Fantasies of Marginality and Glorifications
of Mobility
The Commodification and Capture of
Counter-Culture on Ibiza
Tycho Hellinga
Supervisor:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Prof. Dr. J. A.
Master’s Thesis
McBrien
Fantasies of Marginality and Glorifications of Mobility:
The Commodification and Capture of Counter-Culture on Ibiza
Introduction ... 4
Methodological and Personal Remarks ... 8
Routes and Rooting ... 10
Routes ... 11
Rooting ... 14
Imagining the Nomad ... 18
Nomadic Fantasies and the Counter-Culture ... 20
Self-Shattering Techniques and the Process of Breaking Away ... 23
Economic Practices and the Commodification of Counter-Culture ... 29
Global Nomadism as Praxis ... 30
The Commodification of ‘Hippie’ Culture ... 35
Conclusion ... 44
References ... 47
Introduction
When he turned 13, young Asher (now 18) was ritually instructed to climb a hilltop and meditate for twelve hours straight. The climb was preceded by a ‘sweatlodge’ ceremony, during which the male friends of his mother and stepfather explained to him the qualities of a 21st century man. The ritual mimicked a Yucatan Mayan male initiation rite; some alterations were made by Asher’s mother Merel, to make it more fitting for this century as well as the European context. Asher told me all this in a mixture of Dutch and Spanish while adjusting the ‘teepee’ in the garden where I had been staying these first weeks of my field research on Ibiza. Both the ritual and the tent had been picked up during a succession of extended trips the family had taken in South- and Central-America. Asher’s mother and stepfather organize a busy weekly ‘hippie party’ called Namaste and run a fashion company together. When they fell in love at an African drumming party on Ibiza’s Benirras beach 18 years ago, Merel (Dutch) and Alok (Spanish) were both dirt-poor, having both just renounced most of their worldly possessions. To make ends meet Merel sewed bags and clothes which Alok sold at the local ‘Hippie Market’. With the profits they traveled around Morocco and along the way bought Arabian fabrics to create new items. Around the same time, they started to organize the Namaste parties. The past few years has seen their fashion business expand rapidly, with a manufacturing facility in Thailand, two stores on Ibiza, and three stores in other Spanish cities (Barcelona, Madrid and Marbella). From a home-sewn, market-stall operation, it has developed into a professionally run fashion label, called World Family Ibiza. Namaste too grew from a small gathering to a busy event. A week after my talk with Asher, the house was in slight turmoil as Vogue Brazil had commissioned a photo-shoot. All the kids of the family (6 in total), grandma, Merel and Alok were styled and groomed with World Family clothes, attributes and bags. Asher and Alok donned native-American feather bonnets. Their style was a unique blend between exotic and familiar, tribal and modern.
The ‘hippie’ family described here is exemplary for globalization processes occurring on Ibiza. This is a study on a relatively recently emerged category of people who, like Merel and Alok, move around nomadically in the sense that they seasonally visit different ‘camp sites’ scattered across the globe (Ateljevic, 2012). Ibiza is formally part of Spain, but the phenomena and the people I was studying there sometimes bore more relation to places on the other side of the globe, such as India or South-America. In the literature, these people are sometimes referred to as Global Nomads. Perhaps one of their most salient characteristics is
that they have broken away from the west, both spatially and ideologically, and embarked upon journeys of self-transformation. On their unconventional, ‘anti-touristic travels’ (Welk, 2004), they have appropriated artifacts (material and cultural) from ‘native peoples’ around the world, which they have reassembled in order to create alternative ways of giving meaning to their lives. In breaking away, in adopting novel practices, styles, and modes of mobility, they have pioneered new fields of interaction as well as new forms of religious, political and social ideologies. As agents of globalization they have had an immense impact both on the local dynamics of the ‘exotic’ places they frequent, as well as on contemporary Western culture generally (D’Andrea, 2007: 31). Specifically, they have been important agents in the process of the ‘Easternization of the West’ (Campbell, 2007), spreading and teaching adaptations of ‘exotic’ religious beliefs, practices and rituals, ranging from Buddhism to Shamanism and Mayan astrology. Much of this cultural and social pioneering is constructed as being subversive of Western global political power structures, multinational corporate interests and capitalist consumer values. Whether travelling, engaging in artistic expressions, ecological projects or spiritual development, a self-image of the subject as a counter-hegemonic agent underlies many Global Nomadic endeavors. At the same time, and in spite of these idealisms, we see in the example above that cultural pioneering is also a means to get by, a novelty product designed to cater to the demands of Western tourists for displays of exoticism.
The concept of Global Nomadism used here derives from consumer studies researchers Sherry and Kozinets, writing about Burning Man Festival in the USA (2007) and anthropologist Anthony D’Andrea (2007), who preceded my own fieldwork on Ibiza, supplemented with research in India. D’Andrea’s multi-sited study (Marcus, 1995) on Global Nomads will especially figure prominently in this paper. The concept is sometimes also encountered in educational studies, where it is used to speak of children educated at different International Schools in multiple countries1. However the use in that discipline does not refer back to Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structuralist work on ‘Nomadology’ (2004 [1980]), as Sherry and Kozinets’, and D’Andrea’s use of the term does, and will therefore be disregarded here. In Deleuzian philosophy the Nomad is set up as a metaphor not simply of mobility, but also of resistance, change, transgression and disorganization (ibid.: 387-467). The nomad is seen to be in direct and hostile dialectic opposition to state, empire or power (Scott, 2009:
1-1 See for example: Langford, M. (1998). Global nomads, third culture kids and international schools, in: Hayden and Thompson (eds.), International education: Principles and practice, p. 28-43. London: Kogan Page
5 | I n t r o d u c t i o n
39). In D’Andrea’s view, the Global Nomads of Ibiza then are not only seasonally mobile people, products of the age of globalization, but themselves producers of ‘alternative’ or ‘self-organized’ globalizations (Featherstone, 2006). “Both nomads and neo-nomads have deployed mobility as a tactic of evasion from dominant sedentary apparatuses.” (D’Andrea, 2007: 25) It is on this dialectic between the State and the Nomadic, the hegemonic culture and its counter-culture, that the main argument of this paper comments. While the ‘nomadic associations’ of Ibiza can be seen as counter-cultural assemblages undermining global structures of domination on the fringe of ‘Empire’ (D’Andrea, 2006a), we must remain aware of the ‘nomad’s’ tendency to be seduced by state processes and be incorporated into its designs (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 460-5). Ibiza’s history of the past half-century is an excellent case to explore how actors eager to escape contemporary ‘state-craft processes’ (Scott, 2009: 20-6) have lodged themselves in the ‘nooks and crannies of social spaces’ (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975: 155). But in the past two decades we also see a reversal of this process as ‘the system’ in the guise of the tourist industry attempts to commodify Global Nomadic and New Age cultural products in order to attract tourism (Rozenberg, 1995). Like pirates, gypsies and bandits (Hobsbawm, 2010), ‘hippies’ are picaresque figures inhabiting the margins of organized society (McFarlane, 2007). Such marginal characters can exercise very strong attractions on the collective imaginations of ordered societies (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975). The past decades has seen many practices pioneered by Global Nomads, such as backpacker tourism, New Age spirituality and underground art, find its way into mainstream society, exploited and marketed by large industrial corporations (Sherry and Kozinets, 2007).
