New Age Nomadism and a Vision of the Earth
Occupied the empty houses.
We moved secretly through the streets at night.
Food was taken in doorways and shallow alcoves.
Tattoos were performed on open floors of abandoned factories.
Bedecked with cloth and feathers.
Our vehicles ran not on benzene but the oil given to us by those no longer needing.
We watched the stars revolve and the moons rise.
Animals accompanied us on our journeys knowing they would never be eaten.
Music and the constant trance of pipes.
Reflections of passing in roadside pools and river mirrors.
Slow days in apple orchards unworried by ownership or time.
For the graves of our ancestors are in the sky.
Ours shall be unfindable.
Between a sun not yet seen and the lake of our skins.
There the burials will take place in trees and other wooded creatures.
There will be no piles of ash or breaking open of caskets
But instead a keeping of each flame around a circle as yet unbroken.
James Barrett.
In the 1980s and 90s groups of people travelled en masse through the countryside of the United Kingdom, mostly in the south and south west. The travellers who celebrate the Equinox and Solstice at Stonehenge are recognised as being groups that subscribe to “New Age” ideologies (Hetherington 2000, Ross 1994, Heelas 1996). The diverse body of New Age could be described as a diffuse reality view, a discourse or as Gardiner states in relation to ideology as “a material segment of reality…embodied in some signifying practice or semiotic material (word, gestures etc.)” (Gardiner: 1994 P71). This making of reality is dependant upon and is created from group and individual identity within New Age and as defined against that from outside it. In effect a dialogue is constructed concerning authentic states of being and how this is achieved {1}. To those outside the definition the reactions can range from curious interest to open hostility. In general when individuals become travellers they choose to reject the settled, class orientated, domestic, regular job lifestyle of so-called mainstream English society. Instead these are negated through discourses and practices of nomadism, carnival, and a shift in emphasis in the nature of dialogue.
The history of the New Age Traveller {2} movement in the United Kingdom begins with the free festival circuit of the 1960s and 1970s. Such festivals as The Windsor Park Free Festival, Glastonbury, and Stonehenge were seasonal gatherings of hybrid space incorporating elements of 1960s pop show (Woodstock, Isle of Wight), squatted property, medieval festival day, and gypsy horse fair. Although strands of cultural practice related to these can obviously be traced much further back in time, they converged in this form with a template provided by the now famous Merry Pranksters journey across the United States led by author Ken Kesey in 1964. During the 1970s in the United Kingdom there developed groups of people who would spend the summer driving in convoys of busses, cars, and vans between the various festivals and living in the vehicles. In June 1982 following the annual Stonehenge Free People’s Festival a convoy of approximately 150 vehicles drove to Greenham Common USAF base and set up next to the site as the “Cosmic Counter-Cruise Carnival” in conjunction with the Women’s Peace Camp which had been going since 1981. The carnival camp lasted until the night of 5–6 February 1985 when police and military evicted it with violence and razor wire.
Around this camp developed ‘The Peace Convoy’, a collection of vehicles which roamed the countryside and featured heavily in the pages of tabloid newspapers through the mid-1980’s. For 18 months following the dispersal of the camp at Greenham Common traveller convoys moved about the landscape in a cat and mouse game with police and district authorities. This culminated in the so-called ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ when a convoy of travellers attempting to reach Stonehenge for the summer solstice of 1986 were forced into a field by police and attacked, vehicles were confiscated and 500 were arrested (the largest mass civil arrest in English history). The passing of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994 made the increasing difficulties of living on the road now subject to legislated and many Travellers opted to leave England or settle down in rural collectives, mostly in Wales and Scotland. However the life style continues with Stonehenge remaining an important space for the culture. In 2001 for the first time in 7 years a gathering was permitted at Stonehenge for the summer solstice and in 2002 an estimated 23 000 people went there to watch the solstice sunrise, many of whom were New Age Travellers.
