The principal concern here is the (re)production and/or suffusion of alternative identities and culture via public events. Anthropologists have long been interested in public events variously described as 'ritual', 'ceremony', 'rites of passage', 'celebrations', 'feasts', 'carnivals', 'festivals', 'parades', 'pilgrimage rites', 'spectacles', etc. In perhaps the most comprehensive heuristic treatment of public events, Handelman (1990:16,3) suggests that all such events are 'closed phenomenal worlds' wherein 'people undertake in concert to make more, less, or other of themselves, than they usually do'. Public events are 'little worlds' which 'point beyond' themselves, are 'symbolic of something outside of themselves, standing for, evoking or bringing into being something else, something absent' (ibid:13). They 'operate on and through' participants, who are said to be 'captured by, and caught up within, the logic of their design' (ibid:16). As such, they are, for both natives and ethnographers alike, 'privileged points of penetration' into socio-cultural universes (ibid:9).

This thesis goes some way toward correcting the absence of 'an anthropology of alternative cultural public events'. It seems clear that the communion (coming together) of dissenters, the profoundly disenchanted and part-time expatriates who inhabit certain spaces at certain times, to resist and celebrate - to quite literally seek otherness - is indispensable for the (re)production of alternative identities. Alternative cultural public events are sanctioned and patronised by the ACM.5 Though they interrupt and agitate normative conceptual and value frameworks, such event-spaces are, however, truly varied in substance and effect - variation conveyed via theoretical models deployed to apprehend events and event-spaces. Lefebvre (1991), for instance, refers to 'spaces of representation' (or 'representational spaces'), everyday event-spaces resistant to commodification, which seek to make visible the contradictions in the capitalist production of space. Alternatively, Handelman (1990) speaks of 'events of representation', specialised, usually legitimate, moments of suspension and transgression in the seasonal round such as the carnival.

A discussion of alternative event-spaces should not be inattentive to tourism and the tourist-event. Seeking respite from, or disillusioned with, modern, urban life, westerners have developed an insatiable longing for the authenticity that is perceived inherent in the cultures and lifestyles of 'others' - especially indigenes. Like pilgrims, 'traveller-tourists' have discovered alternative, or 'elective centres' (Cohen et al. 1987) 'in the recesses of the Other' (Cohen 1992:51). Introducing the phenomenon of expatriate youth 'seeking spontaneous experiences in the excitement of complete strangeness', Cohen (1973:89) discusses a global itinerant traveller culture converging upon 'drifter communities', 'semi-autonomous islands of transplants' developing at exotic locations like the Spanish island of Ibiza and Goa, India, since the sixties.

The last three decades have seen the appearance of 'cultural productions' (MacCannell 1976) catering for 'traveller-tourists' who are 'searching for experience and for their origin through the rural, the primitive, the childlike, the unpolluted, the pure, and the original' (Bruner 1993:324). Descrying the existence of one such nostalgia-laden 'production', Manning (1983:26) cites the example of the Rio Carnival to which North American tourists flock en masse, 'not to revel in fantasia, but to encounter a pristine and genuine spirit of festivity that they believe has been "lost" in their own society'.

Authentic representation, however, is a process identifiable in cultural productions transpiring within the geographic boundaries of advanced capitalist societies. Such productions may appropriate, re-create or re-enact a constellation of themes from other cultures, rurality or the past. The nostalgia industry has, for instance, given birth to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in San Francisco, which, since the sixties, has been held in a meticulously reconstructed Elizabethan Shire where participants, normally comfortably well off, imagine their immersion in a Shakespearian epoch (Cohen 1993:138-47). In this, and other examples of 'staged authenticity' (MacCannell 1976:101), traveller-pilgrims are often immersed in social imagery 'redolent with simplicity, truth, naturalness, and purity' (Manning 1983:26). I have especially in mind numerous counter-spaces, 'elective centres' largely outside the reach of corporate capital and state surveillance which have appeared at 'places on the margin' (Shields 1991) within the borders of 'home nations' since the sixties.6 Perhaps performative alternatives to 'alternative tourism', or 'anathema parks', these are temporary local 'drifter communities' accommodating contemporaneous antinomians and expatriate pilgrims seeking affirmation, wholeness and a better world (Reader 1993:9-10).

It could be argued that festival (or carnival) is itself a universally alternate moment in the life of a people. Since the Roman Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools, the festival has been a time of inversion, intensification, transgression and abstinence.7 Falassi (1987:3) makes this clear:

At festival times, people do something they normally do not; they abstain from something they normally do; they carry to the extreme behaviors that are usually regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life.

