite desire and virtue byTechnoshamanism + 71 making virtue desirable. A key symbol for the rave is the DJ. We have focused on the DJ as technoshaman, but the DJ is also the paramount agent of technology at a rave. The DJ’s main instruments—turntables and the mixer—are in fact fetishized: some techno musicians name themselves after equipment like the Roland 808 synthesizer (for exam- ple, 808 State), while images of the Roland 303 synthesizer or Technics brand turntables can be found decontextualized as icons on T-shirts, web sites,” and elsewhere. The DJ is thus a mixed symbol of human and machine. By spinning “tribal” beats on sophisticated equipment, the DJ synthesizes our desire to be spiritual with our rootedness and dependence on the material. The DJ thus serves as a model of the place of machines in the world and a model for how the soul can be integrated with them. Conclusion Based on the testimonials presented in this paper, raves increase self-esteem, release fears and anxieties, bring inner peace, and improve consciousness, among other things. Raves don’t cure disease, but when someone claims that “last night a DJ saved my life,” it is reasonable to suspect that at least some form of healing takes place. The effects of raves bear a family resemblance to hippie experiments with drugs, con- sciousness, and community-building in the 1960s. In addition to other critical differences between ravers and hippies, such as differing com- mitments to community-building and social change, I have argued that different mechanisms are at work in spiritual healing at raves. I have attempted to explain the therapeutic effects of raves by attending to the symbols and metaphors that dominate rave discourse, such as tech- noshamanism and tribalism. In short, with the help of the DJ (the tech- noshaman), dancing, and lights, ravers embark on an overnight journey to a primitive paradise where individuality is left behind and communi- tas is achieved. At such a destination, ravers find a world of harmony, equality, and communality—a place similar to humanity in its early tribal stage, as conceived by ravers, but diametrically opposed to the moder world. Reynolds (“Rave Culture” 86) points out that the myth of unity is just a myth; indeed, ravers can be criticized for not following through on their goals of community-building. But myths are powerful, even if they are “just myths.” The enactment of the myth of eternal return—a symbolic return to the primordial place where life is as it should be—invigorates the ravers, allowing them to face the sobriety of life as it actually is, at least until the next rave. The rave experience might be highly symbolic, but these symbols are labored upon and imbued with such meaning that they surpass the empty, touristic simu- lacra that previous commentators consider them to be.72 + Popular Music and Society Three contradictions presented themselves in the discussion of the rave: the problem of achieving primitivism through dependence on advanced technology, the dichotomy between the vibe of unity and the divisive nature of subcultural capital, and the paradoxical nature of sexu- ality at the rave. Two additional sets of questions could help guide fur- ther research. First, the Introduction briefly addressed the question of whether the rave encodes a subculture of resistance and noted the pecu- liar transformation of an underground phenomenon into a multi-billion- dollar industry. Economic research on the marketing of raves, the techno music industry, and many other related rave economies, such as lighting specialists, design, production and sale of clothes, graphic design and printing of fliers etc., would provide excellent data on how capitalism and youth cultures interpenetrate. These data would inform various lines of scholarship, and at the least could be used to illuminate to what degree raves resist market fotces, thus providing a fresh angle on the question of counterculture and resistance. Also, exactly what is the dynamic between individual healing and social improvement? This is a fruitful area of analysis because it connects to similar discussions of healing in other modern westérn subcultures. For example, when ravers say that “We can only improve the society if we improve ourselves first," or that “consciousness unfolds and expands itself slowly from the individual to a group awareness,”“ how does this articulate with notions of social responsibility held by new age channels (Brown) or other modern spiritualists? These and other questions cannot be addressed without a more detailed study of technoshamanism. Hope- fully, this paper has demonstrated that the rave scene deserves such attention and benefits from an anthropological perspective. Notes 1. For an “insider” definition, see “The official alt.raveFAQ,” by Brian Behlendorf, published 8 May 1994 on the website Hyperreal, the largest and oldest Internet resource for rave music and culture: . This and Internet materials cited below were avail- able between October 1997 and March 1998. 2. See also “Techno Music and Raves FAQ.” By Mike Brown, 1 Dec. 1995 . 3. “Idealogical foundations,” an email message by Robin Green archived at . 4, “The official alt.rave FAQ,” by Brian Behlendorf .Technoshamanism + 73 5. “DJ_Journeys.html,” an internet posting archived 29 Feb. 1996 at . 6. From an email message posted by Maknrag@dircon.co.uk, archived at . 7. “Coup d’Aacademe.html,” an email message by “Megan,” archived at . 8. See Reynolds, Generation 316, and an email message by “Bob,” posted at “Rave_Mass.html,” 28 Nov, 1995, archived 7 Dec, 1997 at . 9. From an email message by Robin Green, posted at “Rave-Mass.html,” archived 7 Dec. 1997 at . 10. “Beautiful_Visions.html,” an email message by philena@gladstone. uoregon.edu, archived at . 11. Testimonial from the website . 12. “Technoshamanism_Definitions.html,” a series of email messages archived at . 13. “Perfect_Party.html,” an email message archived at , and “The official alt.rave FAQ,” by Brian Behlendorf . 14, In the compact disc UrbMix Volume 1: Flammable Liquid, Planet Earth P50105-2, 1994, the liner notes clebrate DJ Doc Martin as “a vinyl shaman.” 15. In Superstar DJ Keoki’s compact disc, All Mixed Up Moonshine, mm 80035 1996, the liner notes state “It’s time to let Keoki be your guide, open your ears and your mind will follow.” 16. From an email message by zazgooey @fix,net, archived at , 17. “Otherworlds_Experience,” an email message by edlantz@aol.com, archived at . 18. From an email message by henao@blkbox.com, archived at . 19. “The_Vibe_Tribe.html,” an email message by Jason Parsons, archived 23 Aug. 1996 at . 20. “Techno_Subculture.html,” an anonymous email message posted dec. 27, 1994, archived 27 Dec. 1994 at www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/tech- noshamanism, 21. “Why_do_we_rave?.html,” archived at . 22. “Dance_to_Transcendance.html,” an email message by archived Feb. 15, 1997 at . 23. .74 + Popular Music and Society 24. . 25. “Why_do_we_rave.html,” an email message by Rick M. archived 27 Dec. 1994 at . 26. “Vibe.Tribe.html,” an email message by Jason Parsons, archived 23 Aug. 1996 at . 27. “Goa.Trance.html,” archived 27 Nov. 1997 at . 28. “Techno_and_raving.html,” an email message by Sean Casey, July 1993, archived 28 Dec. 1994 at . 29. “Perfecct_Party.html,” archived 26 Mar. 1996 at . 30. “The_Vibe_Tribe.html,” a email message by Jason Parsons, archived 23 Aug. 1996 at . 31. “Expand_Your_Mind.html,” an email message by Amy, archived 18 Oct, 1997 at . 32. “Why we are here,” internet posting made by Komotion International at . 33. “We are all connected,” a mission statement of the Cloud factory col- lective . 34. “Techno Music and Raves FAQ,” by Mike Brown, 1 Dec. 1995 . 35. 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