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Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race
" Psychedelic White is one of the most innovative, refreshingly different analyses of race I have read in the last decade." —Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Politics, Evolution and the Untimely
The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are? A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation. Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering building on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race. Arun Saldanha is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota.
The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are? A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation. Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering building on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race. Arun Saldanha is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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May 22, 2021
Rarely have I encountered a book of such wide interest, yet couched in such unnecessary academic waffle and fluff. The hippie scene of Goa was legendary from the early 1970s to the turn of the millennium, eventually sparking the "Goa trance" dance music phenomenon and developing a reputation as a place of peace and love. Yet the predominantly white members of Goa’s scene (along with the many Japanese and Israelis who joined them) always existed in tension with the local Indians, seeing the latter as square and intrusive and erecting various barriers to their participation. Author Arun Saldanha, a Belgian sociologist with an Indian parent, found it curious that a peace-and-love counterculture could actually be racist. This book documenting and exploring this theme is based mainly on two seasons around the turn of the millennium which Saldanha spent doing participant-observation in Goa.
Besides its valid point that the Goan scene had a real problem with Indians, one of the good things about this book is simply the amount of information on the scene, which is now history: already during the era documented here, the regional government had begun to discourage freak communities and low-budget backpackers, aiming at a higher-spending and less morally offensive demographic. By the time I myself visited the western coast of India a couple of years after this book’s publication, Goa was pretty gentrified and not only had the freak scene moved to the beach community of Gokarna further to the south (in Karnataka state), but even the Karnatakan scene had already run its course. Saldanha describes in detail how the Goa freaks and their backpacker admirers lived, what their daily schedules were like, how they moved around . He carried out interviews with many people in Goa, foreigners and Indians alike, to gain a historical context of three decades of Goan tourism and the attitudes of the foreigner community.
The bad thing about this book is that between the clearly written, informative parts, the reader has to trudge through writing that contributes little to the fascinating examination of Goa, but which only serves to boost Saldanha’s street cred among his fellow academics. Sometimes it is merely annoying terminological choices, for example, instead of simply using the normal words "person/people", Saldanha usually writes "body/bodies" as was the fad at the time. But other times it is many paragraphs in a row pointing to some theoretical construct of Deleuze & Guattari, Bourdieu or Levinas.
Besides its valid point that the Goan scene had a real problem with Indians, one of the good things about this book is simply the amount of information on the scene, which is now history: already during the era documented here, the regional government had begun to discourage freak communities and low-budget backpackers, aiming at a higher-spending and less morally offensive demographic. By the time I myself visited the western coast of India a couple of years after this book’s publication, Goa was pretty gentrified and not only had the freak scene moved to the beach community of Gokarna further to the south (in Karnataka state), but even the Karnatakan scene had already run its course. Saldanha describes in detail how the Goa freaks and their backpacker admirers lived, what their daily schedules were like, how they moved around . He carried out interviews with many people in Goa, foreigners and Indians alike, to gain a historical context of three decades of Goan tourism and the attitudes of the foreigner community.
The bad thing about this book is that between the clearly written, informative parts, the reader has to trudge through writing that contributes little to the fascinating examination of Goa, but which only serves to boost Saldanha’s street cred among his fellow academics. Sometimes it is merely annoying terminological choices, for example, instead of simply using the normal words "person/people", Saldanha usually writes "body/bodies" as was the fad at the time. But other times it is many paragraphs in a row pointing to some theoretical construct of Deleuze & Guattari, Bourdieu or Levinas.
May 31, 2020
Such a pity I took it from the university library and had to return it before finishing it due to Covid, because it was fucking great, I was really enjoying it.
Amazing insights of the contradictions in the hippy raver scene.
Amazing insights of the contradictions in the hippy raver scene.
