Author meets critics: a set of reviews and response for Arun Saldanha's Psychedelic White

Book reviews
Author meets critics: a set of reviews and response
Arun Saldanha
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the
Viscosity of Race
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007.
ix þ 248pp., $18.00/e12.99/£14.49 paper-
back (ISBN 0-8166-4994-4), $60.00/e51.86/
£39.49 hardback (ISBN 0-8166-4993-6)
Introduction
By the turn of the twenty-first century a shake-
up of ideas around race and racism seemed
inevitable. Fifty years of activism and reflec-
tion on diversity, equality and civil rights
produced real progress in understanding that
racial divisions are neither natural nor
immutable, in recognizing that racism is a
slippery style of oppression with a form for
every occasion, and in establishing what anti-
racism is against. Yet, it suddenly seemed hard
to find any fresh account of what all this work
was for. Race theory became trapped in the
cycle of categorizations and identifications
that mapped representations of race onto
styles of resistance or models of recognition.
Anti-racist practice clustered hopefully,
but often fruitlessly, around ever more
elaborate ways of using integration, socializa-
tion or some other style of mixing to counter
strategies of exclusion, segregation and dis-
affection. Arun Saldanha’s book is one of a
handful of new works that effectively breaks
that mould. That is why it is so controversial;
and it is why we chose to profile it here.
The subjects of this ethnography are
white, well-off hippies and ravers (‘freaks’),
middle-class Indian tourists and villagers who
come together in the beaches, bars and guest
houses in the Goan village of Anjuna. As a
participant observer in the assemblage of
bodies, ecstasy, dancing and sun, Saldanha
came to realize that despite trance discourse
about peace and respect, white (Israeli, British,
Danish, even Japanese) people coalesced in
rave spaces, on certain beaches and in tourist
hangouts, making them exclusionary. White-
ness, defined as ‘sticky connections among
property, privilege and a paler skin’ (Saldanha
2006: 18), is creative, effervescent, finding
ever more ways to remake itself. Its stickiness
closed off the ostensible possibility of love and
unity. Indians, regardless of class or gender,
were not part of the ‘in-crowd’; their bodies
out of place even on the edges of the dance
floor as the sun rose on a rave. While Saldanha
is critical of the freaky form of whiteness as
well as the moralistic response to the raves
from Indian authorities, he wants to see some
potential in the racial encounters in Anjuna.
The immanent ethics Saldanha elaborates
emerges out of white freaks’ sense of ‘intensive
difference, the particular charge between
oneself and another’ (p. 173). Some white
people feel that their privilege requires others’
subjugation. When they stop taking their
subjectivity for granted, they ‘enter a field
of intensive differences in which identities
don’t hold’ (p. 175). Thus, ‘[i]n the face-to-
face, the self embraces a relatively powerless
other, not to exploit or appropriate him/her
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 4, June 2009
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/09/040499-19
DOI: 10.1080/14649360902853296

into ‘the Same’ but to give and to care-for’
(p. 118). For us, then, an important message of
the text is that difference is seen not as threat
but as a resource for questioning the vulner-
abilities and dependencies of one’s position in
the world.
It is tempting to read Psychedelic White as a
‘new’ material geography of race designed to
replace the outdated social constructionist
model that preceded it. Saldanha himself
cannot quite resist this claim. But, arguably,
the force of this work does not depend on there
ever having been a singular representational
approach to race to react against. It does
perhaps rest on the awkward truth that race
scholars, having spent so long arguing against
objectivist, materialist and realist accounts of
race difference, have been reluctant to deal
with the dissolution of the boundary
between culture and nature that has occurred
in other spheres of scholarship. Mostly though
this is an account of the material geo-
graphies of race that stands or falls by its
own appeal and plausibility, not by its
‘otherness’ to what precedes, follows or
contextualizes it.
Saldanha (2006) understands race as an
event: an assemblage of things, phenotypes and
practices which is made, remade, revised and
reformed in the constant flux (and occasional
showcase event) comprising daily life. It is this
emphasis on working with bodily practices—
their engagements and disengagements, their
fixity or movement, their material encounter—
that stands in contrast to a body of work
reflecting on the representations that people
deploy to define or resist others. To understand
how phenotype works, Saldanha’s approach
not only describes ‘intensive differences
between human bodies’ but traces how
‘economic, cultural, phenotypical and other
disparities open those bodies to certain kinds of
interactions and transformations’ (p. 25). In this
way, through ontology, he develops an argu-
ment for the materiality of race.
