Rave Culture and Religion

the following must be stressed: first, that over a decade after the birth of raves in
England, clandestine scenes still thrive in a number of cities; second, that these vivid
and transforming experiences can occur unexpectedly—for instance, at large
commercial raves. In the course of my own research I have been astonished to hear
young ravers holding little knowledge of rave history speak of their experiences in these
large raves—the intensity of their experience, their commitment to the scene and
the community forming around events—in virtually the same terms as those
reported at the emergence of rave.

Religion: from disappearance to shifting

To tackle rave from a religious studies perspective, and thus grant it a full-fledged
religious status, requires a few introductory comments. First of all, a distinction
must be made between ‘a’ religion, from a theological, traditional, institutionalized
perspective, and ‘religion’ as a fundamental cultural phenomenon.^3 Opposing the
social studies secularization theory and other modern views holding religion to be
doomed to history’s burial ground, the idea that religion and the religious
experience do not end with the dwindling of traditional forms of instituted religion
is becoming widespread.^4
The French anthropologist Roger Bastide can be considered one of the most
stimulating thinkers on the topic of contemporary religious phenomena, as he kept
an eye on the cultural shifts in Western culture while concentrating the body of his
work on Brazilian and African rituals. Late in his life, Bastide acknowledged that
religion ‘shifted’ more than it disappeared or ‘reappeared’. He pointed to
urbanization- and secularization-induced phenomena such as star and hero cults,
and their ecstatic rituals as contemporary modulations of an experience of the sacred
and, therefore, manifestations of religiosity. That religion transforms itself in less
easily distinguished—or, as Edward Bailey (1997) would say, less explicit—cultural
phenomena challenges classical definitions of religion. For Bastide, religion is not
always ‘in’ what we are accustomed to call ‘religions’. Religions, in fact, are often
conservative contractions of the religious, or even institutions which aim to defend
against the religious, and are thus merely moralistic or sentimental annexes of, for
example, ‘bourgeois class rule’ (Bastide 1995). If this position is startling at first,
closer analysis demonstrates that Bastide’s ideas on religion, like those of Georges
Bataille, are incisive toolkits enabling a comprehensive grasp of phenomena which
would be elusive were we to limit religion to its traditional, institutionalized forms.
For Bastide, therefore, the ‘death of God(s)’ and the fall of traditional religious
institutions (the instituted) by no means correlate to a disappearance of ‘instituant’
experiences of the sacred. In other words, the crisis affecting various Christian
churches, for example, does not signify a crisis of the instituant: the desire and need
for experimentation with the dynamics of the sacred, as can be found, for instance,
in transgressive behaviour or collective effervescence. It is the dialectical movement
between these two polarities that I would like to introduce in order to shed some
light on the dynamics of the rave phenomenon in contemporary society.^5

THE ‘INSTITUANT’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF RAVE 63