Just going around, and around, an’ around, an’ around observing ya’know. And one sees this year after year and one sometimes wonders is it leading anywhere or is it just the same thing? Ya’know, they dust out their sarongs once a year and, and get out there, parade around and around, arh looking ya’know, what are they there for? I often wonder ya’know, what are they looking for? (Spinifex)
It was the space I’d been looking for. It was the soul, the antithesis of the current structure, the egotistical structure. You can see it in the big cities, the big phallic towers - essentially a big male ego ... This was the opposite of it. It was temporary structure, it was cobbled together - desert island productions. It was done on the scrounge. It was thieves. It was piracy, ya’know ... I was convinced that this bunch had got the idea of organic [right] ... It was [a] completely subjective, chaotic situation. Yet it worked, it had its own coherence. (Laurie)
It’s a huge Buddha field of Love, a matrix of pure possibility, a cosmic clearing house for memes & ideas. A loving & safe space to explore & experiment with modalities of mind, body & spirit. (Professor Ceteris Paribus 1996)
I s’pose you could say ConFest is the mother of all festivals. (Magpie)
For over 20 years, ConFest (Conference/Festival) has been Australia’s principal site for the celebration of alternative culture. Since 1976, this alternative lifestyle festival has been a regular (now biannual) seasonal event in the alternate calendar, attracting well over 100,000 people. The event is facilitated by Down To Earth (DTE), which in 1979 became a Melbourne-based co-operative society. Most ConFesters spend between five and seven days inside the event-space, often after undertaking pilgrimages from cities hundreds of kilometres distant. There, they experiment with the multiplicity of discourse and practice gaining popular currency in the alternative sector. Indeed, a vast spectrum of beliefs and behaviours are championed, performed and contested by participants, for whom ConFest is, typically, a sacred space, a transitional period, a centre on the margins. Yet, since thousands of eager participants access a growing plurality of thresholds and zones, unlike in conventional passage rites, there can be no predetermined outcome.
For me, the immediate dilemma is one of defining and elucidating a complex time-space matrix, an animated hub of Australian alternative culture since the mid-seventies. Several concerns have driven my inquiry. What is the purpose of DTE/ConFest? What constitutes the culture of DTE/ConFest? What is the significance of the ConFest experience for its participants, and how may this be compared with other events and experiences? What has been the effect of this experience upon both the alternative and broader communities? Why and how has the event endured for so long? What cultural theoretical models and conceptual mechanisms, past and present, can be drawn upon in the attempt to fashion an appropriate heuristic device?
Mapping the contours of a spectrum of comparable events and charting the historical, social, political and cultural co-ordinates formative to ConFest itself are critical to the investigation. The approach reveals a unique contemporary experience reliant upon an anarchic social organicism, a co-operative event-space representing a diverse (or more precisely heterotopic), and thereby prismatic, lens on contemporaneous explorations on the frontiers of leisure, health, environment, religion and community - an inimitable mirror to the Australian alternative movement.
Furthermore, extensive research employing multiple methods (see methodology in Appendix A), coupled with an analysis of relevant contemporary writing, warrants the application of an advanced theoretical modelling of ConFest. My approach will demonstrate that the standard theoretical paradigm adopted for the analysis of alternative events, that of Victor Turner, while remaining applicable, requires renovating and reconfiguring if it is to remain useful in the study of contemporary events. The thesis, therefore, undertakes a deconstruction of Turnerian thought, and it does so via two connected routes.
First, the thesis defines the demonstrable junctures of liminality and authenticity. I explore the means by which Turner’s triad of liminal modalities, or limina (play, drama and community), contextualise respectively unique opportunities for the performance and realisation of various qualities of authentication, or authentica (a multiplicity of discourse and practice valued as ‘true’, ‘natural’, ‘pure’, ‘sacred’). Moreover, I investigate how ConFest foments participant access to, and performance of, ferality - a local eco-radical trajectory and authentic career demanding considerable attention.
Secondly, through a critical deconstruction of Turner, I draw attention to the essentially exclusivist, non-carnal and consensual proclivities of the Turnerian paradigm. Since the latter cannot account for the key event themes of heterogeneity and corporeality, I enlist the concept of hyper-liminality to navigate a revealed counterscape of plurality and contestation, and adopt a body-oriented conceptualism from contemporary writing to investigate the liminal embodiment and performative carnality transparent in this permissive pleasurescape. Furthermore, ConFest’s distinctive anarchist-grassroots character, determined via the comparative-historical investigation, requires the adoption of the more specific designation - organic hyper-liminality. Thus, my ‘data’ demand the reconfiguration of an inherited model, calling for an appropriately post-structuralist heurism of alternative cultural events, an effort also made possible through an application of the ideas of Hakim Bey (the Immediatist/TAZ project) and Michel Maffesoli (neo-tribalism and Dionysian sociality).
In addition, I have structured the thesis such that the renovation undertaken commissions the exploration of principal vectors in alternative lifestylers’ authenticity pursuits. The main themes surveyed are: (1) the complex political and personal dimensions of cultural borrowing - especially in regard to the appropriation of indigeneity; (2) the implicit contiguity between the commitments to self-growth and earth-consciousness, and; (3) the authenticity wars breaking out between proponents of rival music cultures within a context of conflict and compromise. The study of a grassroots counterworld which is simultaneously liminal, marginal and, for a majority of its participants, central, thus illuminates primary cultural processes operating within the alternative sector, processes effecting the (re)production and suffusion of alternative culture.
Chapter one, ‘Alternative Cultural Events: Heterotopia Now’, is an introduction to alternative culture and its events. The chapter details the alternative culture movement and investigates alternative cultural events, ascertaining their principal counterspatial criteria. Several event-clusters, including the variant forms of alternative lifestyle event, are delineated. The latter, following the ideas of Foucault, are described as alternative cultural heterotopia. A survey of prior ethnographic research on alternative events is also undertaken. The critical and comparative analysis of theoretical and methodological approaches employed in these projects assists my own investigation of ConFest.