I will argue in this paper that contrary to Sherry and Kozinets’ and D’Andrea’s findings, the cultural pioneering of Global Nomads is not simply captured and appropriated by the interests of the tourist industry. Rather, Global Nomads quite consciously deploy their counter-cultural reputations for the benefit of tourists and Western consumer markets in order to commodify and market their own cultural products. Many of the counter-cultural activities on Ibiza, though not all, can be regarded as what Babcock-Abrahams calls a ‘tolerated margin of mess’ (1975). As she argues: “…deviant forms of behavior are a natural and necessary part of social life without which social organization would be impossible. More generally, all semiotic systems are defined in terms of what they are not. Marginality is, therefore, universal in that it is the defining condition as well as the by-product of all ordered systems. We not only tolerate but need ‘a margin of mess’” (ibid.: 152). In marketing this ‘mess’, I will argue that Global
Nomads themselves play an active part in processes of cultural commodification and authentication.
This discussion also has implications for the broader debate on globalization within the social sciences. Introducing the metaphor of nomadism in the debate on globalization, we could say that now Empire has globalized (Shaw, 1997), so have its fringes. It is on the fringes of Empire that new associations of resistance, adaptation and change have always emerged (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 446-50). As a contemporary example, electronic dance music both as an industry and as a dominant cultural ‘machinic assemblage’ has emerged from within the nomadic fringes of globalized Empire (St. John, 2005). The same can be said about New Age spirituality (D’Andrea, 2007: 1-39). Understanding the way cultural pioneering and commodification in these global fringes operates and how nomadic subjectivities develop is therefore an important academic endeavor if we are to keep abreast of global cultural developments that have the potential for rapid change.
In order to describe Global Nomadic movements, ideas, and finally their economic relations with the ‘sedentary world’, this paper will be structured in three sections. The first section will be an exploration of the spatial plane that Global Nomads move through. Besides establishing non-conventional routes through ‘exotic’ countries, they have also settled down to build temporary communities there. Combined, these routes and communities constitute the Global Nomadic ‘trans-national social field’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). The second section will deal with ideas, discourses and Orientalist fantasies. Most routes Global Nomads traverse are through the ‘exotic orient’, and many of Said’s deconstructions apply on their ideational framework (Said, 1985). Global Nomads act as cultural pioneers in that they appropriate native cultural forms and reassemble them into an ideational system of their own, often referred to as New Age spirituality (Heelas, 1996). These first two sections build up to and are written as a backdrop for the final section, where the main argument of this paper as sketched out in the previous paragraphs will be developed. Inhabiting the cultural interstices between the West and its post-colonial ‘exotic others’ (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975), the third section is about the way Global Nomads make use of this liminal position to make their living. Through an analysis of the way Global Nomads market cultural products and offer them to tourists in commodified form, it will become apparent how on Ibiza the counter-cultural discourse of Global Nomads explored in the second section is leveraged as a form of cultural capital.
Methodological and Personal Remarks
Even though it was my first time on Ibiza, the field I encountered was not unfamiliar. I grew up in a small ‘hippie village’ outside Amsterdam called Ruigoord, founded and frequented by people with similar backgrounds, ideas and nomadic practices as those I encountered on Ibiza. The village supplied me with some excellent contacts on Ibiza. But at the same time, the issue of being a ‘native’ weighed heavily for me from the start of my fieldwork. Retrospectively, it made it more difficult to understand the way most Global Nomads had had to break away themselves from their social backgrounds and localities of their youth in order to become nomadic. Paradoxically, I, perhaps like most children, resisted my parents and consequently I had never tried LSD, nor travelled through Asia on my own, nor immersed myself in meditation or Eastern philosophy. However, stories about these kinds of practices had been part and parcel of daily life ever since I was little. It took some time to understand how important it was that most of the people I spoke to had had to break away, that they moved to Ibiza of their own volition, not because they were born there. For them, drugs, traveling and spirituality had been extremely important aspects of their processes of self-transformation. I joined in some rituals, but did not acquire extensive experiential or embodied knowledge of these practices during my fieldwork. Only slowly did I come to appreciate their significance as acts of rebellion. I grasped only later that it was such practices that constituted the dialectic relation between the two conflicting identities, spaces and realms of thought my subjects were struggling with: one the hand the nomadic that they tried to become and on the other the sedentary they tried to break away from.
In 1973, the authorities planned to expand Amsterdam’s harbor industry and evicted the rural inhabitants of Ruigoord. At that time Amsterdam was a leading city in Europe’s ‘hippie’ or ‘alternative’ movement (Dahles, 1998). A group of artists known as the Amsterdam Balloon Company, among them my father, squatted the hamlet in protest against this eviction and the destruction of nature for the benefit of industrial expansion. The protest evolved into habitation and 40 years later, the artist village is still there. It has a strong symbolic and inspirational function and works as an organizing epicenter, connecting underground artists, spiritual mystics, radical left-wing politicians, psychedelic intellectuals, animal right activists and ecological farmers from all over the country and beyond. But in the end the harbor was also built. Ruigoord is now a green island surrounded by grey harbor infrastructure; an uneasy
compromise between industry and art. In order to survive, the village now has to cooperate with the authorities and make a show of producing culture that is meaningful to the city. Ibiza and Ruigoord have had ties since the first ‘hippie travelers’ arrived on the island in the 70’s. Over the years, Ibiza has acquired an international reputation as the ‘clubbing capital of the world’ (D’Andrea 2006b: 72). However, I always knew the island as the place where some of my parents’ friends emigrated to in the mid 90’s. Ibiza in my imagination was similar to Goa (India), that other pillar of international hippie-dom: an island paradise where hippies, travelers and artists lived in peace and happiness on the beach, playing guitar music and musing about the mystic nature of the universe and the primacy of love in social relations. As it turned out, the Ibiza I imagined wasn’t so different from what I found, but sometimes it was hard to distinguish between real-life and a part played for a marketing brochure that advertised ‘authentic hippie culture’. As will be argued in this paper, this commodification of culture is quite similar to the way indigenous peoples’ cultures are marketed for tourists elsewhere on the globe (Nash, 1989). It seems that the ‘hippies of Ibiza’ resemble the ‘tribal people’ they so idolize in more ways than they might care themselves. In recent decades, costs of living on Ibiza have expanded greatly. In order to make a living and survive, Global Nomads have had to create alliances with the tourist industry. Due to my background, I was perhaps more aware of the unstable compromise between industry and ‘hippies’. Like Ruigoord, Ibiza is a marginal space from the perspective of the ordered society on whose fringe it lies. It is messy, but it is also tolerated. It is therefore a tolerated margin of mess. Quite likely, I am externalizing personal frustrations with my village’s own unstable position onto the field. Yet so many dynamics were similar that they could not be ignored. The overall topic of this study is very obviously the result of my cultural background. Personally, the topic is close to home. Intellectually, the topic is of great importance in order to better understand the way in which people resist, adapt and improvise on processes of globalization, and in turn are changed, influenced and captured by such processes. Since the 1970’s, research into the topic of ‘counter-hegemonic globalization’ has varied in its normativity. We have come a long way from Cohen’s crude typology of the ‘itinerant hippie’ as “the travelling drop-out, on his way to some drug-sanctuary in Europe or Asia or drifting aimlessly from one “hippie community” to another.” (Cohen, 1973: 100) On the other hand we have an author like D’Andrea, who it seems immersed himself totally in the field (2006b). This resulted in some interesting findings, and I am especially indebted to him for his insights on self-transformation and what he calls ‘self-shattering techniques’. These are subjects, as I
explained, I initially found hard to grasp. However, it must be said that his identification with the field results in a slightly exaggerated romantic portrayal. I have here tried to remain neutral and not judge either way. Conflicting as it may sound, though perhaps I was born a ‘native’ to this particular field, once in the field as anthropologist, I did my best never ‘to go native’.
