Updated 2 months ago
A brief summary of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race by Arun Salhanha, and a few reviews
Before we go in I’d like to address a few questions:
“Is psytrance and Goa Trance racist?” is a ridiculous rhetorical clickbait question that can be answered after about a minute walking into any trance party. The community is a crazy quilt, a United Nations of different races and cultures.
Is psytrance and Goa trance cultural appropriation? I would argue no. Culture is free. Cultures need to exchange ideas for humanity to move forward. There may be tasteless examples, yes, such as that famous girl at Burning Man or Coachella with the headdress.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater… And let us not forget that India itself is a highly stratified society with a caste system that probably has roots in slavery, that whiter skin is valued over darker skin.
But this book is much bigger than that.
Much like LSD and other psychedelics offer a new way to map out the brain and consciousness, Goa trance may offer a materialistic new way to dissect racism and cultures.
Salhanha offers an interesting new materialist wrinkle with which to gaze through the racial prism, but I can wager its audience will be found not in psytrancers but in racial theorists who are always looking for new angles.
Admittedly, I am a middle-aged white male WASP. There is a whole other aspect I wish I could add to all this…. the bourgeois commodification of festivals such as the superrich at Burning Man, with take a diamond-encrusted jackhammer to its DIY ethos. The worship of individual trance DJs. Large venues charging exorbitant amounts for water, and preventing people from refilling water in the bathrooms. Little things like that.
But are these really problems? It’s hard to be objective. Goa trance was never really that big in the US. Even with Burning Man and their catering to rich pussies, it is all… let’s be honest…. still…underground, edgey and relatively pure and to pretend any of it was or is anything approaching commercial is delusional.
Terence McKenna speaks from the grave: “The music and the trance-dance drug-taking situation is the establishment of a ritual space outside the conventions of ordinary society, that is the new shamanism. And that’s again what makes it so suspect in the eyes of the establishment. They sense that this is something they can’t get a handle on and control, or that it takes them some time to get a handle on – they have to figure out how to co-opt each generation in a new way. My generation was co-opted in a very crude way, with money.
Your generation… The Establishment’s not interested in that, they’d rather keep the money for themselves. I’m hoping that the new trance-dance culture has enough integrity to resist being folded into commercialism and ordinary mass cultural entertainment. But we shall see.
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race by Arun Salhanha
Amazon Link
The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are?
A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation.
Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering building on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race. Arun Saldanha is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota.
Two quotes from the beginning:
This is no field for the faint of heart. You are venturing out (like the Portuguese sailors, like the astronauts) on the uncharted margins. But be reassured—it’s an old human custom. It’s an old living-organism custom. We’re here today because certain adventurous proteins, certain far-out experimenting cells, certain hippy amphibia, certain brave men pushed out and exposed themselves to new forms of energy.
—Timothy Leary, about his Harvard LSD experiments
When a number of bodies of the same or of different magnitudes are pressed together by others, so that they lie one upon the other, or if they are in motion with the same or with different degrees of speed, so that they communicate their motion to one another in a certain fixed proportion, these bodies are said to be mutually united, and taken together they are said to compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from other bodies by this union of bodies.
—Spinoza
Excerpt from Preface:
Bodies are different. Finally, this is coming to bear on theory. Feminism has led the way in stressing the irrefutability of bodily differences. But for a host of reasons, the bodily differences we call race have been relegated to the discursive realm. Race is a cultural construct, full stop, with no basis in the material world of flesh, phenotype, and the physical
landscape. This book tries to suggest a new ontology of race, and asks throughout: but what is race? It asks how racial difference emerges not because people think or write “such and such is white,” “so-and-so is Indian,” and neither because a dominant discourse “others” certain minorities. Racial difference emerges as many bodies in the real world align and comport themselves in certain ways, in certain places. Taking the embodiment of race seriously is not a mere addition to existing poststructuralist approaches. It calls for quite a radical shift in thinking, and I know it is tricky. Most theories of race are still very much steeped in an antirealist, psychoanalytic, dialectical framework. I’ve come to believe, however, that a shift toward materialism in the conceptualization of race is nigh, and it won’t be just this book arguing for it. Race is simply far too important a force to prevent such shifts to happen.