Revising Turner’s core concept of liminality, borrowing insights from parallel theory and acknowledging the unique context of the event itself, Chapter 2, ‘The Organic Hyper-Liminal Zone’, proposes a suitable heuristic approach to ConFest. First, the Turnerian paradigm is detailed drawing specific attention to the significance of the limen. This is followed by a critical exposition of an inhibiting essentialism in Turner’s work. This, in turn, lays the foundation for an apposite rendering of ConFest: as an organic hyper-liminal zone. That is, with the work of Hakim Bey providing complementary explanatory power, I suggest that a localised anarchic social organicism lies at the heart of ConFest’s ‘design’. Furthermore, I suggest ConFest is a distinctive hyper-performative context for the manifestation of a triad of liminal/authenticity modalities (play, drama and community) upon which I elaborate in Chapters 6-8.
Chapter 3, ‘The Down to Earth Movement’, issues a diachronic perspective on the Down to Earth Co-operative Society and ConFest. Following an investigation of the movement’s emergence, I provide a detailed historiography of DTE, attending to its three phases. DTE is regarded as an inimitable ‘neo-tribe’ (Maffesoli 1996) which is elective, responsive, affectual, diverse, neutral and unstable. I investigate how DTE has, over more than twenty years, mutated from a millenarian movement to the neutral custodian of Australia’s principal alternative cultural heterotopia. ConFest is introduced as a prismatic lens upon the contemporaneous discourse and practice of the Australian alternative movement. Despite ongoing internal divisions and mounting tension within DTE, ConFest continues to reinvigorate the Co-operative.
Chapter 4, ‘ConFest: Alternative Cultural Diversity Celebrated’, proposes a summary ethnography of five ConFests. Following information on the events researched, participants, ConFest’s organicism and volunteer ethos, I provide a detailed illustration of the cultural topography of ConFest, with particular attention to the key event zones and the villages/workshops. As a desired ‘location’, ConFest is revealed to be contested, yet its design ensures the coexistence of competing interpretations and expectations.
An authentic condition of human being for disenchanted Australian youth, ferality approximates the definitive cultural business of ConFest. In Chapter 5, ‘Going Feral: Eco-Radicalism and Authenticity’, I investigate the origins and principal characteristics of ferals - an eco-radical subcultural milieu committed to the celebration and defence of indigenous ecology and peoples. Via an exploration of this milieu’s activist confrontationalism, spectacle, semi-nomadism, postcoloniality and sociality, I advance the view that ferality is a contemporary rite of passage connoting reconciliation, a redemptive return and re-enchantment. The chapter also describes how ConFest furnishes access to, and licences the performance of, this desirable condition. At this space on the edge, and in this time in-between, one may be or go feral.
Chapter 6, ‘Playing Out: Carnality, Alterity and the (Re)created Self’, is the first of three chapters detailing the hyper-performativity of the respective authentica fomenting limina. ConFest is a powerful context for the abandonment and (re)creation of the self. It is a ‘subjunctive’ world where participants are permitted to experiment with desired sources of authenticity, to ‘play out’ (or ‘down’, ‘across’, ‘up’) side of ordinary experience, to experiment with ‘alterants’, to be ‘other’. Yet, as an extraordinarily tactile and sensuous environment, I give special consideration to the corporeal possibilities of Turner’s ‘subjunctive mood’. Therefore, articulating the interwoven on-site options of carnality and alterity, and paying special attention to a reconsideration of cultural appropriation, I discuss ways in which embodied otherness and ‘the other’ (especially the indigene) are implicated in participant desires. Also, attending to performative appropriation, or mimesis, I move toward an analysis of complicated DiY identities, fashioned via identification with multiple nodes of difference.
Turning to the liminal modality of drama, Chapter 7, ‘Sacred Drama: Self, Earth and Indigeneity’, focuses upon the manifold sacra (‘the ultimate concerns’) of participants, as they are evoked in this environment. The chapter contends that alternative culture is (re)produced through the ‘collective reflexology’ that takes place in the context of a temporary multi-cultural drama performed via ramified genres at multiple venues. Several on-site ‘ultimate concerns’ are articulated. I discuss how health and environmental concerns are ‘ecologically’ related (a relationship I call the self-globe nexus), as is clearly evident in manifestations of eco-spirituality such as Neo-Paganism. I also attend to indigeneity, the varied significance of which is evoked through numerous events and their interpretations.
Via a critical assessment of communitas, Chapter 8, ‘“What Tribe do you Belong to?”: Immediate and Contested Community’, circumscribes ConFest as: (1) an alternative cultural heterotopic community accommodating a multitude of ‘constituencies’ holding to diverse interpretations, and; (2) a desirable demesne of intercorporeality, the understanding of which is enhanced through readings of Maffesoli and Bey. I find that ConFest, or what is locally dubbed ‘the ConFest Spirit’, is enigmatised by concurrent tendencies towards massification and tribalism, homogeneity and heterogeneity, inclusivity and exclusivity, realising internal unity and discord. Despite the unqualified ideology of ‘being together’, as a community, and in the interests of maintaining a distinct ‘counter’ identity, DTE and ConFesters are preoccupied with identifying and excluding ‘foreign’ elements. Yet, as the example of competing music authenticity claimants indicates, ConFest is a contested community as there is little consensus on that which constitutes ‘foreign’. In the face of such disunity, however, the event’s social organicism nourishes networks and dialogue potentiating ‘unity in diversity’, working adaptations and localised resolutions.
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Thesis Contents
Main Page