Routes and Rooting
In this first section the focus will be on establishing the trans-national spatial dimensions inhabited by Global Nomads and the dynamics that govern it. Any movement over a spatial plane is composed of two elements: the first are fixed points, the second is the crossing of space that connects those points (Deleuze and Guttari, 2004: 419-20). In human society the spatial plane consists on the one hand of communities, fixed points, and on the other the roads that connect them, necessitating crossings. The dynamic between these two elements, the fixed and the fluidic, community and journey, is ruled by disjunctures caused by movements. One can either be only part of communal life, or be ‘on the road’. How can one be part of a community of travelers, what would such a community look like and how would it function? These are questions addressed in this section. Disjunctures at the local level by constant travel being the norm, I will argue that Global Nomads have developed something of a laissez-faire attitude towards the building blocks of the traditional community: personal connections. Instead they have developed interactional forms that stress the here and now and enable senses of communality to arise ad hoc, without necessarily leading towards creating sustainable local communities. This ‘subjectivity of mobility’ (D’Andrea, 2006a: 98-101) is perceived as a rupture with ‘conventional society’ and thus related to counter-hegemonic sentiments. In sum, this section attempts to explain how spatial disjunctures relate to articulations of freedom and breaking-away which are central in the Global Nomadic ideational frameworks sketched out in the next section.
To establish this point, this section is broken down into two parts, mirroring theory. The first part will focus on Global Nomadic journeys. Through meetings with others travelers on similar journeys, tentative associations are formed. In this part, the Turnerian idea of the liminal journey as a pilgrimage (Turner, 1973) will be employed to explain how Global Nomads form bonds while traveling. The second part of the section focuses on infrastructural
fixtures. For mobility to occur, ‘moorings’ will always be necessary (Hannam, Sheller and Urry, 2006). Over the years many travelers have elected to stay in the lands they have explored and were later joined by others. These communities function as mooring points for global travelers. It is in the interplay between movement and rooting that small communities arise, in turn connected by these movements to the global ‘trans-national social field’ (Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004) of Global Nomads which spans from Ibiza to India, South America and other communities all over the globe.
Routes
Aram was a young man raised in Taiwan, though his parents were American. On a five month stay on Bali, Indonesia, he traveled for a while with some Europeans who lived on Ibiza and invited him to come over. After a stop-over in Thailand teaching yoga at a resort, he traveled over land through India, but hopped on a plane to Europe when the monsoon started. With no money left and only two contacts, he arrived on Ibiza. I met him at the weekly party of ecological farm Casita Verde, where he taught yoga for meals and donations and occasionally DJ’ed. He was talking about India with an Italian girl, Elena, also a yoga teacher. It turned out that Elena had also lived on Bali for a while. They discussed India, Thailand and Bali, and the common acquaintances they had in those countries. They talked about the various yoga teachers they had in different countries, and how that had influenced their own techniques. Elena expressed the desire to visit Taiwan, and both Aram and Elena had heard many people were heading towards South America as small communities were rising up in the Amazon. Significantly, Aram concluded the conversation semi-jokingly: “The right people always know how to find each other, in one country or another!” After this they hugged.
The ways in which mobile lifestyles can create new global senses of belonging for Global Nomads on the move is illustrated by the above. Elena and Aram hadn’t met each other before. From different national backgrounds, they could nonetheless immediately recognize the common spatial and experiential journey they had followed to reach this point. They tapped effortlessly into a shared discourse of spirituality. They exchanged information about peers and places in other countries. They then concluded their conversation with an affirmation of their recognized similarities. All this reveals several aspects of how Global Nomads go about their journeys. It shows that they drift around the globe in creative ways,
finding ways to survive as they move along and not shunning insecurity. Along the way they pick up ideas, techniques, information and contacts which can subsequently be applied in other localities.
Six days later, I met Aram and Elena again at Namaste, the weekly party organized by Merel and Alok, my adoptive ‘hippie parents’. Prem Joshua, a German musician living in Goa, India, was performing on stage. It was busy, and the audience was going wild on the band’s eclectic fusion between western progressive rock and eastern mysticism. After the final song, Joshua thanked the audience and introduced his band, all of whom live in Goa and whose ethnic backgrounds are as eclectic as the music they made. His band was composed of a German bass guitar player, a Japanese on electric guitar, an Indian on tablas (Indian drums) and Prem Joshua himself singing and playing an Indian flute. Then he announced: “Ladies and gentleman! You’ve been a lovely audience! I love coming to Ibiza! There’s only two other places in the world where the crazy people live and that’s Goa and Bali! Who’s been to Goa!?? [cheers] Who’s been to Bali!? [cheers]” Aram and Elena looked sideways across me at each other in recognition and laughed.2
Namaste functioned as an important gathering point for Global Nomads on Ibiza. Aram and
Elena, the characters of above vignette; Prem Joshua, the musician they saw perform at
Namaste; and Merel and Alok, two of Namaste’s main organizers are all linked together by
the series of similar global journeys that has led each of them to that specific gathering. Besides having had to travel physically across the globe, they have gone through mutually recognizable experiences. On their journeys, they have appropriated cultural artifacts and assembled them into new cultural manifestations, such as yoga workshops, new genres of music, and decorative styles. At gatherings like Namaste, these separate manifestations are combined with others, resulting in the collective assemblage of music, décor and body praxes that is the party.
The word journey here denotes simultaneously a spatial as well as an experiential movement (Adler, 1989). Besides the transcending of space, there is also a transference of meaning onto the landscape and a reinternalization of projections into the journeyer (ibid.: 1377). As the terrain changes, so does the journeyer. This transformational power of journeys has best been explained by the historical work on pilgrimages of Victor Turner (1973; 1974; 1978). In
2 For a more detailed exploration of the relation between music, territoriality and identity, see Duffy, M. (2000). ‘Lines of drift: festival participation and performing a sense of place.’ Popular Music, 19(1): 51-64. 12 | R o u t e s a n d R o o t i n g
Turner’s view, greatly simplified, the pilgrimage is a liminal journey. Participants venturing to a common goal meet others on the same road sharing similar ideas and motives until finally the pilgrim’s site is reached and all are ritually united in a collective sense of togetherness, what he calls ‘communitas’ (1973: 198-212). In the liminality that is the journey, the identities of participants are in limbo, the threshold of change, and have the potential to develop in a variety of ways. In tandem with this psychological process, the mechanism of the pilgrimage has the power to bond together large collectives of peoples from different localities, united in their communitas at a symbolic center. The pilgrimatic journey is therefore instrumental in giving shape to cultural forms shared over great distances (1979: 16-42).