Carnival, a season of festive events culminating in two or three days of massive street processions, is rooted in Roman Catholic pre-Lenten festivities occasioning 'release from the constraints and pressures of the social order, generat[ing] relationships of amity even among strangers and allow[ing] forbidden excesses' (Cohen 1993:3). Duvignaud (1976:18) argues that the 'destructive or subversive spirit inherent in [such festivities] ... involve[s] a real awakening of individual consciousness'. Indeed, Duvignaud remembers Rousseau's romantic understanding of the non-imaginary 'other-world' of the festival where 'individual minds would fuse together under the pressure of intense participation' (ibid:16). In regard to the Rio Carnival, Da Matta (1984) understood this as the usually impersonal street's domestication. Bakhtin (1968) knew it as the cosmic world-body correspondence of the medieval carnival and market place. Turner (1969) deemed it 'spontaneous communitas'.

But what is the character of the subversion, rebellion or resistance inherent to the festival, carnival or market place? Are they moments of real conflict: instruments of political opposition, sites of subversion occasioning open criticism of the state and religious authorities? Or, are they 'rituals of rebellion' (Gluckman 1954), fake revolutions like Fasnacht at Basle, 'a savage form of class struggle' which 'enables the underprivileged class to make revolution without really performing it' (Weidkuhn 1976:44). Do they, therefore, function as 'safety valves', permitting people to 'revolt' before returning to their consented place in the social hierarchy, their allegiance to the system reaffirmed? Furthermore, are not carnivals means by which the powerful maintain their privilege - through which class, gender and ethnic strata are reproduced? The truth is carnival is essentially ambivalent. According to Cohen, it is poised between genuine opposition and means of domination. Like a 'grand joking relationship', carnival/festival is characterised by 'both conflict and alliance' (1993:128).

Yet, what is distinctive about the events I outline here, is that they are diverse products of an oppositional culture. After all, there are substantial differences between most commercial festivals, or state sponsored arts festivals, and independent, underground or alternative orientated events. In chronicling events, I have kept several principal criteria in mind, taking into account the organisational and economic framework of events themselves as much as their self-designated or apparent purpose. That is, to qualify as counter-spatial, they are, firstly, grassroots and, therefore, communally derived. As such, the administrative structure of events inclines towards a non-hierarchical, co-operative style of (self)management. Collective ownership of the event-space is encouraged. Second, the organisers (also 'facilitators', 'focalizers' or 'enablers') should not be motivated by self-profit. In some cases, this means that an event may be 'commercial' (that is, possessing an entrance fee), but only such that this necessitates its reproduction.8 Third, events lie largely outside the spectacularising tendency, and recuperating implications, of the corporate media industry. Thus, they are not normally 'media-events'. Immediatist as such, commodification is largely avoided. Fourth, they are not singularly, nor in large part, dependent upon the state through the administration of 'Arts' funding. Fifth, on the performative level, they are participatory. As such the boundary between performer and audience is fluid or non-existent. Sixth, practical demonstrations of non-violent philosophies, such events are usually safe environments (though they may be occasioned by violent incidents and aggressive tactics). Finally, they are 'real-time' encounters. Rather than 'virtual events' - though these may be employed in the hatching of such encounters - they are intercorporeal occasions.

As I will indicate, several clusters of ACEs have emerged, the most significant for my purposes being the alternative lifestyle event (ALE), of which there are several varieties. Before disclosing these, I will attend to other ACEs conforming to the above criteria: co-operative, not-for-profit, non-spectacularised, independent, participatory, non-violent and intercorporeal. It will be clear that boundaries between event-clusters are fuzzy. This discussion not only seeks to detail the contours of several event-clusters, but is intended to provide a cursory history of the international ACM, and Australia's contribution to this field.

Folk Festival

As minimal-commercial orientated music events, folk festivals should not be confused with most country, pop or rock festivals. Folk festivals are intentionally heterodox to mainstream music trends especially in their focus on 'authenticity'. That is, apart from the 'ideology of total participation', there is a proclivity towards: 'traditional' (especially acoustic) music instead of electronic instruments; widespread amateurism instead of 'stars', and; embracing a multiplicity of ethnic and regional styles instead of a monocultural, profitable style (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993:201-2). Also, often maintaining an explicitly political agenda, the genre celebrates and promotes the interests of disadvantaged populations (cf. Eder et al. 1995). Australian folk festivals appeared in the 1970s. Such festivals, like Port Fairy and the Australian National Folk Festival (held annually at different locations), along with Queensland's folk-derived Woodford/Maleny Festival, occasion songs, lectures and yarns expressing deep concern 'with past and present oppressions, injustices and barbarities perpetrated by the state upon ordinary people and upon the land itself' (J. Kapferer 1996:173).

