This chapter offers a summary ethnography of ConFest. Focussing specifically on five events (held between April 1994 and April 1997), I provide a detailed description of ConFest in two parts. In the first, I discuss event foundations: the events researched, participants, the effects of social organicism, preparations and the volunteer ethos. In the second, I describe the cultural topography of ConFest in detail, with particular attention to key event zones and villages.

Consequent to DTE's democratic impetus in this period, I note two basic themes apparent. First, a diverse spectrum of alternative neo-tribes and subcultures (owning a vast range of discourse and practice, beliefs and motives) have been accommodated on site, a result of the Society's empowerment of multiple 'units' (villages) within the greater counterscape of ConFest. Second, in some respects a result of the first, ConFest is contested. Participants do not hold an homogenised interpretation of the meaning and purpose of the event, the polyphony of extant groks resonating ongoing disputes over that which constitutes 'alternative'. The existence of diverse cultures and interpretative frames renders ConFest radically inconstant, yet the persistent return of those holding divergent 'alternatives', and their on-site coexistence, insinuate the enduring logic of organicism underlying and conditioning a commonly desired experience.

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