I critique the New Age on the micro-level as a method for legitimising and externalising inner-voice {4}, and on the macro-level as a strategy of resistance to the epistemological and moral precepts of bourgeois individualism, what Bakhtin described as “the culture of essential and inescapable solitude” (Gardiner; 1994 P72). Within the New Age “the basic idea…is that what lies within- experienced by way of ‘intuition’, ‘alignment’, or an ‘inner-voice’- serves to inform the judgements, decisions, and choices required for everyday life” (Heelas: 1996 P23). As inner-speech is identified by the Bakhtin Circle as consistently being anti-authoritarian and unofficial dialogue, the legitimising of it within New Age articulates a corresponding socio-political orientation. Furthermore this resistance is consistent with the nomadism, and carnival as articulated by New Age travellers. Also related to this, and particularly when considering Stonehenge as chronotope, is the concept of Gaia and “Gaian time”. This is based around the work of James Lovelock and others who theorise the earth as a living organism, of which humanity is a component. “The Life of Gaia” is an extremely long-term “time dimension, for the birth of Gaia happened so long ago that the time scale is almost beyond our comprehension. In fact the time scale is probably the most significant way in which Gaia differs from other forms of life.” (Lovelock: 1991 P73). As a significant location in the concept of “Earth Mysteries”, Stonehenge provides access to “Gaian time”.
In this ‘revised time scale’ a conception of authenticity is offered, similar to that found in New Age philosophies concerning finding the ‘true self’, or in effect “reality”. In terms of the Bakhtin Circle as cultural critique “in order to endow any idea with authenticity, one need only conceive of it’s “natural state” in some Golden Age or perhaps existing in the present but somewhere at the other end of the world, east of the sun, west of the moon, if not on earth then underground, if not underground then in heaven” (Gardiner: 1994 P148). In the case of the New Age the Golden Age is presented as potentially contemporary but hidden behind “ego”, “programming”, “consumer values”, and “brainwashing” to list a just few of the barriers cited by Heelas. Through extended groupings which travellers often describe as ‘their tribe’ (e.g. The Dongas, Yellow Tipi, Space Tribe), communal living, vegetarianism, living off the perceived excesses of capitalist culture (e.g. “dumpster diving” — raiding the bins of supermarkets and retailers, selling “tat” — second hand bits and pieces), and attention to New Age healing and cosmological beliefs there is a concerted attempt to overcome the barriers to what is deemed authentic experience {5}.
Consistent with Gaian theory, there is an apocalyptic element to New Age traveller discourse that is oppositional to the Golden Age. It is perceived, as it is generally in New Age, that continuing to develop cultural values based on bourgeois individualism as expressed through capitalist consumption, industrial-scale production and materialist political values will lead to a “gigantic global disaster” in the words of Lovelock.
As strategy of resistance to ‘the culture of solitude’ New Age travellers construct a counter culture which includes what has developed today into a pan-global network of what I term ‘consensual season destinations’. This network is constantly changing based on local political situations and of weather patterns, astronomical occurrences (solar eclipses draw travellers to where they are best viewed from on earth) {6}, airfare prices, discovery of pristine locations, and availability of autonomous space {7}, such as squats, liveable nature or ruins (e.g. Hampi in South India) and cheap places to live. Information regarding what is happening and where in the international Traveller community is disseminated through Internet sources (as sound, vision and text), word of mouth, and some small-scale ‘hard copy’ magazines and flyers {8}.
All of these attributes of Traveller culture are consistent with Bakhtin’s theories of carnival ambivalence in that “carnival is for Bakhtin the ‘anti-body’ living within a pathological social body always threatening to rupture the latter from within. In other words, carnival is simultaneously consistent with the contemporary social world and desperately at odds with it. (Gardiner: 1994 PP139–140). As a major setter of style and fashion (e.g. the enormous popularity of electronic dance music of which much originates in seasonal traveller locations such as Goa, Koh Phangan, and Ibiza, and the mass outdoor festivals now such a part of summer in Europe) as well as a source for mainstream narrative content (e.g. Films such as The Beach, Run Lola Run, and Tank Girl), the Traveller culture is not so totally removed from the society it resists.
This symbiotic relationship includes the struggle over meaning within the chronotope of Stonehenge, as;
The only difference between claims that Travellers make on [Stonehenge] compared with those made by English Heritage or by the discipline of archaeology are that the one set is seen as legitimate and the other is not. There is no essential right in one and wrong in the other. The practice of conservation may have moved on apace during the twentieth century but the idea of conservation within British culture remains wedded to a nineteenth century vision. (Hetherington: 2000 P 153).
