The molecules of ritual: promoting, producing, and performing raving and clubbing in Toronto

Abstract

This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer. This dissertation investigates raving and clubbing as performances of ritual. It follows Victor Turner's call to locate the original matrix of ritual in the multi-dimensionality of those contemporary cultural events which he referred to as liminoid phenomena. In doing so, it describes music and dance as the central expressions and experiences of raving and clubbing. Ethnographic research on the practices of raving and clubbing was conducted in Toronto, Canada from 1997 to 2001. Informant testimonials on the communal, magical, spiritual, and quasi-religious experiences associated with raving and clubbing position ritual as a framework of analysis derived from practitioners. A review of the dominant sociological literature reveals metaphorical and anecdotal references to raves and clubs as ritual spaces and raving and clubbing as ritual practices to be largely inadequate. An anthropological approach to the study of ritual as a performed sequence of events is taken through an analysis of music, dance, and the auxiliary media which promote their meanings as rites in and of youth culture. The performance roles of disc jockeys, dancers, and organizers are described to examine music, dance, and event design and advertising as the practices through which raving and clubbing are conceived, received, and interpretively framed by participants as ritual. The framing of raving and clubbing as ritual is considered historically through an analysis of the technologies of playing records and the social application of those technologies by disc jockeys associated with the cultures of disco in New York City, house in Chicago, and acid house and rave in England. Underground dance music and the disco concept are identified as the musical and performance genre shared by those culture and the ravers and clubbers in Toronto who index their social mythologies to situate their rites as authentic and meaningful. Describing successful performances of underground dance music records by disc-jockeys as a journey, the processual model of ritual developed by Arnold vanGennep and refined by Turner is invoked to examine how this performance idiom structures the expressions and experiences of liminality through music and dance. Raving and clubbing are thus considered opportunities for participants to engage in ritual performances of transcendence and transformation.