The book’s project is also political (as well
as theoretical), and perhaps most distinctive in
setting out not just what we should argue
against in the field of race, but also what it is
that scholars might usefully argue for.
The book makes a case for the importance
of revisiting and rethinking segregation and
the possibilities of reconceptualising and
re-experiencing race. Against the formulations
of identity politics and racism, race, here, is
open-ended becoming, made up of some
relatively fixed and some changing aspects
and, with practices, race plays a role in what
bodies do. Thus for antiracist futures, it is
necessary to consider race as the physical
aggregating of phenotypes. We find inspiration
in Saldanha’s point that ‘race should not be
abandoned or abolished, but proliferated’
(p. 199).
Yet Saldanha has written about phenotype
as if it must principally be associated with race
when the term refers to any outward
appearance. While he makes reference to
‘experiential ableism’ (p. 66) and the materi-
ality of race in the work of ‘anthropologically
inclined medical research’ (2003: 259), his
contribution is much more than a theory of
race; it is one of phenotype. Thus this work’s
most lasting impact may be to inform under-
standings of all kinds of bodily marking—
around disability, health and forms of genetic
discrimination—as well as those that currently
hang on race.
Psychedelic White is a compelling provoca-
tion to the theoretical frameworks tradition-
ally summoned to study race and racism. In her
review of the book, feminist philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz writes ‘Psychedelic White is
one of the most innovative, refreshingly
different analyses of race I have read in the
last decade’ (see www.amazon.com).
500 Book reviews

Rachel Slocum
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
St. Cloud State University
Susan J. Smith
Department of Geography
Durham University
q 2009 Rachel Slocum and Susan J. Smith
Becoming viscous
What would it mean to write a materialist
account of race? Or to claim that there is no
need to place scare quotes around the term,
since contrary to what cultural studies
scholars have asserted race is real rather than
merely constructed? Or to bring the body—
and phenotype in particular—back into our
analysis of race, as integral to what race is,
rather than that which merely bears its marks?
Such is the aim of Psychedelic White, perhaps
the most adventurous, although not entirely
unexpected, turn in geographical studies of
race in the past decade. Adventurous because
after a generation of radical scholarship that
took race to be a ‘social construction’ and
imagined a future ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ race,
Arun Saldanha has the audacity to argue that
anti-racism should not be about surpassing
race, but about its proliferation. But not
entirely unexpected either, because although
constructivism has in many respects been the
lingua franca of cultural studies since the
1990s, new materialist accounts of difference
have challenged its tenets with increasing
effectiveness, placing renewed emphasis on
how difference is generated in and through the
material processes, interactions and encoun-
ters of everyday life.
If race is not a social construction, then what
is it? Saldanha gives us a simple response: race is
the name we use for the viscosity of bodies, the
manner in which bodies come together and sort
themselves out in the situated encounters of
everyday life. Race is thus an event, rather than
a schema; it happens not through the arbitrary
imposition of racial difference on bodies—a
kind of coding to which the body must submit
and through which social hierarchy, colonial
violence and economic exploitation find their
basis and persistence—but rather ‘emerges as
many bodies in the real world align and
comport themselves in certain ways, in certain
places’ (p. ix). Hence, in the analysis of
difference, one doesn’t begin with race—either
as an ontological given, or as a disembodied
discursive category in need of deconstruction—
one instead locates oneself on that plane of
organization where the becoming viscous of
bodies occurs; one attends to the emergence
of race. Crucially, however, if race is a
contingent outcome for Saldanha, it is also
not a final outcome in the sense of something
which endures as a stable and fixed referent
after the dust clears; it is, rather, precisely that
which is thrown open again, from moment to
moment, a creation out of heterogeneity with
no final end in sight. For Saldanha, then, race is
not only that which emerges, it is, as
important—and perhaps most controversially
in the face of arguments against race by writers
like Paul Gilroy—that which can never be
transcended. For, as long as bodies mix and
mingle, as long as combination and differen-
tiation are ongoing propositions of material
life, the viscosity of bodies is an insurmountable
element of the becoming common of the world.