Dance Party

Free, or by donation, outdoor dance parties were originally operated in Britain by various sound system collectives such as Spiral Tribe, the DiY Collective and Exodus (Reynolds 1998:Ch.8). Possessing an anti-market orientation and featuring largely anonymous DJs, these all-night parties constituted deliberate attempts to withdraw from the spectacle of rock concerts and machismo of disco culture. They are distinguishable from the extravagances of clubculture where dance culture became commodified and 'rave style' super-marketed. In Britain, illegal outdoor dance parties proliferated in the early nineties, seemingly reaching a crescendo with the Castlemorton 'mega-rave' of 1992, where the traveller/raver connection was forged.11 Though the Criminal Justice Act (CJA)12 has effectively criminalised free dance parties in Britain, smaller 'microraves' continue to appear, and from the mid-nineties sound systems and travellers have sought to escape home-nation restrictions by joining other Europeans at events like the Czech Teknival (Garner 1998). Exiled 'tech-nomad' sound systems like Spiral Tribe have thrown techno fiestas in Bologna (Reynolds 1998:173), while Bedlam, Desert Storm and Dubious Sound System have travelled Europe, holding free dance parties in places like Bulgaria and Bosnia (Dubious Dan 1998; Bean 1998).

Protest

Operating via the principles of NVDA, 'sit-ins', 'die-ins', 'protest villages', vigils, reclamations, encampments and festivals organised to raise consciousness of, and funds for, political, identity and lifestyle (e.g. environmental, gender, land rights, human rights, sexuality) issues are also, or can become, significant ACEs. As the public event phase of collective action, protests can be temporary communities and theatres of creative resistance, spaces where politics and pleasure converge, and where concrete disturbances of, and symbolic challenges to, state and corporate interests transpire. With roots in surrealism as much as leftist-politics, projects may embody prescriptive agendas which seek to generate 'situations', non-violent moments of resistance to the spectacle and banality of capitalism (cf. Debord 1983).13

There are varying manifestations. The Paris Commune of 1968 is probably one of the most significant episodes of situationist revolutionary carnival. A dramatic ritual re-enactment of past revolts - 1789, 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871 - the festival 'finally gave true vacations to those who had never known anything but workdays and days off work' (Turkle 1975:85). During the eighties, an indication of the strengthening of the peace and women's movements, women's anti-nuclear Peace Camps appeared in Britain (most notoriously Greenham Common: Harford and Hopkins 1984; Young 1990; Roseneil 1995), the US (Krasniewicz 1994) and Australia (the Pine Gap peace encampment of 1982). During the nineties, anti-road protests such as the 'Free States' (McKay 1996; Routledge 1997) and Reclaim the Streets rallies (Jordan 1998) have become significant sites of cultural resistance. With anti-logging encampments and forest festivals appearing through the eighties and nineties - such as the US Earth First! 'rendezvous' (Taylor 1993:227-8; 1995) and their Australian equivalents (see Chapter 5) - the history of eco-radical direct action illustrates the merger of civil disobedience, poetic gesture and gathering.14

Some events have begun as small protests, evolving into huge annual street carnivals. Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras follows this pattern. Beginning in 1978 as a commemoration of New York's Stonewall riots, the Mardi Gras has since shifted to the summer blossoming into one of the world's premier gay and lesbian celebrations (Altman 1999; Carbery 1995). Despite experiencing the conversion from protest to street carnival and dance party, the Mardi Gras remains a crucial annual moment in queer identity politics (Hawkins 1993:131). Though experiencing a different quality of mutation, London's Notting Hill Carnival, known as 'the biggest street festival in Europe' (at least up until the early nineties), represents an equally significant field of expression and intervention, in this case for a subaltern immigrant community (Cohen 1993). Beginning in 1966 as a 'revived traditional English fair', from the seventies West Indian's embraced the Notting Hill Carnival as an 'all-West Indian institution' and 'liberated territory', which came to symbolise and enhance the 'corporateness and cohesion' of that disadvantaged minority.

< BACK

NEXT >