Culture
As a part of the post-modernist cultural wave, ravers and raving have appeared as a youth subculture that associate electronic music, and personalized dance, with a disengagement and disassociation with mainstream society. Despite this neo-conservative perspective, the act of raving holds a more spiritual element where in it serves as a space where participants can use the combination of sensory stimuli and the removal of physical and interpretive surfaces as a platform for self-improvement and spiritual healing. Dance ritual has been employed by various indigenous cultures, such as the Numic peoples of the Great Basin, as a temporal and spatial escape. Here an individual would attempt through rhythmic dancing and chanting to disconnect from their plane of existence and create a connection with the metaphysical entities that govern their belief system. In order to achieve these instances of supernatural experience, the rituals were organized on the basis of 4 basic principals: location, music, lighting (in regards to time of day and the use of a fire), and finally dance.
Read more about this topic: Ravealation
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)