Rave Culture and Religion

Routledge Advances in Sociology

by Graham St John (Editor), Hillegonda C. Rietveld (Contributor), François Gauthier (Contributor)

The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. Rave Culture and Religion will be essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and religious studies.

Reviews

"Rave Culture and Religion is a smart book collecting essays many by emerging scholars and graduate students who, in personally experiencing rave culture, find immediate and urgent applicability for the academic theories they are reading. To link rave and religion will hopefully prove shocking enough to the established academic study of religion to open new discussions about religion and popular culture. To link rave and sophisticated academic study will hopefully be shocking enough to a few ravers to lead them to see beyond a simple-minded fuzzy understanding of the power and importance of what they are experiencing." - Professor Sam Gill, University of Colorado at Boulder

Genres: Music, Sociology, Nonfiction, Spirituality

344 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 11, 2003

About the author

Graham St John, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and historian with a research interest in transformational events, movements and figures. Among his books are Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press 2025), Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books 2015), Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox 2012), Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox 2009), and the edited collections Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures (Bloomsbury 2017), The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Routledge 2010), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn 2008), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge 2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Commonground 2001). He was recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow in the Dept of Arts, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield and is currently Senior Research Fellow in the department. He is Executive Editor of Dancecult journal.