paper presented by

Arun Saldanha

Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSo)

Free University of Brussels (VUB)

Belgium

arun.saldanha@vub.ac.be

at the 10th Annual IASPM International Conference

University of Technology

Sydney, 9-13 July 1999

Hippies began hitting Goa’s beautiful shores towards the end of the sixties, fleeing straight urban society, in search of ‘instant karma’ and widely available drugs (remember Said, 1978). Goa was mythologized quickly amongst hippies as Earth’s paradise in terms of landscape and hedonistic pleasure (Odzer, 1995). Especially Anjuna, a village in the north, became a traveller station on the way to or back from Bali and Kathmandu. Even as a charter tourism industry gradually formed in the immediate south, tourism in Anjuna remained relatively small-scale and youthful.

Music was always integral to the hippie traveller subculture, largely in the form of outdoor parties (compare Collin, 1998). The end-of-the-year and full moon parties in Goa started getting bigger and bigger towards the end of the seventies, with live rock music and crowds tripping out on acid punch. The parties became so big that DJs, partygoers and artists started conflating the popularity of particular genres with actual ‘scenes’.

How and when the Goa trance scene came about is a matter of debate and a source for myths of origin typical to any subculture. Certain is that by around 1991, young Westerners started coming to Anjuna not for spirituality or Indian culture, but for the Goa trance raves held on beaches, on hilltops and in the forest (for a preliminary musicology of Goa trance see Cole and Hannan, 1997). This was acoustic tourism - little ‘tourist gaze’ involved here (Urry, 1990) - an articulation of music, dance, drugs, internationalism and pilgrimage not so different from Woodstock, Ibiza or the Berlin Love Parade... except that Goa lies in the Third World.

Mainly because of 450 years of Portugese colonization, popular Goan patriotism is more often than not overly Catholic, middle class and sentimental. Goan intellectuals from a Marxist-Leninist tradition try to avoid this socially biased nostalgia. Since Goa became part of India in ‘61, intellectuals have played an important role in the ‘re-imagination’ of Goa (Anderson, 1983), in which essentialization is never far away. With essentialization is meant the bracketing, from within a power/knowledge structure, of an object’s internal heterogeneity and ambivalence (Chatterjee, 1986 on postcolonial essentialism; Foucault, 1980 on power/knowledge).

This postcolonial essentialism is obvious in Goa’s intellectual discourse on the dangers of tourism. Most intellectuals in Goa represent the place as the passive victim of multinational exploitation and Westernization. Anti-tourist critique and NGO activism focus on pollution, land policy, international crime, mediatization, and the corruption of ‘Goan culture’. The environmental and institutional evils of tourism are primarily associated with the tourism industry as it developed since the seventies. But the emergence in the nineties of rave tourism in Anjuna and Vagator also raised firm protest amongst Goan intellectuals. New debates arise on what Goa is and what it is not, as a genre with the place’s name in it (Goa trance) spreads around the world, and becomes popular amongst Goan youth as well.

In Anjuna during high season, parties take place every other day, attracting not only flocks of charter tourists from further down south, but also flocks of curious Indian men from neighbouring villages and rich Indians from Bombay and Bangalore. And then there are the remaining hippies who don’t mind a rave from time to time. Thus, the parties are peopled by foreigners and Indians alike, whose identifications with the subculture and music varies considerably. Remembering Sarah Thornton’s work (1995) on subcultural capital, I wasn’t surprised to observe the considerable hostility, amongst some Westerners, against the young local men who want to join in the fun.

Anjuna’s history of psychedelic culture is reflected in psytrance parties all over the world: a good Goa party contains fluo decorations and mind-expanding paintings, people selling ethnic jewellery, self-made snacks and bodypainting, and doing circus-like performances; ideally set in a remote natural surrounding with the only light coming from UV-lamps and the full moon, going on as long as possible (24 hour parties are common in Anjuna), the drugs of preference being LSD and cannabis and not Ecstasy or alcohol.

Parties always have what I call a ‘mat economy’, consisting of locals sitting on mats selling sweets, cigarets, water, snacks and of course chai (tea). Today, the trade at tourist sites in Goa is competitive out of proportion. Beggars are rare in Goa, but I’ve seen them at parties. The scene naturally attracts drug cartels too. Fishing for drug possession, cops stop the ‘freaks’ on their bikes daily, and sometimes bust entire parties, mostly with the sole purpose of getting more than the routine bribes. Mean while, more and more villagers are unable to sleep through the relentless kick drum and squelching TB303. Goa trance in Goa is clubbing in the wilderness, pounding beats breaking through the tranquil paddyfields. I guess Foucault (1986) would call the psytrance parties in Goa ‘heterotopic’, spaces containing uneasily disparate meanings and functions.

