Report to the dancefloor : journeys by experience and writing into raving and anthropology
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1998Author
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Abstract
This work is an ethnography about raving. As such, it is based on the
author's actual, inter-subjective and historical experience of that
contemporary international social phenomenon in Britain and in Goa (India)
during the late 1980s and 1990s. It is written from the position of an involved,
participating subject over time. This ethnographic approach and the emphasis
placed upon subjective experience, history and knowledge 'from
within' throughout the work is aimed, critically speaking, at tendencies
within contemporary forms of anthropology which favour academic
introspection, inter-textuality, textual notions concerning social life and overinterpretation.
This commitment to ethnography is also used in the final
section of the work, within a critical-historical appreciation of the discipline,
to argue for a re-statement of Malinowski's radical 'science' of ethnography in
the face of a routinisation of 'science' as a legitimating discourse within the
discipline during the twentieth century.
Furthermore, the ethnographic approach is also set out, in a way which
attempts to make the work relevant not only to practitioners of anthropology,
as a way of producing public knowledge and accounts of social life which are
very different, ethically and politically, from those produced within other
public practices and contexts, such as by the media and government agencies.
Representations and accounts produced by such public agencies are situated
and questioned in the work through attaching them, as loaded products, to
Michel Foucault's political notion of modern 'governmentality ' Within
such a politicised account of representation, the author has used long-established,
humanist notions surrounding the practice of ethnography,
regarding participation and empathy, in order to produce accounts of
raving as a human social practice. These humanised and politicised
accounts of the phenomenon are offered as a contrast to the predominating
public accounts of the practice, produced through distanced and disinterested
discourses, which mainly focus upon its ability to animate certain powerful
social categories and forms of exclusion, such as 'the criminal' and 'the addict',
and socio-political discourses, such as that on 'drugs' and 'the war against
drugs'. This contrast, and the opposition and demand for human tolerance
it expresses, forms part of a wider project within the work which resists dehumanisation;
that is, the treatment of human beings and their practices in
terms of self-serving discourses (monologues) as opposed to the humanising
and politicising effects of experience, interaction and
empathy/understanding (dialogue).
Within this general framework surrounding the politics and ethics
of representation, other areas which are explored are the position/role
of the anthropologist and the use of subjectivity within the
research process, the use of creative writing as a source of
humanised ethnographic knowledge about diverse social worlds, and an
exploration into the possible uses and limits of academic theorisation.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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