Ravers

14 Pages 3406 Words

This paper offers an introductory glimpse into the rave subculture for members of mainstream culture. The exploration includes rave artifacts, lexicons, and mysterious rituals. Based on two years of ethnography in the rave scene combined with published documentation, a survival guide for attending raves is offered for the naive, but curious. To survive in the rave subculture, possessing both the artifacts (nonverbal communication) and lexicon (verbal communication) are imperative. Artifacts include appropriate clothing, essential supplies, and psychedelic toys. Examples of interesting and unusual artifacts will be used throughout the paper to give the reader a vicarious rave experience. Insider lexicon phrases include codes for illegal substances, group rituals, and dance music. The reader will be taught some of the un!
ique rave jargon, so that he or she can speak "rave."
Although there is no definitive source on the etymology of the term "rave," most ravers agree that the term originally referred to "raving" about the secret, decadent parties. There is also no universally agreed upon definition for the term, but a few examples will serve to conceptualize the term. Bradburn’s (Jul. 1993) broad definition is of " a new phenomenon that is more of a spontaneous happening that brings people together for dancing in various locations." More specifically, Saltonstall (1995) defines raves as "all-night dance parties that move mysteriously into the city’s abandoned warehouses or lofts for one night, like tremendous floating clubs, and then move on" (4A). Perhaps Reynolds (1994) captures raves best: "It is a self-induced hypergasm, a shared hallucination of the in-place-to-be grandiosity" (56). Raves typically share the common features of secrecy, mobility, youth, music, drugs, fashion, and attitude. These features appear consistently throughout the entire history of raves since the moment of their inception.Like so much of Generation Xâ...