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‘Connectedness’ and the rave experience
Rave as new religious movement?
Tim Olaveson
Is rave simply about the dissipation of utopian energies into the void, or
does the idealism it catalyzes spill over into and transform ordinary life?
(Reynolds 1999:10)As William Pickering published his second edition of Durkheim on Religion, he
remarked upon the increased interest in the work of Émile Durkheim (Pickering
1994:2). The observation remains accurate today, partly through growth in the
popularity of the social anthropologist Victor Turner, prominent in a tradition of
scholars adapting Durkheim’s project. Regular contributors to journals like
Durkheimian Studies and scholars publishing through the British Centre for
Durkheimian Studies have launched reinterpretations of Durkheim’s thought on
various subjects,^1 and Turner’s work has been recast, reformulated and extended by
scholars of the sociology/anthropology of religion, ritual and other social
phenomena, including pilgrimage, performance, education and tourism.^2 For my
own part, in another work (Olaveson 2001) I demonstrate the equivalence of
Durkheim’s collective effervescence and Turner’s communitas, indicating that similar
models of cultural creativity and revitalization underlay the work of both scholars,
resembling more recent attempts to map new religious movements.
In recent years, the concepts of effervescence and communitas have been employed
in efforts to understand and map a range of youth social practices falling under the
rubric rave or post-rave (Hutson 1999, 2000; Malbon 1999; St John 2001a;
Tramacchi 2000). Scholars have begun to conceptualize raving as a transformational
and spiritual practice, raising the possibility of viewing rave as a new religious
movement (Tramacchi 2001) or, as Corsten suggests, ‘a symbolic and proto-religious
practice of a modern urban youth scene’ (1999:91).
Addressing various criticisms, this chapter illustrates how collective effervescence/
communitas (often viewed as separate entities) is useful for investigating the most
often reported experience in rave literature around the world—connectedness. The
evidence I use consists primarily of a review of the existing literature on rave
cultures, along with the results of the initial eight months of an ongoing ethnographic
study of the central Canadian rave scene. I then delineate how the model of cultural
revitalization latent in the work of Durkheim and Turner has been adapted by