gatherings such as “raves” and “trance parties” taking place at urban “wild zones”
(Stanley 1997) or secret rural areas. Techno rituals constitute temporary spaces of
ecstatic and psychedelic experience induced by techniques of shattering and
reshaping identities (Collin 1997; Redhead 1997; Reynolds 1998). “Rave is more
than music plus drugs, it is a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behavior and beliefs. To
the participant, it feels like a religion; to the mainstream observer, it looks more like
a sinister cult” (Reynolds 1998:5). Positioned between leisure, religion, and politics,
debates circulate about Techno’s meanings and political content, notably its
emphasis on sensorial hyper-stimulation, intense hedonism, and communitarian
effervescence (Borneman and Senders 2000; Ingham et al. 1999; Best 1997; McKay
1996). Nevertheless, the current proliferation of Techno tends to veil its origins in
the 1980s among marginalized, “underground” subcultures in global cities and
utopian sites: ethnic gays in Chicago and New York (house and garage music),
blacks in Detroit and London (techno and jungle music), and hippies/freaks in Ibiza
(Spain) and Goa (India) (trance music). These cultures of resistance emerged during
the wild times of the neo-liberal capitalism of Thatcher and Reagan, and have been
rapidly disseminating throughout international circuits and “postcommunities”
(Ortner 1999). In sum, “Techno” signifies the emergence of aesthetic and stylistic
manifestations of digital culture, which unfolds through symbiotic interactions
between a global counterculture and various national mainstream cultures.
As a movement and process, New Age queers religious, scientific, and aesthetic
realms, and designates a rhizomatic “network of networks” incorporating a vast
universe of subjects, practices, and groups (D’Andrea 2000; Heelas 1996; York
1995). Underlying its multiple forms, the New Age’s basic premise is the cultivation
of the self (Bildung), rendered as a precondition for a new secular and spiritual age.
As an early 1970s countercultural derivation, New Age ethno-ecological,
parascientific and psy-spiritual syncretisms reflect the diffusion of a reflexive
mysticism formerly confined within erudite circles of Western Romanticism
(Luckmann 1991; Bellah 1985). Thus, expressed in casual statements such as “I don’t
have any religion but my own spirituality,” growing interest in Zen, Yoga, Sufi,
Cabala, Alchemy, and Wicca indicates the psychologization of world religions and
native traditions as tools for the reflexive and expressive cultivation of the “self.”
Techniques of the self (music, meditation, body-techniques, encounter groups,
diets, etc.) are employed for attaining special subjective moods. But a dual logic of
“love-wisdom” and of “power-control” evinces contradictions between expressivist
and instrumentalist drives within the New Age movement, reflecting either
historical trends toward individualism or neo-liberal ideologies of predatory
capitalism (D’Andrea 2000; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Bellah 1985). New Age
stimulates religious transformations in the West, particularly the emergence of a
global meta-spirituality which indexes a multiplicity of equivalent spiritualities of
the self.
Although studies on New Age and Techno do not usually interface, a careful
comparison evinces a common horizon: alternative lifestyles informed by aesthetic,
erotic, and hedonic/ist values and practices; cultivation of expressive forms of
234 GLOBAL NOMADS IN IBIZA AND GOA