Anderson and others (Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Moore, 1980; Sherry and Kozinets, 2007; Bell, 2002) have demonstrated that the Turnerian concept of the pilgrimage may be usefully stretched to also include collective journeys not specifically religious or institutionalized, but with common destinations and intentions. It is suggested that Global Nomads go on personal journeys of transformation with the vague motive of escaping or breaking away from the pressures of modern capitalist society (D’Andrea, 2006a: 113-115). Cohen is most clear on this point and says alternative travel is “…both a symptom and an expression of broader alienative forces current among many youth.” (1973: 94). On Ibiza, almost everyone expressed such sentiments. Older nomads spoke reminiscently of the days of their youth when they felt the need to be different. Now, it was implied they just were different, without trying. The younger nomads were often more vocal on this point. Most salient was Maarten, a Dutch boy of 19 who grew up in what he self-describes as a ‘boring middle-class family’. Last year he dropped out of his senior high school year and came to Ibiza. He has a job as a sailing instructor and trains to be a fire-juggler in his spare time. Maarten says he never wants to go back to his old life and has no regrets of leaving school prematurely. He denounces his middle-class upbringing in the strongest language. He may be regarded as the contemporary and globalized version of the 70s college drop-out.
Significantly, while the motives for going on such journeys might be a subjectively felt opposition to conventional society, it was Turner who identified a deeper and inherent social opposition between the nomadism of all travelers (pilgrims) and sedentary villagers: “Daily, relatively sedentary, life in village, town, city, and fields is lived at one pole; the rare bout of nomadism that is the pilgrimage journey over many roads and hills constitutes the other pole.” (Turner, 1973: 195) Choosing for a life on the road, away from the native home may in itself be seen and experienced as a counter-hegemonic act. While journeys to India, Ibiza or
America start out as solitary acts of rebellion, once on their way individual paths converge. The extended individual journeys to various symbolic centers like Ibiza and India thus function as a series of pilgrimatic movements which spurn the process of Global Nomadism. In this part of the section, I have shown that much like pilgrims, it is ‘on the road’ that Global Nomads meet others on similar paths and find their way to moorings, small established communities of earlier fellow-travelers. In the vignette above these moorings on the local level are the Casita Verde ecological farm where Elena and Aram first met, and in the second instance the Namaste party where they watched Prem Joshua perform. They also discuss communities and acquaintances around the world, establishing shared territories, as well as finding similarities in personal journeys of transformation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they establish the implicit and explicit cultural contents underlying their bonds. It is on the liminal journey where forming senses of global communal belongings starts through sensations of spontaneous communitas “the direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities which, when it happens, tends to make those experiencing it think of mankind as a homogeneous, unstructured, and free community.” (Turner, 1973: 193) Through
communitas experienced while travelling the Global Nomadic trans-national social field
emerged.
From chance meetings follow collective ritual celebrations of shared experiences and the territories where these took place, such as what Prem Joshua tried by evoking Ibiza, Goa and Bali as the homes of the world’s ‘crazy people’, a nomadic territory in Deleuzian terms (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 419). What kind of global imaginaries are celebrated shall be treated in the second section of this paper. In the next part of the current section, the focus remains on the spatial and social dimension of Global Nomadism. The aim of the second part of this first section is to establish how social relations between Global Nomads are formed and maintained across the globe. It also looks at how earlier travelers have anchored themselves and formed local communities, and how they deal with global flows presenting constant upheavals to their localities.
Rooting
From the point of view of the ‘itinerant hippie’, the ‘Ibiza experience’ as it’s called by some, can be broken down to an ever-changing cycle of weekly events. There are a few fixed points
on this calendar such as the Sunday lunch at the Casita Verde, the Sunday evening drumming party on Benirras beach, the Wednesday evening party of Namaste at Las Dalias and the Friday evening goa-trance party at the Sunset Ashram. Of course this calendar differs from individual to individual and not everyone attended each gathering each week, owing either to geographical distances, social connections, individual preferences or other circumstances. There were also a few monthly events worth mentioning, especially the goa-trance party
Shambala held in Las Dalias, and the ‘sweatlodge’ ceremony of ‘professional shaman’ Maria
from Chili, held every month on the full moon. Some of these gatherings are publicly accessible and attract a lot of tourists; this is especially the case with the weekly events. Maria’s ceremonies on the other hand are never advertised and kept somewhat secret. Notably, this calendar only applies to the busy summer season when tourists abound and financial opportunities for entrepreneurial Global Nomads are rife. In the winter many Global Nomads trek on to one of their other ‘moorings’.
As the island’s dynamic changes in winter, a different schedule applies. The weekly lunch at Casita Verde continues, as well as the Benirras beach party, though it’s more a private drumming session than a party. Most social life takes place at a few private gatherings at people’s homes which center on artistic or spiritual workshops. An Englishman named Russ organized weekly African drumming jams at his house; there was a weekly ‘spontaneous art’ gathering at the house of an Italian woman called Frederique; and a meditation and ‘spiritual exchange’ evening at the house of Spanish Maria. Doubtlessly there were more of such small gatherings less routinized. Most of these events were semi-private in nature. Although not advertised, in general anyone who knew someone there could be introduced to the host and attend. Those that could manage to stay the winter referred to their circle of friends on the island as their ‘Ibiza winter family’. Together, these events work to reinforce Ibiza’s global reputation as an alternative center, establishing the island as an important ‘pilgrimage site’. But besides being the topic of campfire conversation on a beach in Thailand or the Amazonian jungle, gatherings are also instrumental in connecting traveling and localized Nomads.
When the tourist season started to ebb, departure parties became common. If the departee was only leaving for a short while, the routines of constant travel had grinded the importance of the departure down. But however trivial their leaves, there was almost always some kind of ritual. Sometimes this meant a few drinks with close friends at a favorite beach bar. Movements of a more extended or permanent nature called for bigger celebrations. Often
material possessions acquired over months or years had to be redistributed or borrowed out for safe-keeping. On one occasion, someone going away permanently combined her party with a yard sale. Everyone recognized that such social demarcations of passages were necessary and important, not just materially. Jody from Australia (twelve years on Ibiza) explained that “However small a trip, you’re always stepping into the great uncertainty of the world outside, so it’s important to square with your pals wherever you are – on an emotional level I mean – because, well anything can happen and you might never see them again!” Oggie from Bulgaria (five years on Ibiza) said that you may have been best friends for a season, but you never know if people come back. “I don’t even know if I’ll be back next season [laughs].”
