Poststructuralism and postmodernism lend themselves quite well to an adoption
in rave studies. The Nietzschean celebrations of desire, micropolitics, art, music,
spontaneity, marginality, chaos, indulgence, and undecidability implicit or explicit
in the work of Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault, Irigaray, Lyotard, and especially
Deleuze and Guattari, as Todd May (1994) has contended, betray a flirtation with
older tropes of anarchism (see Bey 1991). We cannot, of course, conflate anarchism
or the avant-garde with spirituality, but what is common to both is the self-proclaimed
position outside of social reality. Poststructuralism avoids completely nihilistic
conclusions from analyses of total power by exalting experiment to spiritual degrees.
The close congruence of 1960s counterculture and poststructuralism in the events
of 1968 and their aftermath suggests that it might not be too far off the mark to
state that a certain structure of feeling of reinvented spirituality informed them both.
Now, this chapter won’t deny that there is something “spiritual” present in rave.
Neither will it impede the creative possibilities for secular philosophy and cultural
theory of an engagement with some sort of spirituality Instead, it makes quite a
simple point: that spirituality can never be thought of and evaluated outside its
situatedness in assemblages of power. Transcendence, peace, love, resistance just
aren’t the whole story. Although there are debates in religious studies about the
social and cultural contexts of mystical experience (e.g. Rothberg 1990), power
relations hardly ever come into the picture. Any engagement with spirituality,
practical or theoretical, needs to connect to political analysis and a sense of
responsibility or its claims of transcendence remain hollow, possibly hypocritical.
The case study through which I will reach this conclusion is the rave scene in Goa,
India, which might seem an extreme case, but I hope similar arguments about the
dynamics of spirituality and power can be made elsewhere.^2
Goa tranceThe former Portuguese enclave of Goa, 400 kilometers to the south of Bombay,
with a third of its population Catholic, started attracting white travelers at the end of
the 1960s (see Chapters 12 and 13 ). The palm-fringed beaches and simple fisher
villages of Calangute and Colva soon harbored small communities of hippies. Soon,
when more and more “straight” Western and domestic tourists flooded in, some
hippies left for the northern villages of Anjuna and Vagator, where to this day the
tourism sector is largely in the hands of local people and many foreigners stay for a
few months. The hippies’ lives centered around nude bathing, smoking hash in
copious quantities, and holding full moon parties on the beach. Electricity arrived in
1975, and the amplification of music became possible. The late Cleo Odzer’s
unique account of Anjuna’s hedonistic heydays in the 1970s, Goa Freaks: My Hippie
Years in India (1995), has to be read with caution, as her experience, say many
generational survivors, cannot be transposed to all foreigners then present. Indeed,
Anjuna has always had close connections with the Osho Commune in Poona (see
Chapter 12), sadhus (wandering Hindu holy men), yoga, Ayurveda, meditation and
New Age practices such as Reiki and palm-reading. Karma, mandalas, auras, and
272 ARUN SALDANHA