India, or Brazil. As the old hippie complains, “Then they loved us, now they blame
us!”
In India, Techno and New Age activities became sources of income for local
communities. Besides the ancillary activities of taxing, lodging, restaurants, and the
pervasive “chai economy,” trance parties in Goa became complex joint-ventures of
Goan gangs and Western DJs, the former seeking profit through sound-system
rentals, bar sales, and police bribes, and the latter aiming at shamanic excitement
and prestige. Although drug consumption abounds in the clubs, bars, and parties of
Ibiza and Goa, in most cases there is no basic economic motivation linking party
organization and drug dealing, as commonly suspected regarding trance gatherings.
It is well known that party promoters often lose money on their parties.
Nonetheless, they allow drugs as a way of creating a “nice atmosphere” among
friends and the crowd. In Ibiza, trance parties are organized by non-profit gangs of
youngsters, and the underground scene unfolds secretly through the agonistic
motivations of sociability, excitement, and transgression of global and Spanish
freaks.
On a larger scale, transnational flows of nomadic countercultures and the
resulting circuits, networks, and ethnoscapes are affected by various agencies and
structures operating at the local and global levels. By the early 1990s, legal
repression of raves in the U.K. contributed to the dissemination and
commodification of parties and drug consumption in Ibiza and Goa. Conversely, in
2000, north Goan villagers protested the tough repression of trance parties by
authorities and police, as it stifled their main source of subsistence by scaring freaks,
backpackers, and party-tourists away Goan authorities had to respond by
recalibrating their actions in order to accommodate different interests. This meant
that a certain degree of freak activity had to be allowed. As we have seen, a complex
dynamic of conflict and accommodation also underlies the development of the
Osho meditation resort in Poona. In sum, the interconnectedness of global flows
develops through tensions and disjunctures among social, political, and economic
domains, and characterizes the turbulent environments through which global
nomads navigate.
As evinced, the co-presence of multinational backgrounds, nomadic practices, and
transpersonal experiences among global nomads is central to their identity. By
exploring “limit-experiences” (Foucault) in transgressive cults of “orgiastic
sensuality” (Weber), Techno and New Age provide sites for the cultivation of a
cosmopolitan nomadism, by which alternative subjects attempt to make sense of their
lives in contexts of high mobility and instability. As a matter of fact, countercultures
have been comfortably exploring strangeness, rootlessness, and displacement much
before these qualities became considered by media and academia as core predicaments
of contemporary social life. The familiarity of countercultures with such
predicaments illustrates the richness of Techno and New Age as advanced sites for
the investigation of emerging realities.
Hence, theories claiming that alternative subjects have “dropped out” of
neoliberal capitalism are unable to explain why and how they make critical decisions
248 GLOBAL NOMADS IN IBIZA AND GOA