Graham St John
Biographic Data
| ID | 185119 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Graham St John |
| GIVEN NAMES | Graham St |
| FAMILY NAME | John |
| SIGNATURE | JOHN G S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2020-5738 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Executive Editor's Introduction
Executive Editor's Introduction
Burnerverse
Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is a remote fire-arts gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that has catalyzed a global movement. An ephemeral community flowering in a desert, Burning Man is also a cultural proliferation of events that model and mutate the Black Rock City prototype worldwide. Cyclical and augmentative, replicable and mutable, Burning Man has evolved from a small cultural event into a transformative event culture…
Transfestive Horizons
This article identifies conceptual lacunae, connections, and cross-talk in an interdisciplinary field of research targetting a wide distribution of events that possess an intentionally transformational—or “meta-transformational”—remit. While such events—including Burning Man and “transformational festivals”—are embraced by diverse groups as signature contexts for transformations of self, society, and culture, and while research in this field has …
Executive Editor's Introduction
The Voice of the Apocalypse
The acid house rave scene of the early nineties sought its champions and there was no spruiker more willing, vocal and weird than Terence McKenna, a figure for whom rave was a novelty signal in a forecasted apocalypse. A slate of music collaborations with McKenna in the early nineties had one feature in common. They recorded McKenna speaking in an alien tongue. Releases with The Shamen, Space Time Continuum and Zuvuya featured McKenna emulating t…
"Guest Editors' Introduction to "Psychedelica and Electronica
Religion, Politics, and Globalization
While social scientists, beginning with Weber, envisioned a secularized world, religion today is forthrightly becoming a defining feature of life all around the globe. The complex connections between religion and politics, and the ways in which globalization shapes these processes, are central themes explored in this volume by leading scholars in the field of religion. Does the holism of numerous past and present day cosmologies mean that religio…
Wurst Storm Rising
Our subject is the legacy of Dada implicit to the Burning Man phenomenon. Animate in the provocative output of fin-de-siècle French Symbolist writer and puppeteer Alfred Jarry, and filtered through the antics of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, Dada is foundational to the cultural aesthetic of Burning Man, by which we mean the event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert playa (Black Rock City) and a global network of “burn” events. We address the sig…
Executive Editor’s Introduction
Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
Upon the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection addresses the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st century. From anthropology, sociology, and religious studies to performance, cultural, and media studies, Turner's ideas have had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. Examining his relevance in studies of performance and popular culture, media, and religion, along with the role of Edith Tu…
Executive Editor’s Introduction
Ephemeropolis
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is adapted to comprehend events with intentional transformational agendas. An ephemeral community installed annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Burning Man is an exemplary evental heterotopia. With the shortcomings of the romantic-utopian “transformational festival” label identified, the article considers Black Rock City as a heterogeneous threshold and contested space. This hyperliminal weave is redolent in …
At Home in the Big Empty
Burning Man is an artistic community event that has been dis/assembled in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert every summer since 1990. The location of this event in this desert has had a shaping impact on Burning Man as a gathering, a city, an organization, and a transnational cultural movement. A unique facet of what is known as Black Rock City is not simply that it is dis/assembled in a desert region, but that it recurs on a playa, the ne plus ultra of …
Moon Juice Stomper
Executive Editorial
Civilised Tribalism
Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is an artistic event, that, mounted annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, has become the inspiration for a global cultural movement. While it has been the subject of considerable attention from ethnographers and sociologists, Burning Man has persistently resisted classification. In this article, I undertake a tentative approach to Burning Man via a concept integral to Maffesoli's postmodern social…
The Breakthrough Experience
Known to produce out-of-body states and profound changes in sensory perception, mood, and thought,DMT(N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a potent short-lasting tryptamine that has experienced growing appeal in the last decade, independent from ayahuasca, the Amazonian visionary brew in which it is an integral ingredient. Investigating user reports available online as well as a variety of other sources consulted in extended cultural research, this article…
T urner, V ictor
Victor W. Turner (1920–1983) was a symbolic anthropologist whose comparative investigations of ritual and cultural performance left a unique impression in the social and human sciences, and across the arts. Turner's formulations on the ontological value of ritual symbolism, “liminality,” and culture have had a lasting impact in anthropology and other disciplines. His “social drama” model offered a benchmark heuristic to elucidate universal social…
Weekend Societies
From massive raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s to events operated under the control of corporate empires, EDM (Electronic Dance Music) festivals have developed into cross-genre, multi-city, transnational mega-events. From free party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s to colossal corporate attractions like Tomorrowland Electric Daisy Carnival and Stereosonic, and from transformational and par…
Introduction to Weekend Societies
Communitas
Executive Editor's Introduction
Executive Editor's Introduction
Aliens Are Us
