Week 5- Night clubbing and bush doofs as the religion of disenchanted youth

This weeks reading on religion, music and culture highlighted how music can evoke spiritual feelings in the maker or listener groups. Christopher Partridge uses the example of listening to the King's College Chapel at Cambridge and how the feelings the music evokes can make you feel 'a refreshing withdrawal and escape from the everyday pressures of things' (Partridge 2012, p. 183).

Throughout the article, Partridge examines how music embodies listening, feeling, identity and the transcendent. It could be argued that popular night clubbing or bush doof culture is the religion of disenchanted or subcultural youth. Weekend after weekend participants line up to go into small clubs just for a few hours, to 'lose subjective belief in their self and merge into a collective body' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 201). Many weekend clubbers or bush doof goers also take illegal drugs or psychedelics to enhance their transcendent experience. These altered states of spiritual consciousness and the events that drive them, could be modernity's ethneogenic ceremonies. These sacralized events 'share many features of mystical states and are not uncommonly interpreted by the experient within an idiosyncratic religious framework' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 202).

In addition, attendees of night clubs often engage in 'sacrificial and pilgrimage behaviors', whereby they become affiliated with a favourite club or haunt and sacrifice time, money and distance to spend their evenings there (St John 2008, p. 150). Clubbers enter a liminal phase as they get ready to go out, by stripping themselves of their mundane attire and proceed to put on clubbers wear. Initiates then enter the clubs, parties and doofs and engage in a collective community, leaving the mundane world behind for the duration of the pseudo-ritual. Night clubbers are now 'standing out from the surface of life's contingencies...[enabling] a more profound contemplation of being' (St John 2008, p. 153). Finally, as the sun begins to awaken, the initiates are reintegrated into mundane society.

Subcultural groups like ravers, hipsters and indie kids, all use the 'aesthetic and mind-body technologies...to produce a particular affective space' (Partridge 2012, p. 187). The problem with these modern rites and rituals is, there is no guide, shaman or sage to demarcate the healthy spiritual path from the overindulgent path.

Here is a video of one of Northern Rivers bush doofs, called Rainbow Serpent. You can see some of the attendees are engaged in ritualistic behavior and ecstatic experience.


References
Partridge, C 2012, 'Popular Music, Affective Space and Meaning', in Lynch G, and Mitchell, J with A Strhan (ed.), Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 182-193.

St John, G 2008, 'Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Electronic Dance Music Culture', in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, Berghahan Books, London, pp. 149-173.

Tramacchi, D 2000, 'Field Tripping: Psychedelic communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush', Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 202-213.

Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=937720

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq3m-yR8NQ

'Warsaw'- Week four reflection in prose, By Billie Mackness

Below is a poem I wrote called 'Warsaw'. In light of Sylvie's lessons on how the world around us can evoke whimsical, spiritual or existential feelings; I thought I would write a little something about how I reflected on Warsaw in Germany, in Holocaust milieu. 

Warsaw

Grey jungle flusters

Masses wildly subsist

Shun vile clusters

We scantly exist

Divest antique cheeks

We taboo order

Venom alone bespeaks

Quell the border!

We scantly exist

We scantly exist

By Billie Mackness

Here is a video by the band Live, in response to 9/11. It was an emotional experience for the lead singer as an American Buddhist and this song was his way of expressing his feelings about life and such events through song. I think my poem and this song exemplifies how in hard times or faced with hard decisions, humanity turns their faces upwards to the sky and in prose and reflection, reaches out to spirituality.

Photo

http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=124803

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpCa7Ay596M&ob=av2n

Rain-A poem by four; Billie, Ainsley, Lisa and Astrid

Liquid drops rinse the ticking while

Racing down in infinite lines

The sun shines through the transperant drop

It's colours shine, it's beuaty is fine

The falling elixir, a blanket of grey on top.

Here is a video montage of one of my favourite surrealist poems, as an example of rich imagery, even absurdist writings and the power of the imagination.


Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1094659

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54o-pZxAzc

Week 4 Theoretical- Consumerist Spirituality

Wat Muang, Ang Thong Province, Thailand

Since modernity and the growth of capitalism spirituality has been practiced, lived and believed in more ambiguity than established religious traditions. Spiritualism is 'celebrated by those who are disillusioned by traditional institutional religions and seen as a force for wholeness, healing and inner transformation' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 59). We can see this in our society by the popular crystal healing and New Age type stores and with internet psychics and mediums selling their wares.