It should be clear by this point that
Saldanha’s reconceptualization of race owes
a great deal to the philosophical writings of
Gilles Deleuze, even if Deleuze at no point put
race at the centre of his concerns. But as any
reader of Psychedelic White will discover,
borrowing Deleuze’s approach to difference
does not take Saldanha into greater and
Book reviews 501

greater levels of abstraction, but instead lands
him squarely on the question of method. For if
race is something that emerges in the
encounter, if race is to be understood on
the level of bodies and in the material practices
of the everyday—a sort of microphysics of
bodies—then one’s research and writing must
be up to the task. For Saldanha, this means
that race must be studied ethnographically,
rather than discursively, and it is the trance-
dance scene in Goa, India, that provides him
with the rich material, conceptual conun-
drums and methodological and ethical quand-
aries that make Psychedelic White such an
engrossing read. Admittedly, there is some-
thing propitious in this choice of site, and one
can imagine how a different site might have
rendered Saldanha’s project less self-assured.
The rave scene in Goa, after all, presents
itself as explicitly anti-racist in the sense that
it imagines itself as a site where racial
difference—and whiteness most specifically—
is precisely that which has been left behind.
Trance-dance in particular presents itself as
at once a mode of escape (a way of being
ec-static) and the means toward a common
world beyond racial measure (a sort of ‘one-
worldism’ where difference is surpassed). This
provides Saldanha with a poignant point of
departure: if we studied the rave scene only at
the level of representation, he argues, it would
accord almost point-for-point with the sort of
‘after-race’ world that constructivist accounts
of race argue for and point us towards. Yet,
Saldanha notes, what one actually discovers in
Goa is a sorting of bodies that is perhaps even
more marked than elsewhere. The riddle that
Saldanha sets out to solve, then, can be stated
in simple terms: ‘Why would a white micro-
cosm be re-created if the whole point of going
to India and Goa is adventure, escape,
becoming different?’ (p. 6). If race is imagined
to be left behind on Goa’s beaches and clubs,
then how is it that race continues to be so
insistently present? Can this be explained
solely in terms of the persistence of a racial
schema, through which bodies are given value
according to color of skin and hair? Or is the
question of viscosity more complicated? For
Saldanha, the answer to this question is only
available through writing a microphysics of
bodies that attends to movements and
encounters, a detailed description of how
bodies, white bodies in particular, come to
‘stick together’.
This is a crucially important turn in the
study of race, both conceptually and metho-
dologically. But like most first books the
outcome is decidedly uneven. Divided into
seventeen fragments and a number of inter-
ludes, the book is experimental in form, as
well as in content. For this reader, it reaches its
peak intensity in a series of chapters in the
middle of the book that take the reader onto
the beach, into the verandas, terraces and
dance floors of local bars, or speeding along
country roads on Royal Enfields, the bike of
choice for Goa freaks. Here we find Saldanha
at his best, noting the way that bodies are
sorted in terms of habit and comportment,
from the skilful comportment of participants
in chillum circles, which require both practical
knowledge and an acquired bodily intelli-
gence, to the technics of ‘socio-chemical
monitoring’, through which individuals subtly
monitor their psychic state (and that of
others). Or noting the subtle way that viscosity
emerges in the visibility, posture and bearing
of the Royal Enfield rider and the scrape
wounds which signify this particular form of
mobility, or through the temporal rhythms of
the rave events themselves, in which morning
is at once considered the spiritual climax of the
event and also coincides with the period when
the fewest Indians are present, driven away
not so much by the sun as by a combination
502 Book reviews

of the need to work and the esoteric rituals of
Goa freak subculture. Indeed, Saldanha’s great
strength is found in his ability to trace the
coexistence of mysticism and microfascism in
Goa, and to do so with the sort of raw
immediacy and troubling complicity of a
writer who is at once inside and outside the
scene, too detached to be fully trusted by his
informants yet too close to possibly gesture
toward objectivity. Ultimately, the author is
himself simply too entangled in the scene to
imagine anything except a sort of experimen-
tal writing from the middle of things that never
shies away from his own uncomfortable and
often compromised position, which in the
book’s intensely discomfiting last pages
removes any lingering sense of innocence for
writer or reader alike. For if there can be no
‘after’ race, Saldanha seems to be suggesting,
we must situate ourselves ethically and
politically in relation to its ongoing actualiza-
tion, a task that leaves us in the middle of a
perplexity that has no final resolution.