Following this Stonehenge could be viewed as a ‘second order’ signifier which is “utilised by the capitalist class to enforce a particular network of connotations or signifying associations which both express and reinforce the dominant view of reality.” (Gardiner 1994 P145). In keeping with a dialogic model for cultural meaning the struggle against this hegemony is necessary for meaning to exist in the living sense, just as a language must contain multiple voices in order to remain able to represent constantly changing realities. All contribute to a heteroglossic multidimensional reality engaged in dynamic and living processes, the clearest evidence of this being language, however it can also be understood in culture, society, and political discourses.
Finally perhaps the strongest feature of resistance in the traveller appropriation of Stonehenge, and I would argue a central tenet of their culture, can be explained in terms of the theatrical discourses of Antonin Artaud {9} and Augusto Boal {10}.
Boal describes dialogue as “always dangerous, because it creates discontinuity between one thought and another, between two opinions or two possibilities- and between them infinity installs itself: so that all opinions are possible, all thoughts permitted. When two have ceased to exist and only the Sole Absolute Thought remains, creation becomes impossible.” (Boal 2000 PXVII). Artaud saw theatre as a potentially authenticating and thus liberating device. As Jacques Derrida wrote of Artaud, “The theatre of cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself, in the extent which life is unrepresentable. Life is the non-representable origin of representation. “I have therefore said ‘cruelty’ as I might have said ‘life’” (Derrida 1978 P234). It is not difficult to see the spectacle of Traveller culture as theatre, and indeed it is within this discourse that the tabloid newspapers of Britain re-presented them so often in the 1990s (a “tatty circus” is how one newspaper described the Peace Convoy).
The signifier of Stonehenge is one of the ‘open’ stages used by travellers others could be the beaches of Goa, the forests of Chapada Diamantina in Brazil, the fields of the ‘Rainbow Triangle’ of Northern New South Wales in Australia, which are in turn chronotopic spaces. In further keeping with theatrical interpretations, Augusto Boal’s concept of the spectator becoming the actor is consistent with Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival ambivalence. Boal writes, “The audience mustn’t just liberate its Critical Conscience, but its body too. It needs to invade the stage and transform the images that are shown there.” (Boal 2000 PXX). In terms of carnival Bakhtin describes how “Civil and social ceremonies took on a comic aspect as clowns and fools, constant participants in these festivals, mimicked serious rituals” (Morris 1994 P196). The authoritative space of official discourse was therefore invaded in a theatrical gesture and as will be discussed further in the linguistic portion of this work, renewed through derision.
Notes
- In defining what “New Age” is Hetherington quotes Heelas, however unlike the latter it is described as a religion by Hetherington who writes “one of the defining characteristics the New Age movement is what he [Heelas] calls a ‘sacralisation of the self’. This can take many forms, from organized cults to more vaguely defined personal interests in spirituality, personal growth and development. The New Age movement also straddles both so-called counter culture activities associated with retreats, communes and alternative therapy through to mainstream management and business training courses. The vast majority of those who describe themselves as interested in some aspect of the New Age have never been New Age traveller. Equally many who travel may well shun the idea of being part of the religious phenomenon known as the New Age. It is, however, with some qualification, an apt term to use in the cultural sense…Many of the forms of religiosity and therapy associated the New Age involve interest in pre-modern practices and forms of knowledge, astrology, paganism, earth mysteries, ancient healing techniques, simple and rural communal living- that are of interest to many Travellers to. ” (Hetherington: 2000 P12).
- “There are no accurate figures for how many people are living on the edge of legality on someone else’s property, but the Council of Europe estimates that there are over l00 000 Travellers in the U.K., (this includes the media named, ‘New Age Travellers’, Showmen, Gypsies, Tarmac and Labouring gangs and itinerants squatting on empty land or in derelict buildings). There is a wide spread attitude that only a very small proportion of these people are ‘true Gypsies,’ and most, extraneous to this definition, should qualify for no status other than that of ‘no fixed abode.” from A Time to Travel? — An Introduction to Britain’s newer Travellers by Fiona Earle (1994)
- Dialogue: “ Every utterance generates a response in the other who receives it, even if that response is only within inner speech. However, the initial utterance already anticipates the active response in the receiving other and so shapes itself to take it into account. But neither, of course was the ‘initial utterance’ actually the first word in any real sense; inevitably its form is previous utterances. This inherently interactive — dialogic- nature of discourse and consciousness (as consciousness is constituted by language) accounts for the constant generation of new meaning.” (Morris1994 P5)
- Inner speech: “The reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of the signs there is no psyche; there are physiological processes, processes in the nervous system, but no subjective psyche as a special existential quality fundamentally distinct from both the physiological processes occurring within the organism and the reality encompassing that organism from outside, to which the psyche reacts and which one way or another it reflects. By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localised somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the boarder line separating these two spheres of reality. It is here that an encounter between the organism and the outside world takes place, but the encounter is not a physical one: the organism and the outside world meet here in the sign.” (Voloshinov Marxism and the Philosophy of Language quoted in Morris 1994 P 56).