Exploitation, indifference, international crime, racism, institutionalized corruption, and noise pollution: this is the flip side of the coin which is rarely mentioned - or dare I say noticed - by people in the Goa trance subculture (www.chaishop.com; compare Cole and Hannan, 1997). It’s these social problems which have brought Goan intellectuals to fight, on behalf of the villagers, against everything that Western counterculture stands for.

With the Goa party scene getting bigger, more competitive, more criminal, and increasingly fragmented along ethnic, national, socio-economic and subcultural barriers, it becomes difficult to uphold the rave myth of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) so central, implicitly or explicitly, to Goa trance (www.chaishop.com). However, Goa continues to be represented by the government, the tourist industry and by psytrancers alike as the crème de la crème for fun or some sort of spiritual enhancement, although, of course, each gives a different meaning to these words. It’s hardly surprising, then, to learn that Leftist Goan intellectuals equate tourism with neocolonialism, complete in economy, policy and ideology.

So what’s Goa, heaven or hell? What does Goa mean - and to whom? Who belongs to Goa and who doesn’t? The conflictual practices, economies, imaginings and representations in Goa’s psytrance scene show exactly what I mean with the ‘politics of place’.

The dominant thinking about ‘place’ favours poetics over politics. Building on existentialism, the ‘humanist’ critique of modern positivism presents place as a feeling, a home providing safety and identity in a world homogenized by Reason and market forces (Relph, 1976). The ‘sense of place’ of a location is treated as one, as residing in the place itself, as ‘uniaccentual’ and ‘monological’.

But as Volosinov (1930) tells us, signs always involve dialogue between actual subjects in concrete modes of interaction, and thus every sign is ‘multiaccentual’. Subjects using the same sign are positioned differently in power relations (Foucault, 1980 on power); what results is a ‘struggle over meaning’. I think we can ‘spatialize’ this line of thinking by stating that a struggle over the meaning of a place is bound to occur whenever different and unequal social groups use the same space. This struggle does not only take place in representation, but also in embodied activity, experience and desire (Lefebvre, 1991).

Doreen Massey has clarified the struggle over the meaning of place by situating it in the forces of globalization (Massey and Jess, eds., 1995). Each locality ‘accumulates’ various influences from without over time; the quality and quantity of this inter-local influencing reflects the degree to which the locality is inserted in international flows. With these flows becoming more and more diverse and stretched-out, places are increasingly complex intersections of scapes. Massey talks about place just like James Clifford (1997) talks about culture: of each place, the ‘identity’, ‘originality’, ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’ are socially constructed through historical interaction with other places.

With places becoming more complex, so do their meanings. What Manhatten Island meant 700 years ago doesn’t come near what meanings the place conveys today. Migration, modernization and mediation render places more polysemous, and more polysemy means more politics (compare Gupta and Ferguson, eds., 1997). In short, globalization is intrinsically bound up with the politics of place.

The politics of place is exemplified nicely in the case of Goa trance parties: psytrancers mythologizing ‘Goa’ as a mystical party capital, versus Goan intellectuals trying hard to imagine ‘Goa’ as a community free of hedonism. Contra the idealizations by the subculture itself and some enthusiastic analysts, and contra the reactionary verdict in the Goan public sphere, I want to show which power/knowledge structures are at work in these essentializing claims on ‘the’ meaning of Goa.

To study the connections between goa the music and Goa the place, I cannot simply focus on a musicology of psytrance or some ‘sense of place’ I suppose the location contains. Seventy years ago, Volosinov warned us for the omission of material context and social practice in textualist and phenomenological approaches to meaning. And yet, what we see in most geography of music is precisely this omission (Kong, 1995; Leyshon et al., eds., 1998; Lipsitz, 1994; Mitchell, 1995; Smith, 1997; though see Ingham et al., 1999). It’s Goa trance actually performed that causes a politics around the parties to come about. It’s Goa trance actually performed that shows Goa’s caprices of globalization and postcolonial power games. A critical understanding of music and place just won’t do without taking into account the practiced struggle over meaning.

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