This article examines how popular culture is remixed for the purposes of facilitating mystical experiences within a global electronic dance music culture. In particular, it investigates the sampling of space travel and alien contact narratives within psytrance, whose DJ-producers are like media shamans remixing fragments from cinema, TV series, documentaries, NASA’s lunar program and other popular cultural sources for gnostic purposes. I explore …
Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion
This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenolo…
On Happiness
What do anthropologists have to say about happiness? For some contributors in this Vital Topics Forum, happiness is a sensory force that colors and shapes human evolution and experience. Others consider happiness, or the lack thereof, to be a faceted reflection of the arrangements in society. All recognize the potential power of human happiness, where a distant memory, fleeting experience, or idealized vision can serve as a driving force in trans…
Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
Upon the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection addresses the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st century. From anthropology, sociology, and religious studies to performance, cultural, and media studies, Turner's ideas have had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. Examining his relevance in studies of performance and popular culture, media, and religion, along with the role of Edith Tu…
Protestival
Investigating the significance of carnivalized methods of protest in the present, this article explores the characteristics and recent history of the protestival, the carnival of protest which has flourished with the advent of the alter-globalization movement. Heir to the carnivalized politics of the 1960s, and drawing from radical avant-garde movements and guerrilla theatre, the ‘protestival’ inherits much from the kinds of ‘symbolic challenges’…
Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival
is article explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending speci cally to the characteristics of what I call neotrance apparent within the contemporary trance event, the countercultural inheritance of the "tribal" psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants' "ultimate concerns" within the festival framework.An exploration of the psychedelic festival offers insights on ecstatic (selftranscend…
Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation
(2004). Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation. Peace Review: Vol. 16, SYMPOSIUM: Subcultures and Political Resistance Special Editors: Jeffrey Paris, University of San Francisco Michacl Ault, California State University, Bakersficld, pp. 421-428
Introduction to Weekend Societies
Freak media
As an electronic dance music movement, for over 20 years, psytrance (psychedelic trance) has been a context by which sonic, visual, pharmacological and virtual media have facilitated the expression of interwoven narratives, experimental modes of performance, and the experience of intense sociality in scenes the world-over. A key theme adopted within this movement is the tribe, the discourse around which is multivalent, though here I focus on the …
DJ Goa Gil
Connecting three generations of music enthusiasts, Goa Gil is an imposing figure in the world of psychedelic trance. If the title of his 2007 compilation registers intent, he is a Worldbridger. Bristling with motifs of world sacred sites and appropriated "tribal" icons, with Gil seated cross-legged upon the apex of a Mayan temple, the album's cover artwork confabulates the physical, spiritual and cultural worlds he professes to bridge. Leading wo…
Off Road Show
It is Sydney 1998 and, ‘like some crazed pirate galleon on wheels’, a strange bus was seen making its way around the city. Equipped with a PA and ‘DJ booth’ facing out from its rear hatch, the Peac
Civilised Tribalism
Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is an artistic event, that, mounted annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, has become the inspiration for a global cultural movement. While it has been the subject of considerable attention from ethnographers and sociologists, Burning Man has persistently resisted classification. In this article, I undertake a tentative approach to Burning Man via a concept integral to Maffesoli's postmodern social…
Aliens Are Us
This article examines how popular culture is remixed for the purposes of facilitating mystical experiences within a global electronic dance music culture. In particular, it investigates the sampling of space travel and alien contact narratives within psytrance, whose DJ-producers are like media shamans remixing fragments from cinema, TV series, documentaries, NASA’s lunar program and other popular cultural sources for gnostic purposes. I explore …
The Vibe of the Exiles
This article offers detailed comment on the vibe of the exiles, a socio-sonic aesthetic infused with the sensibility of the exile, of compatriotism in expatriation, a characteristic of psychedelic electronica from Goatrance to psytrance and beyond (i.e. psyculture). The commentary focuses on an emancipatory artifice which sees participants in the psyculture continuum adopt the figure of the alien in transpersonal and utopian projects. Decaled wit…
Writing the Vibe
Guest Editor's Introduction
Outback vibes
On Australia Day 1988, the Chairman of the Northern Land Council, Galarrwuy Yunupigu, announced that ‘Australia's too old to celebrate birthdays’.2 In the subsequent decade, mounting sympathy for s
Ferals
(2000). Ferais: Terra‐ism and radical ecologism in Australia. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 24, The Beautiful and the Damned, pp. 207-216
Subcultures
A review of Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (Routledge, London, 2007
Going Feral
In a study of an Australian ‘alternative lifestyle gathering’, I investigate the authentica (the multiplicity of discourse and practice valued as ‘true’, ‘natural’, ‘pure’) championed and performed on‐site. Using emic description, the article details the authentica of ‘play’ (ludic exploration via alterity, especially indigeneity), ‘earth’ (ecological consciousness) and ‘tribe’ (the search for belonging in community) which are axiomatic to ConFes…
Ferals
(2000). Ferais: Terra‐ism and radical ecologism in Australia. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 24, The Beautiful and the Damned, pp. 207-216
Alternative Cultural Heterotopia and the Liminoid Body
