[ANPPOM-Lista] Call for Chapters: Transformational Festivals, Movements, and Cultures

[Carlos Palombini]

Hi

In late 2019 (in another era) I forwarded this call for abstracts for
contributions to an edited volume.

We have a strong volume, which also includes pandemic related content (not
reflected in the earlier book outline as seen below). We still need a
further chapter relating to electronic dance festival/s and the pandemic,
with a bearing on the theme of transformation.

If you're interested and can complete a chapter (8K words max) by Nov 1
2020, please first send me an expression of interest asap.

300 word maximum abstract with 100 word maximum bio by Aug 10 2020, to:
g.stjohn em warpmail.net.

Note. the CFP below is unchanged from the original and does not 100%
reflect the current project.


Event Horizons: Transformational Festivals, Movements, and Cultures
Edited by Graham St John and Sarah M. Pike

Festivals, gatherings, protests, and other events are valued by diverse
groups of people around the globe as significant contexts for
transformations of self and society. While research on transformational
events has grown apace in anthropology and allied disciplines, few if any
titles have sought to represent, compare, and challenge the “state of the
art” in this field. Given the broad conceptualization of both
“transformation” and “event,” this absence belies the popular and
compelling nature of evental transformativity, and the catharsis,
extraordinary experience, status transition, life modifications, and
cultural change associated with it. Manifold events have emerged as
vehicles, platforms, and showcases for a transformative zeitgeist. But what
is altered, reconfigured, transformed, by such events? Subjectivity?
Society? Culture? History? Rites of passages, independent arts gatherings,
mass events, media events, music festivals, tourist spaces, and
protestivals mark transitions and potentiate transformations of status,
identity, and history. What is the character of these event-oriented
transformations and how do the changes they make possible compare with
other transformative processes, practices and movements?

Addressing the convergence of the transformative and the evental, notably
in transformational event-cultures and event-centered movements, this
volume will fill a considerable gap in the contemporary research
literature. A spectrum of events in the wake of the 1960s & 1970s became
models for conscious living informed by proactive and avant-garde
adaptations of the classic rites of passage model. Intentionally responsive
to modern ecological, humanitarian, and existential crises, these
pioneering event-cultures are informed by a cornucopia of aesthetics,
ethics, rituals, architecture, media practices and organizational design.
These new paradigm events with conscious evolutionary, entheogenic and
eco-millenarian agendas propagate as vehicles for multi-species survival,
and as such are responsive to the “transformational events” (Szakolczai
2009) of late-modern history: notably the Anthropocene.

Many initiatives deemed transformational events in this volume have evolved
into super-liminal mini-states and interstitial republics of transition.
Some are rooted in the Rainbow Family, some are legates of the UK Free
Festival tradition, while others are downstream from expatriate seasons in
the former Portuguese colony of Goa, India, and its Full Moon trance dance
gatherings. Steeped in this latter legacy is psytrance and its worldwide
progeny, a psychedelic festivalization evident in events like Portugal’s
Boom, Hungary’s Ozora, Croatia’s Mo:Dem, and other events harboring genre
diversification and invoking various claims on transformational experience.
In regions worldwide, from orbitals in the UK, teknival across Western
Europe, mesibot in Israel, baile funk in Brazil, and the Australian doof,
events adapted the ecstatic vibe of the rave. From the early 1990s, total
solar eclipse celebrations evolved a distinct transformational legacy. From
the late 1990s, visionary arts events identifying as “transformational
festivals” proliferated, notably on the West Coast of North America. An
interactive arts gathering mounted in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a
principled non-profit organization called the Burning Man Project, and a
global movement of regional burn events, Burning Man is commonly recognized
as the prototype in transformational events.

Aspiring to environmental stewardship, and enacting principles of
participation, gifting and decommodification, a proliferation of
twenty-first century events operating in the global North subscribe to
transformative agendas. As alternative cultural celebrations, lifestyle
forums, dance music festivals, and new spiritual gatherings, these events
combine ecstatic dance, visionary art, innovative science, ethical
consumerism, esoteric practices and self-organizing design models.
Typically involving travel to remote sites where urban-dwelling populations
are afforded intimate participation in the natural world, these events have
become sites of significance for religiously unaffiliated participants.
Identifying as “co-creative,” “new paradigm,” “free spaces,” “boutique,”
“artisan,” “maker,” “do-ocratic,” “sustainable recreation,” these event
spaces are promoted as experiments where cutting-edge science and
technology blend with “ancient wisdom” to create blueprints for a
sustainable future. Emergent event-cultures are festivalized vehicles for
hybrid protean cultures, for discourse and conduct at once spectacular and
participatory, recreational and revolutionary, leisured and spiritual.

Seeking to include scholars from multiple disciplines, and deploying a
variety of methods and conceptual approaches, Event Horizons:
Transformational Festivals, Movements and Cultures welcomes research
interrogating the transformative rhetoric of events—their claims to
precipitate change. Contributions critically exploring paradoxical event
parameters are welcomed, and notably the internal inconsistencies and
disparate agendas of events. How does the celebrated principle of “radical
inclusion” square with the racial profile of events? How do evolving
cultures of convenience and “plug-n-play” camping conflict with event
principles encouraging self-reliance and participation? How is the rhetoric
of “transformation” co-opted by industries seeking to establish brand
recognition in a competing event marketplace? Are events committed to wider
historical change and consciousness evolution or are they rather nuovo
revitalization rites orchestrating narcissistic celebrations of the self?
How are transformational events platforms for spiritual and religious
movements? In what ways do they clash with or integrate mainstream
religion? How does evental-oriented transformation differ from other forms
of religious, political and social transformation? How have individual
events evolved unique ethos, principles, and culture?

Best Regards

Graham St John

---------------------------*--
Graham St John (PhD)
Website: Edgecentral
Burning Progeny Project
Executive Editor @ Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor permanente ppgm-unirio