There are, of course, points along the way
where the narrative is strained, and where key
questions are overlooked or passed over too
quickly. Take Saldanha’s odd and in many
ways contradictory recourse to racial cat-
egories even as he seeks to conceptualize race
as an emergent effect. In his description of the
Goa trance scene individual bodies are often
described as ‘white’ or ‘Israeli’ or ‘Indian’
from the moment they enter the picture, rather
than such differentiation emerging in and
through the embodied encounters that occur.
But can one have it both ways? Can race be a
category deployed in one’s analysis if race is
precisely that which is said to be an outcome
of the processes that are being studied? Is a
body ‘white’ from the outset, or is whiteness
something that ‘comes about’ in contingent
ways? Nor is it always clear why the viscosity
of bodies should be discussed in terms of race,
rather than in terms of, say, subculture—along
the lines of Paul Willis or Pierre Bourdieu—or
perhaps in terms of class or gender. Why race
is privileged is not entirely clear, an issue that
seems rather curious given the author’s own
arguments about the need to understand how
social difference happens rather than presume
social difference in advance. Might a study of
viscosity in Goa lead just as easily to a story
about gender or sexuality, or, moreover, to
these in relation to race? Indeed, isn’t the great
strength about the concept of viscosity
precisely that it allows us to tell stories about
the ‘becoming being’ of individuals and groups
that doesn’t need to be forced into pre-given
categories? These issues are not entirely absent
in the text, but rather than being drawn into
the open they are pushed aside too quickly in
the face of Saldanha’s overarching ambition to
develop a new conceptual framework for race
that departs dramatically from writers like
Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy. Likewise,
careful readers of Deleuze and Emmanuel
Levinas may find Saldanha’s wedding of these
two thinkers—Deleuze for his ontology,
Levinas for his ethics—too quick and easy,
even jarring, given their contrasting approaches
to questions of difference and alterity.
The combination that Saldanha offers towards
the end of the book may be intriguing, even
productive, but Saldanha simply does not
engage systematically enough with their argu-
ments to allow readers to judgewhether such an
effort can succeed.
Finally, it merits comment that the volume is
marked by a strong emphasis on the spatiality
of viscosity, but considerably less on its
temporality. While it is true that Saldanha
attends to the rhythms of trance dance events
and to the role that habit plays in constituting
bodies and their potential for combination, the
question of how the past circulates in the
present is not fully developed. A primary
Book reviews 503

emphasis on space is perhaps not unexpected
from a geographer, but it is somewhat
unexpected from such a close reader of
Deleuze, who privileges the virtual over the
actual, and for whom, following Henri
Bergson, the past in its entirety is always in
play. To be sure, Saldanha broaches the topic.
The travelers that populate Goa’s beaches
have been elsewhere before; they have learned
certain practices, gestures and responses as
they have moved through well-trod paths to
Goa. But is this the only way that the past
‘bodies forth’ in the present? Why is it, as
Saldanha notes, that Israelis in Goa seem to be
particularly viscous? Is it simply because there
are many of them? Is it reducible to their
spatial practices in Goa, or because of the
routes that they have traveled en route to the
village of Anjuna? Or does this viscosity
perhaps have something to do with living in an
apartheid state, or serving in a violent army of
occupation in which race is learned as a kind
of bodily intelligence? Bergson, on whose
writings Deleuze leans heavily, insists that
memory constantly rushes forward to meet
perception, the body as a centre of action
continuously prolonging the usefulness of the
past in the present. What might it mean, then,
to take Bergson’s famous cone and place it on
the dance floor? How might one attend not
only to the spatial encounters and movements
of bodies, but to the way in which the past
irrupts in the present, as part of the intelligence
of the body, part of how race is actualized on
the plane of organization that Saldanha
explores? This, of course, would lead to
numerous methodological challenges: How
does one get at memory-images, and not just
spatial practices? Or, more to the point, how
does one study how spatial practices actualize
memory-images?
I can provide no easy answers to these
questions. Indeed, the fact that Saldanha
leaves the reader with such puzzles says
a great deal about his creativity and the bold
challenge he presents to dominant paradigms
in critical race studies. Whether one agrees or
disagrees with the author’s materialist turn,
Psychedelic White offers a welcome addition
to geographical studies of race that deserves to
be widely read.
Bruce Braun
Department of Geography
University of Minnesota
q 2009 Bruce Braun
The paradoxes of freaking
whiteness
This book is a great read. Once caught up in
the compelling language and the fascinating
spin of ideas, I found it difficult to put it down.
