thud so much they get their exhaust altered to increase the volume. It seems as if
they want to trace their ego in thuds wherever they go.
So the smoothness of the experience of riding goes hand in hand with the
striations of noise, accidents, ego, and sleeplessness. This is of course more so with
the raves themselves, which are always open air and never far from houses. The
older inhabitants complain about the noise of Goa trance, carried all the way to the
surrounding villages. The big New Year raves go on for days. It would be impossible
to mount raves of this scale in the home countries of the Goa freaks. But most of
Anjuna’s inhabitants are tourism dependent and therefore co-organizers of the scene,
at least in the indirect way of providing rooms, food, bikes, internet access, drugs,
etc. Only sometimes will they lobby to cancel a rave, for example when school
exams are due. Those Goans who do not make any money from tourism, mostly
middle-class Catholics, have vehemently opposed Anjuna’s hippie and rave scene.
Following successive moral panics in the press (e.g. “Beach parties raise a rumpus,”
Goa Today, February 1996; theme issue on the rave scene), the Goan government
and High Court imposed a ban on loud music in 2000. Though quite consistently
implemented during the first months of 2001 and 2002, the ban is often breached—
bribes reach government officials too. Anjuna without loud music (in bars, at raves,
in restaurants) agitates Goa freaks. Frustration increases as nearly every day there are
rumors of parties, which are then inexplicably cancelled. Many foreigners feel they
have an indisputable right to party, justifying their presence with the income the
parties bring to Goa.
Over the last few years many disappointed ravers have stopped coming to Goa,
going instead to Koh Phangan in Thailand, or Bahia in Brazil, or Madagascar, or
trying to organize parties elsewhere in India. Any place in the sun where living is
relatively cheap would do for psy-trancers. Ultimately it is not exotic Indian
spirituality (for some people I spoke to, not even the beach) but the psychotropic
chemicals and trance music which attracted them to Goa. While Goa remains, of
course, the “mother scene,” psy-trance’s smooth space could be created in any Third
World village. However, it seems that at least for another decade or so no other
place on earth will be able to boast as many eager DJs, dealers, and locals, and a
legal and economic infrastructure corrupt and dependent enough to supply psy-
trance parties for foreigners at the scale and frequency of Anjuna. It remains to be
seen whether the party bans imposed by the courts and police manage to stop new
freaks from coming to reconstitute the scene.
ConclusionPoststructuralists in general, and Deleuze and Guattari in particular, seem to be the
“natural” theorists for the study of the spiritualities of rave. This is because there is a
strong correspondence between, on the one hand, the self-proclaimed freedom and
transcendence of social difference in rave and club discourse and, on the other, the
anarchic celebration of desire, disorder, and flight evident in poststructuralism. But
what many ravers and poststructuralists do not realize is that power and desire,
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