Such ritualized ruptures point to the problematics inherent in Global Nomadic social organization. Global Nomads move around extensively between a set of places the social composition of which changes all the time. Short of asking if they can still belong
somewhere¸ another question is if they still belong to someone. If one thing has become clear
of globalization studies, it is that ‘culture’ need not be localized in a clearly demarcated territory anymore (Marcus, 1995). Some suggest culture never really was bound to space as closely as social theorists used to imagine (Hage, 2005). But we must bear in mind that in the academic enthusiasm for globalization research, the local level is sometimes disregarded to the extent that too much emphasis is put on what is not happening in the field (Candea, 2007). For all the routine use of space-time compressing technologies, global flows remain disruptive for localities (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Appadurai, 1990).
On Ibiza, the local community of Global Nomads is constituted mostly by veteran nomads weary of travel who through financial and social investments in their immediate locality have rooted themselves more so than their constantly travelling friends. It is they that provide the anchorage which younger travelers need to moor temporarily between movements. Over the years, they have seen many travelers come and go. While a few became close friends, some never returned. This has led to the development of a certain detachment regarding long-standing connections and an emphasis on a sense of belonging in the here and now. As demonstrated by the above, ruptures need to be ritualized. Studies on other globalized phenomena also indicate that global flows anywhere have been most disruptive in the way people deal with relationships, marriages and friendships (Freeman, 2001); or constructive in the sense that they have created new practices of interaction. It is readily observed that conjugal bonds (formal or not) are problematic to maintain with a highly mobile lifestyle.
Here it must be noted that it is not the case that long-standing connections are not honored among Global Nomads. The most durable friendships were forged over a number of years in multiple countries. In contrast to most fleeting bonds, such loyal friendships are strong, but rare. Still, as Merel harshly but eloquently explained, social life on Ibiza can be very transient: “So many people pass by each year, and whoever is here, it’s always fun. If you’re not here, nobody misses you.”
Returning to Turner, the evidence suggests that over the years Global Nomads have experienced what he calls spontaneous or existential communitas in many different locations on the globe, with different yet connected groups of people. Such spontaneous feelings of brotherhood could only transcend into social structures to a limited extent. The disruptiveness of seasonal flows of travel, governed by individual economic opportunities, has made fixed communities unstable. This is not to say no localization processes have occurred. The local community of Global Nomads on Ibiza is constituted by networks of older travelers who spend the largest part of the year (more than 8 or 9 months) on the island. They organize local gathering places which in turn provide mooring points for global flows of travelers. They provide opportunities for barter, labor, exchange of information and perhaps most importantly, experiencing a sense of fellowship and belonging. Yet unlike for example bands of travelling circusfolk or pastoral nomadic tribes moving collectively, the largely individual mobility of Global Nomads could hardly lead to a fixed community on the trans-national level. Instead, we can only speak vaguely of a ‘trans-national field’ with a number of traversable and routinized routes connecting various local communities. Ruptures in friendships through global travel being the norm rather than occasional disturbances, the structure of social interaction in this field has developed into a non-committal yet instantaneous, spontaneous and intense way of making new bonds. While this form of interaction makes it hard to sustain communities over distance, on the local level it strengthens Global Nomads efforts to differentiate themselves from the tourists and other groups living on Ibiza with whom they do hardly share any bond whatsoever.
In this section, I have described the spatial dimension of the Global Nomadic trans-national social field on Ibiza and the way Global Nomads deal with issues prompted by mobility. Simply put, sentiments of resistance to industrial society led Global Nomads to trek around the world. Finding others on similar journeys, networks and discursive systems arose. Travelling individually, different subjects use different moorings, yet share some. Through exchange of information on routes and places, subjects become aware of the wider
national social field. This may be likened to traditional nomads, who did not know exactly how far the steppe inhabited by other nomadic peoples extended, yet knew that if they ever needed, access to these yet unknown oases could be obtained. If we continue the allegory, then it may be said that for contemporary Global Nomads, the globe itself functions as a virtual steppe. Despite not knowing each other, Nomads can meet and recognize each other in well-known moorings. Articulating a counter-hegemonic sense of self and deploying a discourse ranging from spirituality, travel hardships and political independence, fellow-travelers are identified and a loose ideational framework is formed. But however intense, interpersonal contact remains transient due to near-constant mobility. This paradoxically strengthens the feeling of brotherhood among travelers in the short term, leading to spontaneous and intense bonds. These spontaneous bonds are one way by which Global Nomads differentiate themselves from ‘conventional society’. With the spatial dimension and its social dynamics established, it is to the ideational we turn next.
Imagining the Nomad
Whereas the previous section concentrated on trans-national movements, this section will deal with ‘post-national imaginaries’ (D’Andrea, 2006a). The term post-national implies a point ‘beyond’ the nation. Inspired by philosopher Jurgen Habermas (1988), the concept has been used by a variety of academic projects, most of which discuss how to engineer the collective transition of territorial belonging from the national to the European level, or even larger3. In this debate the concept is inextricably tied up with citizenship. However, in this paper the concept is used in a slightly different way, following D’Andrea. In his view ‘post-national’ belonging by extension implies ‘post-nation-state’ belonging. To him, it means not belonging to any kind of territorial unit associated with a state, but rather specifically to a set of spatially dispersed points (oases) and abstractly to the idea of the globe (the steppe). This territory may be separated by vast distances and lay in several countries, but may still be perceived and experienced as a single territory or single trans-national space (D’Andrea, 2007: 119-120; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992: 19-20). If the globe is a virtual steppe and Ibiza, Goa and Bali are
3 See for example Sassen, S. (2002). Towards post-national and denationalized citizenship. Handbook of
citizenship studies, 277-292.
18 | R o u t e s a n d R o o t i n g
oases, then these oases may be perceived and felt as much more akin to each other than to the rest of Spain, India or Indonesia.
This section deals with the cultural imaginaries that make such a post-national sense of belonging possible. The first part of this section will be devoted to romantic ideas of traditional nomads and other ‘tribal peoples’ prevalent in Global Nomadic discourse. Rejecting ‘the system’, their discourses are full of references to freedom, living closer to nature and being one with the universe. All of which, by implication, are thought to be the main characteristics of traditional peoples. In this part of the section the argument will be that through imagining an idealized Nomadic condition as a counterpoint to a nationalist, sedentary condition, the post-nationalist ideal implies a rejection of the state and other traditional power hierarchies, which has consequences for the way territorial boundaries are imagined and redrawn.
In the second part, the focus will be on the experiential processes of breaking away and self-transformation Global Nomads have gone through on their liminal journeys in ‘the orient’. Self-transformation may be achieved by practicing what D’Andrea calls ‘self-shattering techniques’ in (semi-)ritual contexts (2006a). Through an empirical examination of examples of self-shatterment, such as psychedelic experiences and body therapies, it becomes apparent how such collective practices reinforce or incur post-nationalism. Very often, these techniques were taught to Global Nomads by ‘exotic’ shamans, gurus or other cultic leaders they encountered while travelling. The argument here will be that physiological experiences of freedom (of movement, of thought, of belonging) induced by self-shattering rituals, in tandem with fantasies of nomadic freedom, together break down socialized identifications with national territories and other traditional sensibilities of belonging (for example to family). These techniques must thus be seen as powerful agents of self-transformation in that they effect a cultural reconfiguration, or psychological ‘decoding’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 495-8), effecting counter-hegemonic images of self and post-national territorial belonging. The dynamics of these ideas of self and belonging are important to establish here, not in the least because they are at the core of the Global Nomadic idea of self, but also because in the final and third section the focus will shift to the way counter-cultural reputations are successfully employed as a form of cultural capital necessary to tap into the tourist trade of Ibiza.