October 22, 2022
Dance music culture is so obsessed with Deleuzian materialism precisely because it's anti-dialectical, emergent and existential. Rather than being grounded in social relations and totality as such, which would situate it as a trifling historical irrelevance. It is not even that psytrance as a minority within a minority of trance subculture, or even that trance is a minority within so-called 'EDM', but that that pop culture as we understand it today is a mostly anglo-american importation, and a minority when considered in the way in which the capitalist periphery conceptualises its popular music (something I note Saldanha is unable to address with his insulated framework.) I.E: he is unable to fully address the fact that conventional pop culture as form (and here his anti-dialectical materialism leaves him stuck) is predominant in regions where the real subsumption of capital has taken place, where in short the agrarian revolution to capitalise agriculture is under way or has transpired.
To give a prosaic example, one could not speak of such a thing as a Turkish hippie scene in the 60s-70s outside of the metropolis of Istanbul, and even then it was an extreme minority, absolutely in no way comparable to developments in England, America, France or Japan. The anatolian psychedelic rock project was sonic psychedelia more than it was cultural psychedelia. The explanations for this are apparent. The majority of Turkey at the time was agrarian and rural, and the shantitowns popping up in Istanbul indicated the brutal acceleration of proletarianisation. It is no coincidence that Erkin Koray himself flirted with the music of these minibus travellers and shantitown dwellers, that is to say the so-called Arabesk (in some ways distinct from the villager folk music.)
In trying to demonstrate the ever mutating machinic viscosity of race, Saldanha becomes trapped in still operating according to the ontological privileging of whiteness in goa. Whereas to my mind, it would have been more fruitful to talk about the goa subcultures total disengagement with its bollywood other in the rest of India, the populist electronic music which developed as a result of Indian TV and Cinema as such. A kind of (re)conceptualisation of Reynoldsian hardcore continuum.
Club culture getting more arab, Indian, Turkish or whatever in regions of the third world and middle east is not so interesting if everything is still thinned into a paste of even consistency, which psytrance is able to do precisely because of its uniformity and lack of ideological impetus to progress. In essence, why the author has a critical affection for this subculture mystifies me, and I do not think he manages to adequately justify it, despite the constant deployment of obstruse verbiage to signal to his fellow academic colleagues.
On a more general note, at it's worst, this kind of anti-dialectical materialism can result in the blooming of a thousand tendencial encounters with no real overarching inner relation to tie them together. Yes, race is viscous, but why it is viscous is not really interrogated, instead a hand wave to colonialism/capitalism/heterosexism. This might be good for a guilty first world liberal who is desirous of reasserting their privileges under the cloak of anti-racism, but for many of us from third world backgrounds, it reads as if the author wants to reduce everything to formless substance. In which case, one cannot really say that this book serves any other purpose than the strictly ethnographic, on which terms it is successful.
The author does come to realise this to an extent when he discusses the dynamics of the black market drug economy and police arrests, but then is unable to generalise this to the capitalist state determining the forms of racialisation as apposite population management. That is to say, the Indian state as concentration of Indian capitalist society also determines the luxuries afforded to foreign white bodies as a primary source of accumulation // colonialism as a motor of accumulation. The assumption that whiteness can be destablised by lines of flight if they hypothetically escaped the reterritorialising integuments of racial typologies is never considered to be faulty, indicating a clear anarcho-mystical bias on behalf of the author. Maybe there is no subversion of parental values, it might be that the rebellion against the parents is the continued renewal of bourgeois hegemony, rather than a force which needs to be constantly domesticated. There is always a danger of taking hippie pabulum for granted. It would be more confrontational, I believe, to argue that there is no self-transformation, no incongruity in the trustafarian drop out. That this is just as tyranical as the person who works as a wall street banker. Not necessarily in degree or kind, but in the fact that this opposition was always scripted, and thereby can in no way be considered unpredictable, even in its more psychotic forms.
The rock mythology as possessing insipiently radical potentialities must be ruthlessly purged.
"Race is creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself." the thing is, Arun, I don't think you would really hear this statement from someone who isn't mixed, I.E: someone who has not been inscribed as half white or white passing. The so-called creativities you speak of comprise of being ham-fisted, plundered and culturally dehumanised rather than being universal and cosmopolitan, which of course must be defended against all feudal and preservationist refuseniks.
