that occur while participating in underground dance music events. Among scholars,
many of whom count themselves as either longstanding or temporary participants in
rave or club culture, there also seems to be an almost intuitive understanding and
appreciation of the events as somehow transformative, transcendent and quasi-
religious. For example, Rietveld refers to early house music events in Chicago as ‘a
night-time church’ (1998:129), Gore characterizes ‘the DJ as [a] high priest whose
instrument is not the drum but the turntable’ (1997:61), and Hutson suggests that
a DJ ‘guides the ravers on an ecstatic journey to paradise—a presocial state of
nondifferentiation and communitas’ (1999:54). Such references have become central
to the academic canon of rave and club cultures and reveal a set of a priori
assumptions concerning underground dance music’s ritual-ness. Given the
theoretical prevalence of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS) in the literature on underground dance music, this is no surprise. It is,
however, something of an obstacle to understanding the processes through which
rave or club events as socially interactive rituals unfold. Following Hall and
Jefferson’s (1976) study of British youth and the suggestion that virtually any
collection of young bodies gathered under the banner of a subculture was engaged in
rituals of resistance, Birmingham-inspired sociology and cultural studies have fallen
short of addressing the structures and experiences of such rituals. This is largely
because analyses informed by CCCS theory and method are marked by a disturbing
lack of ethnographic material on the interactiveness of subcultural sites or events
and the mediating role played by music and dance in many of those events—a
disturbing trend considering the prevalence of music scenes in CCCS-inspired
literature over the past 25 years. Instead, music and dance are considered not as
lived experiences but as static texts or signs to be read for some decodable political
significance or as socially disembodied reference points used to illustrate current
theories on deviance, class consciousness, commodity consumption and stylistic
resistance to the mainstream (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979).
Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures (1996) is one such example of this approach. In
her neo-Marxist analysis of British ravers and clubbers, Thornton makes a number
of allusions to underground dance music spaces as ritual, suggesting that clubbing is
‘a rite of passage’ for British youth and that raves involve a ‘ritualistic passage’ for
their participants (ibid.: 57). Yet her discussion does not attend to any sense of
movement or participation through such passages. In a discussion of what might
otherwise be deemed, following Turner, ‘social drama’, Thornton investigates how
specific and supposed conflicts (authentic/phoney, classless/classed, underground/
mainstream) are played out through particular symbols (clothes, VIP rooms, record
collections) of ‘subcultural capital’. In identifying ‘subcultural ideologies’ (ibid.: 6)
shared by hierarchically ranked groups of participants, Thornton’s analysis also seems
relevant to the idea that rituals can be performances of contested power relations,
directed towards the group and outsiders (see Harrison 1991). But in avoiding the
central role played by music and dance as performed events and concentrating on
how conflict is played out through the successful consumption and signification of
168 MORGAN GERARD