[Acknowledgements]
And last, to all you psy-trancers out there: bom shankar. Keep it going, but keep it shanti.
…Why Anjuna? What’s with the Israelis, and Japanese avoiding Indians? What are “tranceheads,” and why are they watching out for Israelis to turn up at the party? Why do
they wait for Indians to leave? What does a “magical morning” consist of? What is a “mat business”? How does “momentum” of ravers come about? And why were these notes written down in the first place? Why does a half-Belgian-half-Indian guy go study foreign ravers in some thirdworld village?
This sort of puzzlement forces a reassessment of what one knows. Anjuna’s music and drugs tourism is legendary and it is probably the only village in the third world that brought forth an own kind of electronic dance music, Goa trance, which is played at outdoor parties across the globe. Goa trance makes a fascinating case study in cultural geography. It appeared shortly after house and techno music established themselves in the United Kingdom and other European countries around 1990, but the conditions for Anjuna’s trance scene go back to the early seventies. The coastal village was “discovered” by hippie travelers at a time when there was much interest in the mind-altering qualities of India. Although Goa is generally considered “less Indian” by tourists because of more than 460 years of Portuguese colonial influence, the hippies eagerly took to its tranquil tropical beaches and tolerant locals.
By 1975 Anjuna was a secluded haven for a semi-resident community of hippies who could freely indulge in drugs, nude sunbathing, and all-night full-moon parties. Music was always central to Anjuna’s tourism, but it was with Goa trance that it boomed. Goa’s festive image long attracted large numbers of domestic tourists too. Charter tourism from the UK and other European countries was consolidated at about the same time that Goa trance became available in large music stores in Europe, in 1995. What began with Goa regulars
simulating Anjuna’s parties in their home countries grew into a transnational underground rave/club scene, stretching from Tel Aviv to Stockholm, from Brasília to Cape Town
Excerpts From Chapter 1: Psychedelic Whiteness
“They are above the multitudes, looking down from the Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion eyes of America glisten at them like electric kernels, and yet the Pranksters are grooving with this whole wide-screen America and going with its flow with American flags flying from the bus and taking energy, as in solar heat, from its horsepower and its neon and there is no limit to the American trip.
—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
What a White Body Can Do
Anjuna’s psychedelic trance scene cannot be understood outside its hippie legacy. There are clear continuities between Goa’s psy-trance scene and the legendary fluorescent Furthur bus of the Merry Prankster, which brought Ken Kesey’s delirious multimedia “acid tests” across the United States and into Mexico. These continuities express what this book is about: psychedelic whiteness. In an essay on the American hippies, Stuart Hall usefully summarized the eclectic practices and attitudes that defined them.1 Hippie culture literally held together through the adoption of black slang and what Hall calls “assumed poverty”; enacting Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; an identification with American Indians and India; hallucinogenic mysticism; slogans about “togetherness”; a yearning for childhood inno-
cence; and a new brand of hedonistic anarchism do your own thing. Each of these meant a redefinition of what it meant to be white and middle-class in the America of the fifties and sixties, challenging its politeness, suburban consumerism, hometown nostalgia, the Protestant work ethic, and white supremacism.
[I]n its more active mode, Hippies and “flower power” are a way of carrying on a sort of spiritual politics by “other means”. Instead of taking society from in front, like the campus militants, or burning it, baby, to the ground, like the black ghetto militants, they mean to unravel it from within, destroying the rationale, undermining the legitimacy, the social
ethic which is the moral cement which holds the whole fabric together.2 It is this active (as opposed to reactive) “spiritual politics by other means” that I wish to call psychedelics. Psychedelics is the commitment certain whites have to transforming themselves through drugs, music, travel, and spiritualities borrowed from other populations. Psychedelics
is less an organized, antagonistic kind of politics than an “unraveling from within” of the “moral cement” that defines the privileged position of the white bourgeoisie. Important though the taking of hallucinogenic drugs is to psychedelics, it follows from a more general sensual, romantic, and self-conscious framework. Psychedelics is an ethical practice, a relationship to oneself, one’s body, one’s place in society and the world, which seeks not to destroy the culture from which it sprang but to explore its fringe possibilities to the advantage of one’s individuality.”