What you want on the contrary is to preserve the diplomatically elevated position of the white or the half white, so long as the possibility is opened for this continued negotiated line of flight. This in some senses is analogous to the people who would seriously argue that colonialism intensified capitalism in the East. When in reality the truth is that colonialisms rear guard was always concerned with the retention of landed property, tributary and patriarchal forms of production. This is where your insistence on the absurdity of freak means you fail to be rigorous, and open up possibilities for the reactionary deployment of your work. All things considered, This blunder cannot be forgiven.
In sum, I still adamantly believe that Gilroy is correct and that race itself formulates racism, and talking about its subtle viscosity is hair splitting good for ethnographic observation, but does not address the main point about the unification of form and content that Fanon made. The author seems to be stuck in a mechanistic understanding of dialectics where all opposites must be inter alia fixed with no movement of themselves. But such would even go against the change brought about by the transformation of quantity into quality. Because all quantity would be fixed and would not be able to negate being quantity as such. And back to transcendental idealism we go!
To give a prosaic example, one could not speak of such a thing as a Turkish hippie scene in the 60s-70s outside of the metropolis of Istanbul, and even then it was an extreme minority, absolutely in no way comparable to developments in England, America, France or Japan. The anatolian psychedelic rock project was sonic psychedelia more than it was cultural psychedelia. The explanations for this are apparent. The majority of Turkey at the time was agrarian and rural, and the shantitowns popping up in Istanbul indicated the brutal acceleration of proletarianisation. It is no coincidence that Erkin Koray himself flirted with the music of these minibus travellers and shantitown dwellers, that is to say the so-called Arabesk (in some ways distinct from the villager folk music.)
In trying to demonstrate the ever mutating machinic viscosity of race, Saldanha becomes trapped in still operating according to the ontological privileging of whiteness in goa. Whereas to my mind, it would have been more fruitful to talk about the goa subcultures total disengagement with its bollywood other in the rest of India, the populist electronic music which developed as a result of Indian TV and Cinema as such. A kind of (re)conceptualisation of Reynoldsian hardcore continuum.
Club culture getting more arab, Indian, Turkish or whatever in regions of the third world and middle east is not so interesting if everything is still thinned into a paste of even consistency, which psytrance is able to do precisely because of its uniformity and lack of ideological impetus to progress. In essence, why the author has a critical affection for this subculture mystifies me, and I do not think he manages to adequately justify it, despite the constant deployment of obstruse verbiage to signal to his fellow academic colleagues.
On a more general note, at it's worst, this kind of anti-dialectical materialism can result in the blooming of a thousand tendencial encounters with no real overarching inner relation to tie them together. Yes, race is viscous, but why it is viscous is not really interrogated, instead a hand wave to colonialism/capitalism/heterosexism. This might be good for a guilty first world liberal who is desirous of reasserting their privileges under the cloak of anti-racism, but for many of us from third world backgrounds, it reads as if the author wants to reduce everything to formless substance. In which case, one cannot really say that this book serves any other purpose than the strictly ethnographic, on which terms it is successful.
The author does come to realise this to an extent when he discusses the dynamics of the black market drug economy and police arrests, but then is unable to generalise this to the capitalist state determining the forms of racialisation as apposite population management. That is to say, the Indian state as concentration of Indian capitalist society also determines the luxuries afforded to foreign white bodies as a primary source of accumulation // colonialism as a motor of accumulation. The assumption that whiteness can be destablised by lines of flight if they hypothetically escaped the reterritorialising integuments of racial typologies is never considered to be faulty, indicating a clear anarcho-mystical bias on behalf of the author. Maybe there is no subversion of parental values, it might be that the rebellion against the parents is the continued renewal of bourgeois hegemony, rather than a force which needs to be constantly domesticated. There is always a danger of taking hippie pabulum for granted. It would be more confrontational, I believe, to argue that there is no self-transformation, no incongruity in the trustafarian drop out. That this is just as tyranical as the person who works as a wall street banker. Not necessarily in degree or kind, but in the fact that this opposition was always scripted, and thereby can in no way be considered unpredictable, even in its more psychotic forms.
