ConclusionFor Turner, this recognition that the ritual event can be revisited positions rave and
club performances as liminoid events. While somewhat devaluing the liminoid as a
commodified leisure activity Turner nonetheless suggests that liminoid events are
‘proto-structural’ (V.Turner 1979a:39) in that they offer new cultural paradigms to
the mainstream. I have argued that, foregoing Turner’s distinction, liminality is the
root paradigm of underground dance music. Furthermore, I have suggested that, as
a recorded format and a performed activity, liminality is encoded in underground
dance music as an incentive for dance. Dance, therefore, is the primary conduit for
liminal, transformative experiences in the lives of ravers and clubbers. As a
coordinated social action, dance transmits culture, encourages interconnectedness
and reconfigures the body beyond the confines of the individual ego; as a liberatory,
ecstatic experience of collective effervescence, it reveals new ways of being in the
world, opens up the possibilities for transcending restrictive social categories and
undoubtedly offers numerous health benefits from the spiritual to the physical
(Thomas 1997). While the extent to which the value of ecstatic dance and liminality
has been incorporated into the mainstream is not at issue here, it is important to
note that over the last decade underground dance music events have become a global
phenomenon. Perhaps this indicates a more complete and socially recognized ritual
incorporation for participants in that the liminal experiences produced by the music-
dance continuum are transformative not only at the micro levels of individuals to
communitas, DJ to shaman and club to church, but also at a macro level, where
popular culture itself has become somewhat infused with the aesthetic forms
generated by rave and club cultures.^14
Diverging from the subcultural studies agenda which theorizes them as cultures
of resistance, Turner’s similar view that liminoid genres offer a social critique of the
mainstream, or the postmodernist assertion that they are celebrations of
meaninglessness, I suggest (as do virtually all of my informants) that rave and club
events occupy their present status in popular culture primarily because DJs, clubs,
raves, dancing, getting high and other features of underground dance music offer
multidimensional liminal experiences not found in the everyday world. The extent
to which those experiences are transformative, transcendent or quasi-religious for all
participants is unknown, perhaps unlikely and, for the purposes of this chapter,
largely irrelevant. Whether from emic accounts or my own experiences, rather than
excavating the meaning of a club event my intent has been to investigate the form of
a club event and how liminality is encoded through performance. Recognizing that
ritual has a ‘constancy of form and variability of interpretation’ (Boas, in Harrison
1991:231), in describing the processual model as it occurs through music, dance
and space, I hope to extend future inquiries into rave and club cultures beyond the
metaphorical and into the actual.
That said, as I walk home along Adelaide Street beyond the rattling walls and
windows of Turbo, I am struck by the decidedly emic suspicion that Victor
Turner’s quest for retribalization is well underway.
SELECTING RITUAL 179