TY - CHAP
T1 - The difference engine
T2 - Liberation and the rave imaginary
AU - St John, Graham
PY - 2003/11/6
Y1 - 2003/11/6
N2 - The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the growth of non-traditional desires for 'religious experience', for liberation in the sense Heelas (1998: 7) identified as the postmodern quest for personal freedoms, for dijference, without seeking essential, or fundamental, difference. With a rich inheritance from earlier explorations, saturated with the tinctures of Eastern religion and Western psychotherapy, contemporary self-othering is textured by a farrago of beliefs and practices transparent in communications with the Otherworld, and in the transcendence devices of psycho actives, new technologies and consumer experiences agglomerated in public events - those 'privileged point[s] of penetration' (Handelman 1990: 9) and theatres for the performance of 'ultimate' or 'implicit' concerns (Bailey 1997: 9). In recent times, a growing corpus of work has introduced sites accommodating alternative spiritualities, gathering places for those 'hypersyncretic' seekers of self and enchantment that Sutcliffe calls a 'virtuosic avant-garde' (2000: 30). Mike Niman's People if the Rainbow (1997), Adrian Ivakhiv's Claiming Sacred Ground (2001) and Sarah Pike's Earthly Bodies, Magic Selves (2001 a), for example, document the appearance of festivals and gatherings 'exemplifying the migration of religious meaning-making activities out of ... temples and churches into otherspaces' (Pike 200la: 5). Here the proliferating culture of rave and its expressive others paces will receive such attention.
AB - The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the growth of non-traditional desires for 'religious experience', for liberation in the sense Heelas (1998: 7) identified as the postmodern quest for personal freedoms, for dijference, without seeking essential, or fundamental, difference. With a rich inheritance from earlier explorations, saturated with the tinctures of Eastern religion and Western psychotherapy, contemporary self-othering is textured by a farrago of beliefs and practices transparent in communications with the Otherworld, and in the transcendence devices of psycho actives, new technologies and consumer experiences agglomerated in public events - those 'privileged point[s] of penetration' (Handelman 1990: 9) and theatres for the performance of 'ultimate' or 'implicit' concerns (Bailey 1997: 9). In recent times, a growing corpus of work has introduced sites accommodating alternative spiritualities, gathering places for those 'hypersyncretic' seekers of self and enchantment that Sutcliffe calls a 'virtuosic avant-garde' (2000: 30). Mike Niman's People if the Rainbow (1997), Adrian Ivakhiv's Claiming Sacred Ground (2001) and Sarah Pike's Earthly Bodies, Magic Selves (2001 a), for example, document the appearance of festivals and gatherings 'exemplifying the migration of religious meaning-making activities out of ... temples and churches into otherspaces' (Pike 200la: 5). Here the proliferating culture of rave and its expressive others paces will receive such attention.
KW - post-traditional religiosity
KW - New Age
KW - Neo-Paganism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84909070944&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.routledge.com/Rave-Culture-and-Religion/St-John/p/book/9780415314497
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84909070944
SN - 9780415314497
SN - 9780415552509
T3 - Routledge Advances in Sociology
SP - 19
EP - 45
BT - Rave Culture and Religion
A2 - St John, Graham
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
ER -