The rock mythology as possessing insipiently radical potentialities must be ruthlessly purged.
"Race is creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself." the thing is, Arun, I don't think you would really hear this statement from someone who isn't mixed, I.E: someone who has not been inscribed as half white or white passing. The so-called creativities you speak of comprise of being ham-fisted, plundered and culturally dehumanised rather than being universal and cosmopolitan, which of course must be defended against all feudal and preservationist refuseniks.
What you want on the contrary is to preserve the diplomatically elevated position of the white or the half white, so long as the possibility is opened for this continued negotiated line of flight. This in some senses is analogous to the people who would seriously argue that colonialism intensified capitalism in the East. When in reality the truth is that colonialisms rear guard was always concerned with the retention of landed property, tributary and patriarchal forms of production. This is where your insistence on the absurdity of freak means you fail to be rigorous, and open up possibilities for the reactionary deployment of your work. All things considered, This blunder cannot be forgiven.
In sum, I still adamantly believe that Gilroy is correct and that race itself formulates racism, and talking about its subtle viscosity is hair splitting good for ethnographic observation, but does not address the main point about the unification of form and content that Fanon made. The author seems to be stuck in a mechanistic understanding of dialectics where all opposites must be inter alia fixed with no movement of themselves. But such would even go against the change brought about by the transformation of quantity into quality. Because all quantity would be fixed and would not be able to negate being quantity as such. And back to transcendental idealism we go!
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February 8, 2020I was interested to read this anthropological study of the psy-trance subculture... A subculture that interests me for some reason.
The thesis is: long term resident, white "Goa Freaks" are all assholes. I am convinced.
The thesis is: long term resident, white "Goa Freaks" are all assholes. I am convinced.
April 29, 2019
Arun is pretty trippy
August 25, 2022
important work dummy relevant kinda spooky shit
December 25, 2023
Could have done a better job tying up the Deleuze/Guattari mumbo jumbo, but otherwise really good. The ethnographic sections were detailed and funny.
December 21, 2024
The faciality machine is my newest obsession. I will literally yap about this for HOURS. Saldanha has such a unique take on the way phenotypical expressions get categorized into minority groups.
December 28, 2025
Interesting how the author/ethnographer places race - class as primary modes of understanding interactions. The fact that white/white-passing tourists are horrible to the vendors/locals is not just because it's 'part of the freak subculture' but because India is seeped within caste service culture. I was quite appalled to see zero engagement with resistance anti-caste culture within Goa. How could you engage with Fanon (in an Indian context) and not be in conversation with emancipatory literature from India! Absurd! Also dare I say that the ethnographer is a terrible interviewer! I get that the vibe is all 'omg sooo trippy dude' but ....so much potential for a good conversation? The author keeps repeatedly throwing in 'people, especially Israelis are terrible to Indians' and then doesn't quite take this opportunity to examine how different nationalities are interacting with each other and what that could do to this fieldwork. With so much stress on positionality and location, the author thinks they are a non-caste subject, only racially recognized or not-recognized. Barring a few photographs, there is no criticality to why such poses, why such Slumdog Millionaire-esque photos. A frustrating read.
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September 26, 2007It's fun to read books by people you know. This is one of the first titles I was involved with at the UMPress. Weirdly (since it is an academic book), I read the whole thing -- spread out over trips to Chicago and British Columbia, but still ... whenever the theory drags (and how draggy can it be when Arun quotes people saying things like "WE ARE MULTI-MUTATING GLOBAL INFORMATIONAL BEINGS"??), there's plenty of good ethno-anecdotes to pull you back in. Also, some useful concepts for thinking about race, including a personal favorite, that of "being white in public."
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews