The molecules of ritual: promoting, producing, and performing raving and clubbing in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer. This dissertation investigates raving and clubbing as performances of ritual. It follows Victor Turner's call to locate the original matrix of ritual in the multi-dimensionality of those contemporary cultural events which he referred to as liminoid phenomena. In doing so, it describes music and dance as the central expressions and experiences of raving and clubbing. Ethnographic research on the practices of raving and clubbing was conducted in Toronto, Canada from 1997 to 2001. Informant testimonials on the communal, magical, spiritual, and quasi-religious experiences associated with raving and clubbing position ritual as a framework of analysis derived from practitioners. A review of the dominant sociological literature reveals metaphorical and anecdotal references to raves and clubs as ritual spaces and raving and clubbing as ritual practices to be largely inadequate. An anthropological approach to the study of ritual as a performed sequence of events is taken through an analysis of music, dance, and the auxiliary media which promote their meanings as rites in and of youth culture. The performance roles of disc jockeys, dancers, and organizers are described to examine music, dance, and event design and advertising as the practices through which raving and clubbing are conceived, received, and interpretively framed by participants as ritual. The framing of raving and clubbing as ritual is considered historically through an analysis of the technologies of playing records and the social application of those technologies by disc jockeys associated with the cultures of disco in New York City, house in Chicago, and acid house and rave in England. Underground dance music and the disco concept are identified as the musical and performance genre shared by those culture and the ravers and clubbers in Toronto who index their social mythologies to situate their rites as authentic and meaningful. Describing successful performances of underground dance music records by disc-jockeys as a journey, the processual model of ritual developed by Arnold vanGennep and refined by Turner is invoked to examine how this performance idiom structures the expressions and experiences of liminality through music and dance. Raving and clubbing are thus considered opportunities for participants to engage in ritual performances of transcendence and transformation.*
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".