Global tribe - Graham St John

Navigating a course through the world of psytrance (or psychedelic trance), Global Tribe charts the interfacing of culture, spirituality and technology in the first detailed study of this movement. The result of fifteen-years research by the author in over ten countries, the book applies a percipient lens to a little understood yet rapidly globalising dance culture. Using a multi-sited ethnography, it explores the integrated role of technologies and spiritual practice in an alternative cultural movement. A thorough document on a transnational movement with diverse aesthetic and cultural roots, Global Tribe introduces the reader to psychedelic cosmopolitanism, media of transcendence and the narratives of optimisation, techno-tribalism and the cults of experience, neotrance and the electro-carnivalesque, 2012 and progressive millenarianism, along with the risk taking and acts of conscience that are integral to this movement. Illustrated using a wealth of ethnographic, interview and documentary materials, tensions and controversies endogenous to psytrance drive the formulation of heuristics challenging received conventions such as "subculture", "neotribe" and "spirituality". Global Tribe will be of value to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Studies in Religion and Music Studies, though is destined to attract a broad readership outside academia.