review by Charles de Ledesma

University of East London (UK)

Anthony D'Andrea is a "transnationalist" researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. Global Nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to India and Ibiza. It is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. As well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of "expressive expatriates", as D'Andrea calls them. This label loosely corrals a colourful cast including DJs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of Goa and Ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers.

D'Andrea defines "expressive expatriate" early on. "As a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms 'expressive' and 'expatriate' depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject" (p.7). Also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which D'Andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. "Many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation" (p.8). But, D'Andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. He applies Foucault's concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. In the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge - end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s' rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts - could undermine such an analysis. But, thankfully, not; D'Andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. Global Nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating.

Divided into five main parts, D'Andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, "Neo-nomadic", which adds to the multiple voices in the Graham St John-edited collection, Rave Culture and Religion, and in various work from Robin Sylvan and Paul Heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. Before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, D'Andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using Deluge's famous epithet, "the nomad does not move" to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement.

D'Andrea begins his field report in La Isla Blanca - Ibiza - with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. There is yoga teacher Nora, clothes retailer Rochelle, new age body practices seeker Barbara and island long-stay Kirk who, like D'Andrea, is an anthropologist. A rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and "bio dance" classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography's next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island's resort, San Antonio. D'Andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. He less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island's largest nightclub, Privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. We learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night Manumission, and how they 'performed live' sex acts during the night. D'Andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. Beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where "exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in Ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene" (p.107).

Before heading for north Goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren't in this mould, D'Andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neo-spiritual guru Osho's "International Meditation Resort" in Pune, south India. D'Andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned "new age resort" as he holds centre ground between the Osho supporters, sannyasins, and Osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. This section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between Ibiza, Pune and Goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties.

It is Goa that D'Andrea travels to next and it is here that Global Nomads truly finds its pace and footing. After setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once Portuguese-held, south India enclave, and Western interest in it, D'Andrea launches into a field report on "rebel sannyasins", trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the German bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. In an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that "at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection" (p.189). But D'Andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of Arun Saldanha in Psychedelic White, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. One, Bojan, believes India to be a land "that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous" (p.193).

Later in this masterly field report, D'Andrea reaches a ravishing climax. The sub section "The Techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience" remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psychedelic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. So many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on D'Andrea and, unlike in the more extensive Psychedelic White, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. Locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can 'tear the subject from itself' (p.209), the writing collapses key elements - music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers - into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. "Trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality" (p.210). D'Andrea's use here of the Deleuze and Guattarian concept "assemblage" is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe.

No matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. D'Andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north Goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. Not so. DJs Goa Gil and Laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. A stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as D'Andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. But this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. D'Andrea has simply had a number of go's at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. This doesn't detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable.

D'Andrea's study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turn- of-the-century field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. Feel free to add to the list.