Nomadic Fantasies and the Counter-Culture
On Ibiza, as on the Burning Man festival where Sherry and Kozinets’ research took place, a romantization of ‘tribal people’ is prevalent (see also Gilmore, 2010: 69-70). ‘Tribal people’ are thought to live ‘closer to nature’ and more ‘true to the human soul’ than people in industrialized society (Rozenberg, 1995: 165). The idealization of the nomadic, expressed through Orientalist appropriations of practices, clothing and music may in large part be explained by extensive travel histories discussed earlier. During their liminal journeys through exotic, non-touristic spaces for months or even years on end, some have had intensive contact with local ‘natives’ from whom they learned skills and rituals and acquired artifacts. This has inspired the formation of new Orientalist cultural forms collectively called New Age, composed of elements of the Western esoteric traditions fused with a pastiche of appropriated exotic religious forms (Hanegraaff, 1998). The formation of these ideological forms discussed in this part of the section constitutes an important aspect of the rejection of ‘conventional society’ and constructing a post-national belonging to an abstract ‘nomadic territory’.
For designing the World Family line of clothes and bags, Merel expresses drawing inspiration from ‘native peoples’. For eight years in a row, she was annually invited to host a lounge tent at a large indigenous people festival in the Yucatan, Mexico. “[The festival] was hosted by the local chiefs of the Indian tribes living there, but they got a lot of government money and they invited Indians from all over America, North and South. And each year, a tribe from far away, like once they invited Mongolians, and another time Aboriginals from Australia. It was so amazing to see all these beautiful people together, make music, make rituals, and dance together. Very spiritual. We can learn so much from them, you know? Alok and me, and our friends who came with us too, we always feel we’re so much more like them than, you know, the normal world [laughs].” And in a later conversation: “I’m really inspired by gypsie people, their style, their music. Not just gypsies, but all the wandering tribes, Mongolians, Bedouins… it’s the only natural way to live you know? Like a nomad, relying on what the universe decides what the journey brings.” In this same talk, Alok expressed his views on travel and learning from ‘native peoples’: “The most beautiful thing of travel is you can learn so much from how traditional people live, and from each you can take something small and put it in your own life.” Merel added: “What is most important about travelling, surely you must know this as an anthropologist, what is most important is to see how all these people, from India, Vietnam, Thailand, South-America and Mexico…that they are all so alike. They
share the same wisdoms of thousands of years, the same knowledge about nature and the universe. We can learn so much from them.”
A number of idealizations and romanticisms are revealed in the narrative above. ‘Traditional peoples’ are idealized as more spiritual, wiser, happier, and implicitly simply better than people living in industrial society. Something else made explicit by Alok and Merel is that Global Nomads project these ideas on all the various different ‘natives’ they have come into contact with. Of significant note is the mention of nomadic peoples, who receive some special attention. Though there is of course a huge difference, anthropologically speaking, between pastoral nomads and other ‘natives’, this distinction seems not apply within Global Nomadic discourse and fantasies about idealized ‘nomads’ and ‘natives’ are very often conflated. The same ideals of freedom and natural wisdom are projected on all these peoples.
Such identifications do not stop at fantasies. They have also led to cultural appropriations. Earlier, I argued that Global Nomadic journeys through ‘the Orient’ function much like pilgrimages. Central to this spatial soul-searching is the search for the ‘exotic other’, the idealized wandering nomad. Perhaps they went in search of ‘more satisfactory constructions of life’s meaning and significance’ (Hamilton, 2002: 255) than industrial society offered. As pointed out in the previous paragraph, salient about Global Nomads’ identifications with ‘tribal peoples’ is that they tend to see the same things in all ‘exotic others’. Wherever they got their ideas from, be it South American shamans or Indian gurus, cultural contacts are parallel and cross-pollinate. Though some Global Nomads are specialized in a specific religious system, for example Hinduism or South-American shamanism, most take and borrow from many systems at once (Johnson, 1995). New Age is a hotchpotch of ideas and symbols, and although there are many variations in form, the underlying framework is strikingly coherent (Chryssides, 2007: 18-23). Though not a cosmic philosophy, Merel’s designs, which are a pastiche of different fabrics and styles from all over the world, can be seen as an expression of this coherence. Ultimately, it is the ideal of the perfectly independent Nomad (Kaplan, 1996: 65-85), in tune with nature, the spirits and the universe, living outside the mundane constrains of ‘the system’, that propels this process of cultural appropriation. In an informal conversation with Alok, he speaks of the sensation of being different from the rest of the world by having moved away from it, spatially and symbolically. He was sitting on the porch of his country home, naked as usual except for his jewelry, smoking a small hash joint and relaxing after a long day at the Hippie Market where he and Merel sold World
Family bags and items. He told me about a conversation he had earlier that day with an Italian lady called Mami who also ran a stand at the market and who believed the entire world is secretly ruled by a hostile alien race.
Though he doesn’t believe in the conspiracies of Mami, she has said some things with which he does agree. ‘She says that religions make people suffer. The new type of enslavement is work. Normal work like in a factory, like in Germany, everything is so industrial. Their entire life is run like a factory. Those people are slaves in consciousness.’ He goes on a bit about his own life before he traveled to India, met Merel and became a ‘hippie’. Before he started travelling he lived in Barcelona where he made a lot of money as a real-estate agent, was addicted to cocaine and cheated on his wife a lot. After reflecting on his own life, he tries to mitigate his earlier statements somewhat. ‘I’m no judge’, he says. ‘Life in the traditional world isn’t easy. But Mami is right, they are enslaved, but not by aliens, but by money.’ (field note September 1, 2012)
Gianni from Italy, psychotherapist, yoga teacher and local politician for the Green Party voiced his views similarly: “People are made into robots by states and big companies. Keep them happy with Coca-Cola and football and they work in factories and offices for little money without protest!” Ibiza and those who inhabit the island are somehow perceived as different, not really in the West, not really even in Spain. As Gianni says: “It is one of the few places in the world where dreams of freedom can be lived. This is Spain, yet not really. This is Europe, yet not really. People from every nation live here. We’ve created our own small system that is stronger than the world system outside.”
In the informal conversation with Alok quoted above, he easily dismisses Mami’s extraterrestrial conspiracies, but doesn’t deny the underlying premises that this discourse propagates. Here lack of space disallows a full discussion on the significance of ‘conspiracy theories’. With others, I suggest that we should treat such conspiracy theories as symbolic of other issues present in the ‘social imaginary’ (Riley, 2008: 8). Alok doesn’t believe in aliens ruling earth, but he does comprehend and agree with the rest of what Mami is trying to say: forces larger than individuals are determining the course of society and their interests are not benign. Ibiza, or at least the northern, ‘hippie part’ is thus perceived as a place outside the reaches of the capitalist world system. It is ‘nomadic territory’, a place where different rules apply. The fantasy of the wandering nomad, closer to nature, can be manifested there.