In this weeks article Carrette and King discuss the historical top-down change of capitalism on religion. How capitalism has entered into the religious or spiritual sphere with a 'specific economic agenda' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 63).  One only has to go to a shopping centre and see books like You Can Heal Your Life, or spiritual iconography in fashion, cosmetics, books and movies. Capitalism has discovered a renewed economic source within spirituality and has moulded it for re-production and economical expansion in the age of technology and industrialization.


With many shows like Crossing Over and Lisa Williams Live, and also spirituality laced self-help books, what needs to be examined is if these media actually help, hinder or even make a 'change in one's lifestyle or fundamental behaviour patterns' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 62). What now arises, is questions of authenticity. If you examine advertisements for such spiritual healing shows or books, one key loci of the ad is to promote the reality or authenticity of the experience and how that is attainable for the listener or watcher. This modern day mass mediated spirituality 'exploits the historical respect and aura of authenticity of the religious traditions' and it turn the authenticity is always firstly promoted and questioned by promoter and questioner alike (Carrette and King 2012, p. 64). 


A few key questions we may need to ask is; Does the economic agenda subtract from the pureness or authenticity of religious experience? Does the media produce and re package spirituality just for profitable gain or is it meeting the media demands for the technological age? For instance, is media re packaged as blockbuster movies and psychic television shows because now in our age, that is the preferred mode of engagement?

Here is a video for the aforementioned Lisa Williams psychic, just for interests sake.

Reference
Carrette J and R King 2012, 'Spirituality and the Re-branding of Religion', in Lynch G. and J. Mitchell with A. Strhan. Eds., Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, pp. 59-70, London and New York, Routledge.

Photos
The photo is from my own personal collection of photos I have shot myself

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtDnsjHsu-A

Week 3 Theoretical- Islam and Mediatization

I plan to use this week's theoretical reading and apply it to a specific example of Islam and mediatization. Firstly though, credence and respect must be payed to the relationship between modern media and religion. Modern media's discussion and portrayal of religion through movies, news reporting and so forth has made the intangible, tangible. Hjarvard states that 'the metaphysical realm is no longer something you can only imagine or occasionally see represented in symbolic forms in fresco painting or pillars of stone' as now movies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings has made the supernatural a lived experience, albeit vicariously (Hjarvard 2008, p.9). Hjarvard here clearly exemplifies how ironically in our currently perceived secular state, we are put into contact with the numinous exponentially.

The media does not seek just to represent facts about religion but it also stakes opinions and incites changes to 'the ways in which people interact with each other when dealing with religious issues' (Hjarvard 2008, p.11).  For instance Hjarvard discusses Joshua Meyrowitz's discussion of media as conduits, where media engages in a cycle of sending and receiving symbols and images between audience and writer. Media colloquialisms and messages in this context can embody acrimony, as they implement negative trending attitudes towards groups of people, such as Muslims. For instance, on news television shows that report on Islam, the majority of reports embody images of violence, bombings, patriarchy and home made terror videos. This consistently portrays part of society in a certain demoralizing light and alters the way the public views Muslims perennially. 

Secondly, if we examine media as languages our focus turns to the way media constructs negative stories about Islam, which in turn legitimizes the fear as a real and substantiated fear in the reader or watcher. A model of this was when the rumor of piggy banks being removed from British banks adverts due to Muslim offense. The media jumped at this opportunity, even in Australia where the story went to print like wildfire in the Daily Telegraph, the Mercury, the Advertiser, the NT News, the Newcastle Herald and the Courier-Mail, as well as online websites of Channel Nine, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald (Aly 2011). One particularly prominent Australian newspaper's version told the public quite manically that the banks were 'not merely withdrawing piggy banks from advertising, but no longer giving them to children...[and how]... the Muslim world is starting to control our thinking and actually our lives' (Aly 2011, p.50). This in particular reminds me of a certain character of The Simpsons, who always cries out at opportune moments "will someone please think of the children!". This example of media as languages through online, printed and oral news, shows the power between religion and the media and how the media if given the right mustard seed, can pugnaciously grow from it a moral panic.

Thirdly, we can examine media as environments, as how different facets of media operate communicatively with the subject, the story and the listeners. An example of this would be on talkback radio, when screening callers for a discussion on Islam and Muslims, only the most vehement callers would actually feature on a negatively inclined show for aggrandizement. This also allows the media to attempt to scapegoat societal problems on the current opinion of the most dangerous and threatening "other". An example of this scapegoating holds 'Muslims falsely responsible for an impressive range of social crimes from banning Christmas to risking the lives of hospital patients with unprofessional hygiene standards and mob violence against returned soldiers' (Aly 2011, p.53). In this instance the media exploits an already seated fear of the "other" in the once passive listener and transforms him or her  into an agent for perceived justice, or more rightly incited moral panic. The media in such cases acts with ideological fundamentalism, that is the media heightens "us" and "them" attitudes to meet societal attitudes and fear, for impact and for entertainment.

