Fieldnote #19: In which we arrive in Goa, explore neo-tribal rave and new hedonic selfhoods

Hello. It has been a while (3 months), so let’s update.

I finished my innovation role at the National Gallery. Over the year I explored three themes: decolonising, biodesigning and queering.

I’ve been spending time in Brixton, south London, where a group of us have started ‘Idea Factory Radio’. We are attempting to reimagine community radio. Shows we are developing are: ‘Morning Show’, ‘Street University’, ‘Brixton Busyness’, ‘Album of the Week’ and ‘What’s On London’.

And we completed the Studio61 Summer School of Design, Cultures and Organising. The final session was ‘Reimagining Travel’. In this, we analysed a few objects: wheelie suitcases, seashell necklaces, yoga pants and mobile phones.

It was fun, but we didn’t really answer the question: how we might reimagine travel…

Which brings me to today…

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Someone recently asked me: what would you choose to study today if you went back to university? My answer: travel and tourism.

What could be more interesting than the movement of people around the globe for leisure!?

Here are a random selection of terms from the field:

Slow adventure, heritage tourism, eco retreats, Airbnb naming conventions, armchair travel, metaverse travel, bleisure, theme park studies, wellness tourism, gastronomical studies, digital nomadism, music tourism, self orientalism, dark tourism, couchsurfing, protest tourism, travel imaginaries, scopic regimes, tourist guides…

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Right now I am in India.

Specifically, in the region of Goa in a town called Arambol.

Two things of note happened in Goa during the 1960’s. First, in 1961, the 450-year colonial rule of of the Portuguese ended. Second, towards the end of the decade, the hippies started arriving.

Hippies, or the American counterculture, travelled the globe to escape suffocating American cultural values. This was the era of the Vietnam war.

To these disfranchised nomads, Goa offered a perfect space for the establishment of a hippie neo-colony because it was rural, agrarian and economically undeveloped.

These local conditions could easily be romanticised as the authentic, simple, and free village experience that was the ‘other’ to America.

The New Age travellers found that the Goan fishing communities were accepting of their ideas and peculiarities. Pictures from the time show nude white bodies laden with guitars being ‘one with nature’.

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Jump forward to the neoliberal 1990’s.

Goa tourism is becoming a powerful industry. Hotels sprawl along the coast, and marketing campaigns in the big cities develop a hedonistic imaginary for a new Indian middle-class.

The cultural industries play their part. Bollywood movies began depicting young, metrosexual, shirtless, gym-sculpted bodies embarking on road trips of self-discovery to Goa. (I’ve downloaded a copy of ‘Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class, that analyses the gym culture of ‘new India’ to read more about this)

Actual Goans were seldom represented.

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The nineties also brought Goan Trance: a neo-tribal rave subculture and musical genre. Goa-style parties start to take place all over the world. It’s aesthetic is psychedelic, neon, cosmic and incorporates imagery from the natural world and tribal patterns.

For the western cultural consciousness, Goa is perceived as a ravers paradise. A pleasure periphery of hedonism and promiscuity.

Important to note: this was not music created by Goan people, it was created, popularised and distributed by European travellers.

Like the hippies from the sixties and seventies, Goan trance borrowed from the spiritual system of India. This represents the DJ as neo-shaman, provoking a spiritual renaissance.

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Spiritual systems evolve over long periods of time. They co-evolve with the changing social relationships of their environment.

However, the cultural borrowing described above is more about satisfying the psychological needs of the western individual self who has been atomised by economic forces. It is about nourishing and revitalising a spiritually void western world.

Global rave culture is an interesting phenomenon. It often calls for a single, unified, borderless world. Goan trance certainly reflects this. But, we must ask: how much of this one world is a projection of the western imagination?

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This is 2023. What is the current conjecture? What new selfhoods are forming over time as cultural forces collide and change?

Goa comes to life during ‘the season’ which runs from November to March.

The walls here are covered with posters offering healing retreats, suggestive of edenic sexuality, guided by beautiful western Eve’s. You can partake in yoga teacher training, ecstatic dance, ayurvedic experiences, tarot cards, astrological readings and conscious parties.

An app called Party Hunt lets you know which parties are available. Paying users can access the special ‘secret parties’.

And the beautiful, golden, coastline of Arambol, marked with the occasional fishing boat, is lit-up at night by back to back beachside bars offering tourists the perfect sunset view, all serviced by an attentive, local, workforce.

The minimum wage in Goa for hospitality is around £4 per day.