I read to the end, from one captivating point to
another, marveling at the clarity with which
Saldanha depicts the landscape of Goa trance.
The story is about bodies: how bodies
construct a landscape, what comes between
bodies, and ways in which bodies interact
with their complex environments and with
other bodies. The analysis is an intellectual
delight, rich in detail, subtle in interpretation,
astounding in the depth of its social theory.
The book also calls to mind aspects of my
own past, as an ‘old’ hippie. At university
social gatherings in the late 1960s, one might
hear ‘S/he’s a freak. S/he’s cool.’ These words
carry a load of code: don’t worry about using
drugs in this person’s presence; this person is
into an alternative lifestyle; this person can be
trusted not to sell out. More importantly,
however, the words carry the promise of
freakishness that fuelled the student movement:
freaks were committed to ending war, poverty,
504 Book reviews

racism, sexism; to defying the established order
and the hegemony of established identities;
to overcoming oppression. I still cling to those
objectives and I believe that the world really is a
better place for the social movements that
sprang up during that era but, in retrospect, the
freaks of the 1960s seem entirely conventional
in their use of dress, language, music, and other
codes of the body. Their challenge to conven-
tionalism set them apart from the norm, indeed,
but also became a way of establishing a
new social identity built around new forms of
conventionalism.
Saldanha’s major point, I think, is that the
freaks of Goa engage in the delusion that they
are escaping convention, but in doing so they
paradoxically reconstruct a set of white norms
that resist dissolution, that cohere, stick,
remain embodied in this small enclave of
freakiness. The historical fact of race, and the
power of whiteness, are far more complex than
any vision of united colors, global diversity, or
cosmopolitanism can hope to budge. And he is
right, I think, that if we hope to make a
difference in a racialized world, then we must
think upways to change the dominant patterns
in which bodies interact, cohere, include and
exclude. We need to freak out race.
Saldanha takes a remarkable stab at laying
out the theoretical basis on which such a
freaking out might occur, and much of his
argumentation is compelling. I would like to
take issue here, however, with a couple of
points. The first is his critique of the concept of
social construction, which I think he has
underestimated. He spends much of the book
critiquing the social constructionism of anti-
racist theorists such as Paul Gilroy, and the field
of cultural studies in general, for failing to
provide a material understanding of race,
limiting it to a conceptual and representative
realm. This limitation is a common claim of the
recent ‘material turn.’ To treat race as a concept,
Saldanha’s newmaterialism argues, is to limit it
to the world of representation, as though
representations are themselves immaterial,
floating free of the bodies that created them,
meaning without substance.
I agree with him that the interpretive turn in
human geography has led to much—too
much—analysis of discourses separated from
the bodies that discourse. But that is because
so many studies that invoke social construc-
tionism do not follow its logic. It is not a
question of what is only, or purely, a social
construction and what is not, but of extending
the reach of social construction to maintain
the link between human actions and the
historical results of those actions. Ironically,
to study social constructions as disembodied
representations misses the point at the very
heart of social construction theory: it is the act
of construction, not only the symbolic result
that is important. To take social construction
seriously is to take seriously the ongoing
embodiment or performance of meaning that
simply cannot be separated from the bodies
that produce it. Just as the concept cannot be
disembodied, therefore, neither can the body
be deconceptualized.
Indeed, to do so implies that there is some
material realm that exists beyond social
construction, or, as many recent theorists
would have it ‘beyond representation’ (see
Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). This claim leads
to my second point, that by invoking Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of faciality as a complex
machine, Saldanha falls into a conceptual
trap that also separates the body from the
construction of meaning, albeit in the creation
of a realm that is supposed to be material
rather than ideal. Both are essentialisms.
The concept of faciality is very attractive, and
itworks extremelywell formuchof the analysis,
showing how bodies in Goa work to create
difference. Faciality is an ‘abstractmachine’ that
Book reviews 505

‘arranges bodies into relations of power’
through ‘imperialist racialization’ (p. 194). It
is an intersubjective dialectic that goes beyond
theHegelian dialectic of recognition, transcend-
ing a simple binary of black and white. It is
intricate, multidimensional, capable of thou-
sands of expressions that give power to white-
ness. Its capacity for transformation is also its
capacity for power. By bringing bodies together,
it is also geographically located or assembled in
place. The machinic process, claims Saldanha
following Guattari, is neither essentialist nor
anti-essentialist, but rather non-essentialist: it
originates in a complex set of human actions but
emerges to gain a life of its own, or immanence
(p. 189). He wants to counter the power of
whiteness by addressing the immanent material
quality of the white face, dissolving its power
not only through the creation of new forms of
faciality but in the proliferation of such forms to
the point where the machine no longer has the
capacity to reproduce itself.