In this part of the section I showed that in order to find the freedom idealized in nomads and other ‘native peoples’ Global Nomads have moved away from spaces subjectively perceived
as associated with systems of oppression, to spaces which are felt and experienced as free and unconstrained, ‘non-striated smooth space’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it (2004: 424). Manifesting their fantasies of freedom, Global Nomads express their idealizations through art, ritual and performance. These expressions take the form of pastiches of music styles, instruments, fabrics, rituals, cosmologic ideas and therapeutic practices appropriated from various different ‘tribal peoples’ encountered on Global Nomads’ liminal journeys through ‘exotic’ countries. The successful internalization of Orientalist appropriated cultural forms is part of the process of self-transformation to which we turn now. Through a closer examination of self-shattering techniques in the next part of this section, it becomes clearer how the transition to post-nationalism, or break-away from the West, is effected.
Self-Shattering Techniques and the Process of Breaking Away
Thus far, we have established that an important double-edged theme of Global Nomads’ pilgrimages through the ‘exotic orient’ was leaving behind subjectively perceived ideological systems of oppression and replacing these with more meaningful constructions of life. ‘Tribal peoples’ being the subject of many Orientalist fantasies, with the logic of hindsight it seems only natural that Global Nomads turned to them for answers. On their many journeys they sought out and encountered gurus, shamans, priests and other ‘wise men’. Under their ritual directions, Global Nomads experienced ‘self-shattering techniques’, which were cataclysmic in processes of self-transformation. What follows is an examination of such techniques. Here it must be immediately noted that not all such techniques, for example the use of certain drugs, were taught by ‘oriental wise men’. Some originated in the West itself. That said these techniques were still utilized for the same processes of transformation as the ‘Orientalist techniques’, structured as such by discourses surrounding these techniques. The moment psychedelics like LSD became available in the West, a class of intellectuals the likes of Aldous Huxley, Terrance McKenna and others constructed psychedelics as ‘gateways’ to ancient wisdoms. Insights derived from LSD were often compared to insights from Ayahuasca, a psychedelic shamanic ritual from the Amazon (Badiner and Grey, 2002: 1-23). For brevity’s sake, both categories will be conflated in this paper. In this part of the section the focus will be on these techniques’ role as agents of transformation. The argument will be that a pre-existing discourse, inspired by Orientalist fantasies of ancient wisdoms and nomadic freedom, structures these techniques as agents of transformation. They effectuate
profound physiological senses of freedom and communitas, and as ritualized moments of cultural reconfiguration, represent limens in Global Nomadic pilgrimages.
Alok, the pater familias of the family where my fieldwork period begun, grew up in what he self-describes as a traditional Spanish middle-class family. As a young man in the late 80’s, he was a successful realtor in Barcelona. He was married and had a daughter, but reflecting back, says he was deeply unhappy. He lived ‘the fast life’ as he calls it. He made a lot of money, slept around a lot and was addicted to cocaine and alcohol. One of his lovers was a young bohemian girl, who told him she was going to travel around India. Something ‘resonated’ in his ‘subconsciousness’ and two weeks later, he had separated from his wife, given her most of his money, and boarded a plane to India. “I realized that I was human and as a human, free, free to do whatever I want.” He rode an Enfield Bullet motorcycle4 all over the subcontinent, battling his coke addiction and immersing himself in yoga and Buddhist philosophy. He found his way into the circle around the Indian guru Osho Bachwan based in Pune and Goa, took a ‘Sanyassin name’ (Alok) and slowly found the means, the people and the discourse to reinvent himself. Though grown up in Catalunya, he never went to Ibiza before, despite the island’s close infrastructural relations with Barcelona, but now travelled there from Goa to follow a summer long meditation course and help set up an Osho community with a group of European Sanyassins5. Alok describes his immersion in the Osho community of Pune as ‘life-changing’. Like many Global Nomads who used to travel the India trail but moved their base to Ibiza, he’s no longer formally connected with the Osho movement. However, he still adheres to many of the late guru’s values. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and practices meditation on a regular basis.
Alok’s story reveals several aspects of the process leadings towards Global Nomadism. There is the breaking away from his past, realized through spatially moving away from his homeland. It also testifies that the mooring provided by earlier fellow-travelers living in the Osho Ashram in Pune was instrumental in his transformation. They provided a safe space and the required instructions to direct the Ashram’s ritualized self-shattering techniques of body therapies towards a new idea of self. With Turner, we may say that the Ashram represented the ritual context for Alok’s pilgrimage to transcend beyond the limen. Finally, having gone through the liminal space of the Ashram, his rite-de-passage through India also had the result
4 Reportedly, this is a classic India-drifter bike.
5 For a closer examination of Ibiza’s relation with the international Osho movement, see D’Andrea (2006b) 24 | I m a g i n i n g t h e N o m a d
of connecting him to the broader trans-national field of Global Nomads, which in the end landed him in Ibiza.
A good friend of the family, Manu, born on Ibiza to Swiss parents, also used to live in the Osho community in Pune, India. But his ‘life-changing’ experience occurred before enrolling in the Ashram. He talks about his first experience with LSD and what it meant for him at the time: “We were at this party in the middle of the forest and to be honest, I was still a bit skeptical. The party was strange, this loud goa-trance music, I wasn’t used to it yet… [describes the party]… Before my girlfriend had tried to get me to come to a mediation session, but I was still resisting, I thought all that hippie stuff was so stupid, you know? Then at this party on the hilltop, my friend found a vial of LSD and we tried it. It was a lot for a first trip… and when it kicked in… it was the most amazing experience of my life. We danced all night to this weird music and when the sun rose the next morning, it was like bathing in the warmth of the gods or the source or whatever you call it. We felt so connected to each other, to the universe, to everything around us. After that I totally understood my parents and I tried meditation and all that and it turned out it was very good for me. [laughs]” Manu would continue to become an important party organizer in the Ibiza goa-trance underground scene, taking the ‘strange music’ with him from Goa to Ibiza.
While Manu was the most explicit about the transformational aspects of his trip, others too gave similar accounts about their experiences with psychedelics. Someone else asked me whether I had ever done LSD, and when I responded negatively, told me I should hurry up because there was life before acid and life after. Such accounts show that LSD and other psychedelic experiences are constructed as liminal experiences. Like immersion in mediation, yoga and other body therapies, it’s seen as an experience that has the potential to make the subject see the world in a different way. D’Andrea furthermore lists travelling itself as a self-shattering practice (2006a: 64). All three types of techniques (drugs, body therapy, travelling) are liminal, ritualized experiences that can have a strong transformational effect. Important to note is that for each of these practices, a pre-existing discourse exists which structures the experience as a ritualized and transformational experience. In combination with a prolonged exposure to alien cultures, exotic lands and counter-cultural discourses, over time these techniques are able to inscribe upon the subject new mental structures on how to perceive the world. The discourse surrounding these techniques explicitly attempts to deconstruct socialized and normative structures of behavior as taught by ‘the system’. It teaches that the subject can now be free from psychological constrains of fear and insecurity in his relation to
others, that he or she can let go of belonging to ‘unreal’ national boundaries and become part of a global tribe (D’Andrea, 2007: 63-4).
