Music tourism and factions of bodies in Goa

Abstract

Tourism studies has extensively analysed how the ‘tourist gaze’ constructs the experiences and social relationships within tourism. This article seeks to engage entire bodies in the analysis of tourism and shifts away from a focus on vision. Ethnographic details from the psychedelic rave tourism scene in Goa, India, are presented to account for what could happen when differences between bodies at a rave event are considered. In the final theoretical section, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze and Guattari, these ethnographic details are used to make some tentative suggestions as to how music is capable of organizing ‘factions’ of bodies along dynamic socio-spatial boundaries. The main argument is that it is not music itself, but its material connections to bodies, spacetimes and objects, that enable social differentiation in the multiracial touristic environment of Goa.