Rave Culture and Religion

merge into a kind of collective body, a place where desire and production

meet in a state of flow.

(Tramacchi 2001:174; see also 181)

Tramacchi’s description of the ‘melding of selves’ during the connectedness
experience recalls the same language used by Turner to describe the communitas
attending the Ndembu rites of passage he observed in Zambia (then Northern
Rhodesia), as well as the hippie happenings of the 1960s. Such an experience, he
wrote, is an exchange between ‘total and concrete persons, between “I” and “Thou”.
This relationship is always a “happening”, something that arises in instant mutuality,
when each person fully experiences the being of the other’ (V.Turner 1969:136).

Transgressive, levelling and humanizing

As ‘settings of intensely emotional assembly, association and, by implication,
breakdown of established social barriers and structures’ (Nielsen 1999:208),
effervescent rituals evince ‘a compulsion to dissolve limits, differentiation and
particularity.... Effervescent assemblies are in this light ambiguously dangerous
arenas’ (Ramp 1998:144). Collective effervescence thus presents ‘a transgressive
possibility fuelled by a de-differentiating impulse in moments of heightened
emotional intensity’ (ibid.:146). It implies dissolution of regular social and
normative structures, and is sometimes seen as a danger to these structures. This
closely matches Turner’s well-known discussions of communitas as dialectically
opposed to social structure. While social structure keeps people apart, defines their
differences and constrains their actions (V.Turner 1974:47), communitas is a
liberating, equalizing, humanizing and transgressive force and experience, a
necessary counterbalance to the dehumanizing effects of social structure. It therefore
represents an inherent threat to social and political structures.
The rave experience has also been universally recognized as a transgressive,
levelling and humanizing experience. Although rave has become a middle-class
phenomenon in North America, early acid house parties and raves teemed with and
were in fact imported as a concept from Ibiza by working class British youth such as
Danny and Jenni Rampling, the creators of the legendary club Shoom (Collin 1997:
47ff., 168; see also Critcher 2000; Reynolds 1999:59). Furthermore, as Reynolds
notes, house music and its ethos were ‘born of a double exclusion’: the gay African-
American club and party circuit of Chicago (Reynolds 1999:24). Therefore, for its
progenitors and for many today, rave is perceived to be inclusive, a place where race,
class and gender lines are dissolved, where people can just be themselves and be
accepted (see Reynolds 1999; Silcott 1999; Fritz 1999), although theories of
homogeneous and universal inclusion within rave and dance cultures must be
moderated with analysis of the politics of particular dance spaces. For example,
Thornton (1995) points out that 1990s English club scenes did (and undoubtedly
still do) possess tacit norms around notions of subcultural style and ‘coolness’ (and
would-be patrons were sometimes denied access for violating them).

RAVE AS NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT? 91