Although Ibiza was one of the original ‘hippie places’, right from the 60’s, it lacked an indigenous religion or cult that the original ‘flower children’ could connect with. In fact, there’s been a lot of opposition to the Catholicism of the Ibicencans by Global Nomads (Rozenberg, 1995: 162-5). Over the years, cults and rituals from other Global Nomadic sites were imported. Mostly these were practiced and taught by travelers who had stayed for a longer time in one of those places. Nowadays a variety of different self-shattering techniques are available to the ‘spiritual consumer’ on Ibiza, ranging from Mayan astrology, to Indian yoga, African psychedelic roots called Iboga and South-American shamanistic rituals.
It was a cold night in December and together with about 60 others, some of whom I recognized or knew from parties or other gatherings, I was standing naked next to a campfire. A smoldering ember of ‘pure’ tobacco wrapped in banana leafs was passed around and each of us was instructed to have a toke, because the herb would open parts of our minds otherwise closed. While the ember was passed around clockwise around the campfire, our shaman Maria, a squat little woman with grey hair and wearing a shawl from the Andes, instructed us authoritatively but gently in her Chilean Spanish accent about what was to come. Her daughter moved around counter-clockwise with a blunt syringe and a small jar containing a tincture made of tobacco leafs. She stopped at each of us to administer a small amount of the tincture in our nostrils. The effect was a rather pleasant lightheadedness. After being prepared, we were instructed to move into the sweatlodge: a small dome made of branches and covered with thick woolen blankets. In pitch black darkness we sat cross-legged, shoulder to shoulder, giddy and, speaking for me, slightly apprehensive. Maria was the only one not undressed. Seated in the middle, she instructed a helper to take the seething hot stones out of the fire outside with the pitch-fork, and insert them in the dug-out cavity in the center of the sweatlodge. After sprinkling each stone with water and rosemary, the tent flap closed and it became incredibly hot and moist. Maria started humming and it was taken over by rest. Soon, we were all humming and swaying melodically. Maria started to bang the drums and chant a song in Spanish. And so we passed the night in the sweatlodge: swaying, sweaty and chanting songs about love, peace and freedom. Coming out after several hours, we felt cleansed. Maria expressed her gratitude to the group and instructed us to do the same. We individually thanked each other for several minutes, and got dressed again. Maria’s daughter then went around collecting the fee for the ritual, 20 euro’s per person.
Participants express feeling universal love when sweating and singing under Maria’s direction. After such sessions, they say their hearts are opened momentarily, something they attempt to practice in daily life, but which is made so difficult by modern society. Body therapeutic sessions such as sweatlodge ceremonies offer sensations which often are new to the uninitiated. Tobacco smoking may be quite normalized in the West, but not the type of tobacco served by Maria, and not in the collective, ritualistic setting of preparing for a ceremony. Similarly, while the sweatlodge experience is physiologically a lot like the European sauna, entering the sauna in pitch-black darkness in a clearly ritual way is not. Through a combination of ritual and bio-chemistry, Maria achieved a feeling of communitas among participants. As the ceremonial master, Maria ‘inscribes’ upon the participants new ways of experiencing togetherness and provides them with a set of spiritual norms and values about freedom, love and peace, which they attempt to integrate in their own lives.
The same values and ideas internalized at Maria’s were also expounded at other gatherings. Although not always made explicit, such ideas are often counterpoised to traditional Christian or modern capitalist ideas and values. Self-shattering techniques induce sensations of
communitas and can evoke physiological sensations of freedom. Participants often express
experiencing profound insights in the inner workings of their own being, other’s being, or society’s as a whole. Such insights are often constructed as spiritual epiphanies. Structured as meaningful through pre-existing discourses idealizing ancient wisdoms and nomadic freedom, self-shattering techniques act as catalysts for breaking away from oppressive systems (both internal and external), restructuring the self, and ultimately constructing new post-national sensibilities.
This section has dealt with the ideas and fantasies underlying Global Nomadism and more specifically, how these ideas relate to post-nationalist sensibilities. In the first part of this section, much of this discourse was mapped out. It was established that this discourse rests on two basic ideas: the rejection of Western knowledge systems, consumer values and power structures on the one hand, and the idealization of tribal peoples on the other. To effectuate these ideals, Global Nomads broke away spatially through going on liminal journeys, and ideationally by going through experiences of self-transformation (of which travel, seen as an experience, is itself one). The nomadic as an ideal and Global Nomadism as way of life are constructed as means to flee the perceived pressures and directions lain upon them by ‘the system’. “The nomad therefore represents not just the ‘Other’ to be visited, but also an idealised [sic] form of travel as liberation from the constrains of modern society.” (Richards
and Wilson, 2004: 5) A rejection of ‘conventional society’ through spatial movement implies a rejection of the territorial units associated with this society: the borders of nation-states. Because of this rejection, the manifestation in reality of fantasies of nomadic freedom is therefore accompanied by new spatial identifications with ‘nomadic territory’: scattered oases dispersed across the globe. From their pilgrimages through ‘the orient’, Global Nomads returned with romantic ideas of living closer to nature, and brought back ‘native’ practices, tools, medicines (and drugs), instruments, and an accompanying pastiche of observations, reflections and instructions. I argued here that the successful internalization of these cultural pastiches is part of the process of breaking away. But as we shall examine in the next section, these cultural forms, once internalized, can also be reproduced and repackaged for resale to tourists and other ‘sedentary people’ paradoxically using capitalist production methods. Before moving on to the next section, it is important to make a theoretical aside here. The ‘fantasies of mobility’ (Noyes, 2004) treated in this section reveal idealizations of global travel and are an important foundation of the post-national sense of belonging of Global Nomads. Through self-identification with nomads, the global ‘oases’ that Global Nomads moor at become the most important territorial reference points, instead of the borders of the nations they inhabit officially. Here it needs pointing out that such idealizations are not restricted to travelers themselves. The independent nomad as a metaphor for mobility in social theory has been thoroughly deconstructed as an Orientalist fantasy by Kaplan (1996), and subsequently reassembled by Noyes (2004). In her analysis, Kaplan shows that analogies between modern travelers and traditional nomads very often rest on false premises of independence and mystic spiritualism that are supposedly universal traits of nomads everywhere (Kaplan, 1996: 76-86). It is therefore impossible to use the concept on anything but actual nomadic peoples (and even then one must be careful). Noyes agrees, but rebuts by stating that the concept may be usefully applied to people whose spatial movements over the globe are actually nomadic in nature, in that they trek around seasonally from mooring to mooring. Despite fantasies of independence, to him the nomad is still an important metaphor to describe a “social (dis)arrangement and a subjective (dis)order on the fringes of empire, a regime of technological, social, and conceptual innovation that is fundamentally opposed to empire.” (Noyes, 2004: 165). His warning is that we should be careful not to glorify mobility and stick the label ‘nomad’ on anything that moves and is slightly transgressive, thereby muddying the metaphor.