- In a thesis by Graham St John for a Ph.D. from Deakin University, Melbourne on alternative culture in Australia “Bandicoot” a deep ecology activist and Australian New Age Traveller described his life as a hardware salesman before his perceived “return”: “My life took me away from the earth. It put me into a four-bedroom house, it fed me. You know meat and three vegetables every night. Showed me a T.V. taught me how to live and protect myself…to put a roof over my head, and a doona around me. And I wasn’t exposed to the outside. And when we did it was in a car, you know, and in a cabin.” (St John: 1999 P162). There is consistency with the taking of a travelling name (common among travellers) and the attempt at dissolving of social, political, economic and geographical boundaries with the theories of many of the thinkers listed below {6} {8} and {9}.
- Solar eclipses which attracted large groups of travellers as festival were 9th March 1997: Siberia/Mongolia, 26th February 1998 Venezuela/Columbia, 11th August 1999 South Asia/India, 21st June 2001 South Africa/Madagascar, 4th December 2002 South Africa/Australia. This practice can be associated with the relevance of Earth Mysteries and Gaia theory to the culture of New Age Travellers.
- Of great influence upon the global New Age Traveller movement are the works of a body of writers who articulate discourses of ‘primitivist anarchy’, such as Hakim Bey (“T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone”), and John Zerzan (“Future Primitive”). Philosopher authors who are also important to Traveller culture include the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem (“The Revolution of Everyday Life”) and Guy Debord (“Society of the Spectacle”), and post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (“Nomadology: The War Machine”, “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”). These texts also demonstrate a link between the philosophies of Traveller culture and the global protest movement that gained such momentum in the 1990’s.
- One example of an extremely large and international component of traveller culture isThe Rainbow Family of Living Light, which is believed by some to have begun with those who stayed behind to clean up after the Woodstock Festival in 1969 (this is itself a legend of the Rainbow Tribe as they call themselves). Today it is made up of thousands of part time and full time travellers who gather in often-secluded pan-global locations of natural beauty to live for weeks, sometimes months according to their philosophies.
- Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French actor, writer and philosopher whose work The Theatre and its Double (1931–1936) deals with representation and consciousness in the artistic medium of theatre. Artaud is important as an early embodiment of many ideas that would begin to develop more widespread acceptance twenty years after his death. His negation of the author, centrality of gesture to meaning, multidimensional narrative, and use of sound in a sculptural sense in performance predates many post-modernist figures working in the same areas by decades. As for art he wrote “Art is not the imitation of life, but life the imitation of a transcendental principle which art puts us into communication with once again” (Derrida 1981 P234).
- Dr. Augusto Boal (16 March 1931–2 May 2009) a playwright, dramatist, author, theatre theorist and cultural activist. Formulated the concepts of Invisible Theatre, and Theatre of the Oppressed which he teaches as a means to liberation for those outside the power structures of hierarchical societies. Often conducted in public places as dramatic actions that are not recognised by spectators as being ‘Theatre’, the invisible theatre provokes situations and dialogue, often spilling out of the theatrical situation into ‘real life’. The Theatre of the Oppressed (1971) similarly works upon issues of power, liberation and control. To quote: “The Poetics of The Oppressed: In the beginning the theatre was the dithyrambic song: free people singing in the open air. The carnival. The feast. Later the ruling classes took possession of the theatre, and built their dividing walls. Firstly they divided the people, separating actors from spectators: the people who act and the people who watch — the party is over! Secondly, among the actors they separated the protagonists from the mass. The coercive indoctrination began! Now the oppressed people are liberating themselves and, once more are making the theatre their own. The walls must be torn down. First, the spectator starts acting again: invisible theatre, image theatre, etc. Secondly, it is necessary to eliminate the private property of the characters by the individual actors: the “Joker” System…[thus]…we see some of the ways by which the people reassume their protagonistic function in the theatre and in society.” (Boal 2000 P119)
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