Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Partying is political—parties can protect the status quo or challenge the existing order or both. In this presentationI draw on ethnography of anarchist social movements (2005-2020) and recent psytrance counterculture to (2020-2025) consider the prefigurative politics of “DIY” free techno parties vs. large commercial “immersive” festivals. Working with concepts of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”, Debord’s “spectacle” and Victor Turner’s “communitas”, I explore today’s punk anarchist ravers as political subjects who celebrate non-commodified collective joy, criminal psychedelics vs. individualized medicine, avoid surveillance using cash not plastic, and whose values of living outside the law constitute a reservoir of potential anti-fascist action.
Bio:
Erica Lagalisse is an anthropologist of social movements, popular educator, and heteronymic writer. Across the psytrance festival circuit she is known as the author of Occult Features of Anarchism (2019), a study of anarchist social movements that also comments on “conspiracy theory”. Lagalisse has also studied marijuana legalization in Canada and the U.S.A. from an autonomist perspective, and brings this work forward in her current ethnography of European New Age psychedelic counterculture, anti/fascism and “cryptophilia”.
Partying is political—parties can protect the status quo or challenge the existing order or both. In this presentationI draw on ethnography of anarchist social movements (2005-2020) and recent psytrance counterculture to (2020-2025) consider the prefigurative politics of “DIY” free techno parties vs. large commercial “immersive” festivals. Working with concepts of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”, Debord’s “spectacle” and Victor Turner’s “communitas”, I explore today’s punk anarchist ravers as political subjects who celebrate non-commodified collective joy, criminal psychedelics vs. individualized medicine, avoid surveillance using cash not plastic, and whose values of living outside the law constitute a reservoir of potential anti-fascist action.
Bio:
Erica Lagalisse is an anthropologist of social movements, popular educator, and heteronymic writer. Across the psytrance festival circuit she is known as the author of Occult Features of Anarchism (2019), a study of anarchist social movements that also comments on “conspiracy theory”. Lagalisse has also studied marijuana legalization in Canada and the U.S.A. from an autonomist perspective, and brings this work forward in her current ethnography of European New Age psychedelic counterculture, anti/fascism and “cryptophilia”.
