During the early 1970s, a community of hippies and neo-sannyasins (Osho
followers, as described below) colonized the northern Goa beach areas of Anjuna
and Vagator (Odzer 1995; Chapter 14 in this volume). Paradoxically, although
fleeing from the West, they benefited from Goans’ Christian-Westernized legacy of
relative tolerance for leisure practices and individualism! In the ensuing years, “Goa”
emerged as a signifier for a party-cum-drug paradise during winter seasons
(Newman 2001; Odzer 1995; Saldanha 1999). By the late 1980s, the scene turned
digital and tribal, with post-hippie post-punk freaks developing a new style of
electronic music in rituals of psychedelic intensity: the hypnotic “Goa trance” (or
“techno trance”) music played in secret “trance parties” in secluded beach or jungle
areas of Goa. This concept filtered back to the West and resulted in the proliferation
of “Goa parties” around the world (Begrich and Muehlebach 1998), as well as in the
commodification of Goa music into more docile styles such as “mainstream trance”
or “Euro.” As these developments reveal, the diffusion and resignification of
countercultural practices, objects, and symbols can be read in a mapping of de/
reterritorializing flows.
At the onset of the 21st century, the trance scene was still taking place in Anjuna
and Vagator, whose villages now boast upgraded resorts, bars, cyber cafes, and other
ancillary services. Nonetheless, the area still differs from the nearby charter tourist
beaches of Baga and Chapora, with their chaotic hotel urbanization, and from the
more relaxed beaches of Arambol and Palolem, frequented by backpackers. And new
sites are gradually incorporated into the trance scene, such as the highly secluded
Om beach (in Karnataka), where long and wild parties are occasionally thrown.
The global freak community is a tiny minority, probably a few thousand people
in the midst of 1.1 million annual tourists visiting Goa State and its 1.5 million
population (Goa Directorate of Planning, Statistics and Evaluation 1998). Although
90 percent of tourists in Goa are male Indians, the industry targets the 10th of
Western tourists for their superior purchasing power. Foreigners come from the
U.K., Germany, Israel, Japan, Italy, and Scandinavia, among a myriad of other
nations. The majority is comprised of charter tourists, who do not travel around, but
just spend a couple of weeks in beach resort areas demonstrating no real interest in
local life, let alone culture and history.
Nevertheless, the freak minority plays a critical role in the development of
“utopian sites.” Alternative subjects are well aware that they will inevitably be
succeeded by backpackers, then tourists and, gradually, all the urban and tourist
structures. Utopian paradises are thus transformed into giant tourist traps, while
cultures of resistance are commodified as “empty” entertainment for the vacationing
populace. Inflation, land value, pollution, and resource depletion escalate as a result.
For these reasons, freaks generally avoid tourists, local authorities, and natives, other
than for basic income-generating exchanges (e.g. artistic and healing activities,
hippie markets, drug dealing, etc.). In this context, techno-freaks perceive themselves
as belonging to a marginal and vanishing culture requiring countermeasures of
mobility and stealth against commodification and repression. Their postmodern
melancholia stems from an awareness of the contradictions between their
ANTHONY D’ANDREA 239