This article takes issue with Victor Turner's influential, yet essentialist, category of the limen. While acknowledging Turner's continuing significance in the analysis of public events, I draw upon detailed ethnography of one of Australia's contemporary pilgrimage centres, the alternative lifestyle event ConFest, to reconfigure his project. Although ConFest may prove to be an exemplary field of liminality, as a decidedly contested and sensuous l…
Alternative Cultural Heterotopia and the Liminoid Body
This article takes issue with Victor Turner's influential, yet essentialist, category of the limen. While acknowledging Turner's continuing significance in the analysis of public events, I draw upon detailed ethnography of one of Australia's contemporary pilgrimage centres, the alternative lifestyle event ConFest, to reconfigure his project. Although ConFest may prove to be an exemplary field of liminality, as a decidedly contested and sensuous l…
Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation
(2004). Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation. Peace Review: Vol. 16, SYMPOSIUM: Subcultures and Political Resistance Special Editors: Jeffrey Paris, University of San Francisco Michacl Ault, California State University, Bakersficld, pp. 421-428
Astronauts, Psychonauts and Electronauts
Off Road Show
It is Sydney 1998 and, ‘like some crazed pirate galleon on wheels’, a strange bus was seen making its way around the city. Equipped with a PA and ‘DJ booth’ facing out from its rear hatch, the Peac
Outback vibes
On Australia Day 1988, the Chairman of the Northern Land Council, Galarrwuy Yunupigu, announced that ‘Australia's too old to celebrate birthdays’.2 In the subsequent decade, mounting sympathy for s
Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion
This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenolo…
Protestival
Investigating the significance of carnivalized methods of protest in the present, this article explores the characteristics and recent history of the protestival, the carnival of protest which has flourished with the advent of the alter-globalization movement. Heir to the carnivalized politics of the 1960s, and drawing from radical avant-garde movements and guerrilla theatre, the ‘protestival’ inherits much from the kinds of ‘symbolic challenges’…
Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival
is article explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending speci cally to the characteristics of what I call neotrance apparent within the contemporary trance event, the countercultural inheritance of the "tribal" psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants' "ultimate concerns" within the festival framework.An exploration of the psychedelic festival offers insights on ecstatic (selftranscend…
Noon, Black Rock City
It was a remarkable failure.My most impossible objective: to do The Man in a day.Yes, that was the plan.Mounting pressures and misfortune back in the world (a new job approaching, a lost suitcase care of United Airlines and other miscellaneous matters), forced my decision to attend the week-long Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert for one day only.Good thing, I thought, that my friend Seth was driving up on Wednesday night with the…
The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
This lively textual symposium offers a collection of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research addressing psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, yout…
Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
Making a Noise - Making a Difference
This article charts the convergence of post-punk/post-settler logics in the techno-punk development in Australia. Exploring how punk would become implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society struggling for legitimacy, it maps the ground out of which Labrats sound system (and their hybrid outfit Combat Wombat) arose. It provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of hardcore in the context of cultural mobilisations whi…
Sound System Nation
Several years ago, I started gathering interest in mobile initiatives committed to social and political causes in Australia called "sound systems". The likes of Labrats and other vehicles for the performance of postcolonial desires had been rallying the disaffected to wild and weird frontlines, pursuing, as techno-activist mover and shaker Pete Strong (aka Mashy P) once said, "a sound system for all". Back then, I'd become excited by these proact…
Party, Love and Profit
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone
DJ Goa Gil
Connecting three generations of music enthusiasts, Goa Gil is an imposing figure in the world of psychedelic trance. If the title of his 2007 compilation registers intent, he is a Worldbridger. Bristling with motifs of world sacred sites and appropriated "tribal" icons, with Gil seated cross-legged upon the apex of a Mayan temple, the album's cover artwork confabulates the physical, spiritual and cultural worlds he professes to bridge. Leading wo…
Executive Editor's Introduction
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Freak media
As an electronic dance music movement, for over 20 years, psytrance (psychedelic trance) has been a context by which sonic, visual, pharmacological and virtual media have facilitated the expression of interwoven narratives, experimental modes of performance, and the experience of intense sociality in scenes the world-over. A key theme adopted within this movement is the tribe, the discourse around which is multivalent, though here I focus on the …
Guest Editor's Introduction
Seasoned Exodus
Psychedelic trance music and culture (psyculture) is explored as a culture of exodus rooted in the seasonal dance party culture evolving in Goa, India, over the 1970s/1980s, and revealing a heterogeneous exile sensibility shaping Goa trance and psyculture from the 1990s/2000s. That is, diverse transgressive and transcendent expatriations would shape the music and aesthetics of Goa/psytrance. Thus, resisting circumscription under singular heuristi…
On Happiness
What do anthropologists have to say about happiness? For some contributors in this Vital Topics Forum, happiness is a sensory force that colors and shapes human evolution and experience. Others consider happiness, or the lack thereof, to be a faceted reflection of the arrangements in society. All recognize the potential power of human happiness, where a distant memory, fleeting experience, or idealized vision can serve as a driving force in trans…
Communitas
Sociology (26 works) · Art (21 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · History (16 works) · Music History and Culture (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Liminality (9 works) · Media studies (9 works)