White Negroes
If psychedelic practices forge new relationships with what white modernity bars itself from, they are necessarily paradoxical in racial terms. The title of what is one of the most famous essays on the postwar counterculture, “The White Negro” by Norman Mailer, captures this point well.
Reflecting on “Hip,” the subcultural attitude of the beatniks in the mid1950s, Mailer contends that this attitude wouldn’t have been possible without the borrowing of marijuana and bebop from America’s black population.
Indeed, hip, hipster, and hippie probably stem from the black and criminal slang word hep, meaning “with it,” “fashionable.” Because young whites in the United States were experiencing an existential crisis after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, it was the primitive, now-centered, and orgiastic way of life of the Negro, according to Mailer, that held an attraction to them:
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for all practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.
Emergence
In understanding Anjuna’s tourist practices as creative, I have been inspired by popular science writing. This may seem strange for someone trained in media studies and cultural geography, but I’m encouraged by the fact that some Anglophone scholars of Deleuze, such as Manuel DeLanda, are arguing that the humanities and social sciences have largely failed to grasp the deeply creative nature of the material world. The difference
that matter itself makes, as opposed to the difference that consciousness makes of it, has on the whole remained elusive to the human sciences.
This is because they have insisted that matter (the body, nature, things) is only capable of agency insofar as it is mediated by culture, language, and the mind. By contrast, Deleuze holds that matter is itself “problematic.” Matter contains—or rather is—a creativity beyond the creativity that is habitually attributed to culture, language, or the mind. The schism between the human and physical sciences followed from the peculiarly modern European way of separating mind and matter after Descartes. If the humanities talk about fluidity or entropy, they’re supposed to be meant as metaphors, whereas for physical scientists, it’s the real stuff.
I’m going to stop here, but that is a taste of the book.
Buy it on Amazon
Reviews
n Psychedelic White, Arun Saldanha proposes a highly original theory of race as a dynamic event arising from a complex field of embodied encounter whose fundamental contingency it can never fully shake off. A major new statement that will contribute centrally to debates in the fields of race and globalization studies.
— Brian Massumi, Université de Montréal
Psychedelic White is one of the most innovative, refreshingly different analyses of race I have read in the last decade.
— Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely
Saldanha has taken risks with this book. It is irreverent, bold and much of it is fun to read (when Saldanha allows his own voice to dominate he can be a startlingly good writer).
— Progress in Human Geography
Psychedelic White is a compelling provocation to the theoretical frameworks traditionally summoned to study race and racism.
— Social & Cultural Geography
Psychedelic White makes a pleasant and immersing read. I can whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in travel, Goa, embodiment, or whiteness and race studies.
— Suomen Antropologi
Author meets critics: Arun Saldanha’s Psychedelic White
Free pdf download; excerpts:
By the turn of the twenty-first century a shake-up of ideas around race and racism seemed
inevitable. Fifty years of activism and reflection on diversity, equality and civil rights
produced real progress in understanding that racial divisions are neither natural nor
immutable, in recognizing that racism is a slippery style of oppression with a form for
every occasion, and in establishing what anti-racism is against. Yet, it suddenly seemed hard to find any fresh account of what all this work was for. Race theory became trapped in the cycle of categorizations and identifications that mapped representations of race onto
styles of resistance or models of recognition.
