Rave Culture and Religion

ISBN-13: 9780415314497 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 344 str.

G. St John; Graham St John

Opis

Rave Culture and Religion explores the role of the technocultural rave in the spiritual life of contemporary youth. Documenting the socio-cultural and religious parameters of rave and post-rave phenomena at various locations around the globe, scholars of contemporary religion, dance ethnologists, sociologists and other cultural observers unravel this significant youth cultural practice. The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. A range of techno-spiritual developments are explored, including: 'techno-shamanic' DJ technique techno-primi

Recenzje

Rave Culture and Religion is a smart book colleting essays many by emerging scholars and graduate students who, in personally experiencing rave culture, find immediate and urgent applicability for the academic theories they are reading. To link rave and religion will hopefully prove shocking enough to the established academic study of religion to open new discussions about religion and popular culture. To link rave and sophisticated academic study will hopefully be shocking enough to a few ravers to lead them to see beyond a simple-minded fuzzy understanding of the power and importance of what they are experiencing. - Professor Sam Gill, University of Colorado at Boulder.

O autorze

Graham St John is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Production at the University of Regina, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, Universoty of Queensland. His book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures will be published with Equinox in September 2009. His previous publications include the edited collection Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn 2008).