This is a funny video of Uncle Sam, a comic from the show Salam Cafe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSsAY0U66hE

References

Aly, W 2011, 'Monoculturalism, Muslims and Myth Making' in Gaita R (ed.), Essays on Muslims & Multiculturalism, Text Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 49-92.

Hjarvard, S 2008, 'The mediatization of religion: A theory of media as agents of religious change', Northern Lights, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 9-26.

Photos

Muslim woman- http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=490619

Newspapers- http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=527555

Week 3- Reflection on Nature and Spirituality

The sun rising over Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Sitting on the buffalo grass overlooking this slice of nature, amidst the asphalt and concrete jungle, a feeling of insignificance always emerges. This feeling is carved from the gargantuan spiritual and natural cosmos which has sustained human life and disposition. When you grasp those few moments of stillness amidst nature, one can't help but feel spiritual or whimsical as the beauty transcends our industrialized, mundane life, even if only for a moment. As the Sustainable Soul blog pronounces so poignantly:

'The Earth is Sacred. Beyond our differences; beyond religion, politics and culture, Earth remains, the (literal) ground of our being. Disconnected and distracted, we search for meaning. Overworked and overwhelmed, we struggle. Leave the struggle and the search behind. Whether or not you practice an established faith tradition, you are welcome here. By virtue of being a human being, you are connected to this Holy Ground. It is your birthright. Welcome' (Hecking 2010, p.1).

                 

A date with an elephant in Ayuttaya, Thailand

Perhaps as our modern lives have become so preoccupied with careers, goals, families and our metropolitan worlds that nature has evoked spiritual wonderment exponentially. Do not most of us prefer to go on holiday away from our cities? Do we not escape from the hustle and bustle of our lives to just exist, somewhere else even if only for awhile?

References

Hecking, R, 2010. The Sustainable Soul: Nature Spirituality, http://www.thesustainablesoul.blogspot.com.au, 14/03/2012.

Photos

All photos were from taken by myself and from my own international travels.

Week 2 Reflection: Traditional Owners "Ghostology" and Ghosts in Modernity

In keeping with this weeks supernatural theme, I found a discourse which interests me; Traditional Owners "ghostology" in comparison to popular culture's portrayal of ghosts. In Indigenous Australia, ghosts or spirits make frequent appearances in the stories and lore. The numinous is integrated into stories and the cosmology as a way of constructing and interacting with the outlying world. In Indigenous Australian ghost milieu spirits or ghosts 'protect the country and uphold its protocols, ...[and]... watch human activities closely' (McDonald 2010, p.52). Ghosts are known to exhibit aggressive or disaffected behaviour towards new people or people who do not behave in the right way.

In autochthonic ghost stories, ghosts and spirits are terms sometimes used interchangeably to describe the dead or ancestors via allegories. This is an important part of the tradition, as Ancestors are seen to watch over their mortal counterparts. After a loved one's death ghosts 'live normal human lives, traveling through the bush, devising song ceremonies...' (McDonald 2010, p.57).

Popular culture's relationship towards ghosts is very different, despite some commonalities. Ghosts are often romanticised through humanisation. For instance, in any of the popular ghost hunting television shows like Ghost Hunters or Paranormal Detectives, the typical fear element is cogently portrayed on initial investigation. As the episode unfolds, the cast members often discover some story of a wife who died in childbirth, a man who lost his children or some such similar humanisation. It is like these shows build and encourage the fear up into a rising crescendo, then reintegrate the ghost back into the mortal world, where we humans can make sense of it once again.

Traditional Owners vernacular also uses stories and tales to make sense of death and ghosts, however popular culture's portrayal is much more distanced as we lack kinship connections to the featured ghost to connect as wholly as Indigenous Australians. In Indigenous Australian milieu 'ghosts and spirits...help them to make sense of events occurring in their environment' (Clarke 2007, p.141). Meanwhile in popular culture, although the ghost stories evoke emotional responses in the audience, there is a core goal of detached entertainment.

Below is a music video by Indigenous Australian artists-Makaratta Mob. The song is aptly named 'Ghost Trees'.Avant-garde and quite moving.

References
Clarke, P 2007, 'Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of "Settled" Australia', Folklore, Routledge, London and New York, pp.141-161.

McDonald, H 2010, 'Universalising the particular? God and Indigenous spirit beings in East Kimberley', The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Australian Anthropological Society, pp.51-70.

Multimedia
Mask picture-http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1155518

Makaratta Mob YouTube Video-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk5e4cxDqp0