Anti-racist practice clustered hopefully, but often fruitlessly, around ever more elaborate ways of using integration, socialization or some other style of mixing to counter
strategies of exclusion, segregation and disaffection. Arun Saldanha’s book is one of a
handful of new works that effectively breaks that mould. That is why it is so controversial;
and it is why we chose to profile it here. The subjects of this ethnography are
white, well-off hippies and ravers (‘freaks’), middle-class Indian tourists and villagers who
come together in the beaches, bars and guest houses in the Goan village of Anjuna. As a
participant-observer in the assemblage of bodies, ecstasy, dancing and sun, Saldanha
came to realize that despite trance discourse about peace and respect, white (Israeli, British, Danish, even Japanese) people coalesced in rave spaces, on certain beaches and in tourist hangouts, making them exclusionary. Whiteness, defined as ‘sticky connections among property, privilege and a paler skin’ (Saldanha 2006: 18), is creative, effervescent, finding ever more ways to remake itself. Its stickiness closed off the ostensible possibility of love and unity. Indians, regardless of class or gender, were not part of the ‘in-crowd’; their bodies out of place even on the edges of the dance floor as the sun rose on a rave. While Saldanha is critical of the freaky form of whiteness as well as the moralistic response to the raves from Indian authorities, he wants to see some potential in the racial encounters in Anjuna. The immanent ethics Saldanha elaborates emerges out of white freaks’ sense of ‘intensive difference, the particular charge between oneself and another’ (p. 173). Some white people feel that their privilege requires others’ subjugation. When they stop taking their subjectivity for granted, they ‘enter a field of intensive differences in which identities
don’t hold’ (p. 175). Thus, ‘[i]n the face-to- face, the self embraces a relatively powerless
other, not to exploit or appropriate him/her
into ‘the Same’ but to give and to care-for’ (p. 118). For us, then, an important message of the text is that difference is seen not as threat but as a resource for questioning the vulnerabilities and dependencies of one’s position in the world. It is tempting to read Psychedelic White as a ‘new’ material geography of race designed to replace the outdated social constructionist model that preceded it. Saldanha himself cannot quite resist this claim. But, arguably, the force of this work does not depend on there ever having been a singular representational approach to race to react against. It does perhaps rest on the awkward truth that race scholars, having spent so long arguing against objectivist, materialist and realist accounts of race difference, have been reluctant to deal with the dissolution of the boundary between culture and nature that has occurred in other spheres of scholarship. Mostly though this is an account of the material geographies of race that stands or falls by its own appeal and plausibility, not by its ‘otherness’ to what precedes, follows or contextualizes it.
Saldanha (2006) understands race as an event: an assemblage of things, phenotypes and practices which is made, remade, revised and reformed in the constant flux (and occasional showcase event) comprising daily life. It is this emphasis on working with bodily practices— their engagements and disengagements, their fixity or movement, their material encounter— that stands in contrast to a body of work reflecting on the representations that people deploy to define or resist others. To understand how phenotype works, Saldanha’s approach not only describes ‘intensive differences between human bodies’ but traces how ‘economic, cultural, phenotypical and other disparities open those bodies to certain kinds of interactions and transformations’ (p. 25). In this way, through ontology, he develops an argument for the materiality of race. The book’s project is also political (as well as theoretical), and perhaps most distinctive in setting out not just what we should argue against in the field of race, but also what it is that scholars might usefully argue for.
The book makes a case for the importance of revisiting and rethinking segregation and the possibilities of reconceptualising and re-experiencing race. Against the formulations of identity politics and racism, race, here, is open-ended becoming, made up of some relatively fixed and some changing aspects and, with practices, race plays a role in what bodies do. Thus for antiracist futures, it is necessary to consider race as the physical aggregating of phenotypes. We find inspiration in Saldanha’s point that ‘race should not be abandoned or abolished, but proliferated’ (p. 199).
Yet Saldanha has written about phenotype as if it must principally be associated with race when the term refers to any outward appearance. While he makes reference to ‘experiential ableism’ (p. 66) and the materiality of race in the work of ‘anthropologically inclined medical research’ (2003: 259), his contribution is much more than a theory of race; it is one of phenotype. Thus this work’s most lasting impact may be to inform understandings of all kinds of bodily marking— around disability, health and forms of genetic discrimination—as well as those that currently hang on race.
Psychedelic White is a compelling provocation to the theoretical frameworks traditionally summoned to study race and racism. In her review of the book, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes ‘Psychedelic White is one of the most innovative, refreshingly different analyses of race I have read in the last decade’ (see www.amazon.com).
Chromatic Variation in Ethnographic Analysis
(dj.dancecult.net review excerpt)
“Reflecting a Deleuzian turn in social geography, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race examines rave tourism in Goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation…
The basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” According to Saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in Goa…
Within a complex formulation of race materialism, Psychedelic White discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which Saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. Yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of Westerners. In a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, Saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book….
Indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. In a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern Goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. However, the argument that psytrance in Goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. Incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. Firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in Goa or elsewhere. Spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and Goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. In this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. Internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in Goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. Moreover, several Indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as DJs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. Mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against India’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. Furthermore, Saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some Indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in Goa. Likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards Indians is more often than not a Simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across India. All in all, EDM studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes.
The psytrance scene in Goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone.
