The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures

Abstract

At raves, young men and women dance to electronic music from dusk to dawn. Previous scholarship treats as a hypertext of pleasure and disappearance. However, such a postmodern view does not attend to poignant and meaningful spiritual experiences reported by those who go to raves. This article examines claims about altered states of consciousness at raves and therapeutic results-spiritual healing-such states are said to bring. While physiological processes (exhaustive dancing, auditory driving) may contribute to altered states of consciousness, symbolic processes create appropriate frameworks for spiritual healing. Such therapeuticism can be more fully understood in context of other modern western spiritual subcultures. Placing raves within context of these other subcultures foregrounds questions for further research. (raves, shamanism, culture, American spirituality, symbolic analysis) Ever had an experience that makes you sit up and re-evaluate all your ideas, thoughts and incidents in your life?' Introduction The question above was voiced by a young man who had just returned from a rave: a dance party, usually all night long, featuring loud techno2 music, also called electronica, in which participants often reach ecstatic states, occasionally with help of drugs.' Initially, in late 1980s, when they first appeared in Britain, raves were underground events, taking place in makeshift and occasionally secretive venues such as warehouses and outdoor fields. By mid-1990s analysts could comment that the scale is huge and ever increasing (McRobbie 1994: 168). Fully licensed and often held in nightclubs, raves now penetrated to center of British culture. Combined attendance at dance events in Great Britain in 1993 reached 50 million, which was substantially more than at sporting events, cinemas, and all `live' arts combined (Thornton 1995: IS). Commercially, 1993 British market brought in approximately $2.7 billion (Thornton 1995: 15). In Germany nearly two million youngsters and post-adolescents united in so-called rave nation of mid-1990s (Richard and Kruger 1998). Following this initial north European florescence, hot spots emerged around world at Rimini (Italy), Ko Phangan (Thailand), Balearic Islands (Spain), Goa (India), and coastal Mozambique. Though they have never been as popular in United States as in Great Britain, raves have been a fixture in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York since early 1990s and some of techno music's strongest roots are in Detroit and Chicago. Raves today are remarkably diversified. In fact, in places like London where raves have their deepest roots, has fragmented into many successor sub-scenes, usually centered on divergent varieties of techno music, such as Big Beat or Drum $`n Bass. Raves in traditional sense-semi-legal and located in factories and outdoors-are rare. Nevertheless, rave's various offshoots all feature what I believe are critical elements of rave: dance music, long duration, and ecstatic experience. As in London, most all-night dance parties in U.S. cities with a long tradition of raves have blended into regular nightclub scene and are no longer called raves. However, in smaller cities and especially in Midwest (Champion 1998) and Southeast, raves in traditional sense are alive and well.' Demographically, most people who attend raves-often called ravers-are between ages of 15 and 25, thus making a youth subculture (see Epstein 1998). The socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of ravers are not nearly so predictable as their ages. For example, early raves in Great Britain attracted people of various backgrounds, mostly from working classes (Reynolds 1998a: 64). This socially mixed tradition continues today in most urban venues. At other extreme, in midwestern United States, for example, most ravers are white and middle class. …

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