But it is the ontological gap between imma-
nence and transcendence that is problematic
here, and Saldanha never quite comes to terms
with the gap. There is a break in the dialectic
(and dialectics cannot, by definition, be broken)
betweenwhat is socially constructedandwhat is
beyond.He speaks of the need for betterways of
organizing politically, but provides little basis
for political action. If the power of race is, as he
claims, beyond the capacity of social construc-
tion to create it, then it is also beyond the
capacity of social construction to change it.
His answer, instead, is to make that power,
expressed in the lines of flight through which
faciality is transformed, less predictable, to
place it outside the control, in other words, of
ongoing social constructions (p. 207). And
while we need to be mindful of the paradox,
even the inherent contradiction, of believing
that to freak conventional practices is to go
beyond the conventional, is it notmore effective
to embrace the paradox than to believe that it
can be dissolved? Is it not more important that
we understand the direction of lines of flight and
the capacity of human actions to change those
lines than simply to disrupt them?
I have no quarrel with Saldanha’s political
objectives, therefore, but I am concerned about
the theoretical paths bywhich he achieves them.
To pick up the paradox of the title, while the
psychedelic lifestyle of Goa freaks did not
overcome, but rather reinforced, the power of
theirwhiteness, the concept of whiteness itself is
psychedelic, a delusion of superiority worked
out in embodiment-face-location that ends
up ‘reproducing what it escapes’ (p. 211). The
troubling ambiguity with which this book ends
and his resistance to committing to a political
course, emphasizes strongly the limitations
upon, as the first line of the first chapter has it,
‘what a white body can do’ (p. 11). Thus the
book ends by reproducing rather than escaping
the contradictions and social challenges of race.
Onthe last page,white freaks still dancearound,
not with, Indian beggars. While I may be
unhappy with the lack of politics in the con-
clusion, there is one thing aboutwhich Saldanha
and I are in complete agreement: that before
whiteness canbe changed its complexitymustbe
understood. This volume does a great job of
making sense of whiteness.
Audrey Kobayashi
Department of Geography
Queen’s University
q 2009 Audrey Kobayashi
Reading Arun Saldanha’s
Psychedelic White
Psychedelic White is a rich, complex and often
troublingethnographyofanexotic ‘freak’ beach
colony at Anjuna in Goa, on India’s west coast.
506 Book reviews

Part of the achievement of the interpretation is
to repatriate that exoticism with the mother
colony fromwhich it has advanced (or perhaps
regressed): a broadly privileged middle-class,
European population that the author specifies
primarily by its whiteness. The book reveals
the touch of a creative imagination confront-
ing demanding field conditions with largely
non-cooperative respondents. It is innovative
and an informative primer for a graduate
seminar, engaging me fully and prompting
multiple marginal notes on many pages. Of
course discussion here requires some critical
challenges, and there are four areas that I shall
open up for discussion. It is worth noting that
they have much more to do with the
conceptual framing around the study than
with the ethnography itself.
First, the criticism of constructionism is an
important stage in the author’s argument, for
it creates the space for the development of an
alternative conceptual structure in exploring
race. The prosecution is problematic, for it is
advanced on the grounds that constructionism
and its representations are discursive, but do
not engage ‘realities’ (p. 7), ‘impacts on actual
people in real space and time’ (p. 8). Here the
book accomplishes the common arithmetic of
the theoretical critic: the division of a pre-
existing theory, the subtraction of one part
from it, its addition to an alternate theoriza-
tion, and the multiplication of the new
theory’s potential, leaving behind the eviscer-
ated theory swinging in the wind. So a
response needs to address the first steps of
division and subtraction. A portrayal of
constructionism minus the realities of actual
impacts on real people is not what I recognize
in many geographical works that have
emphasized the power of socially constructed
representations to affect actual people in
real time and space (see, for instance,
Anderson 1991).
Secondly, if not its discursiveness, perhaps
the problem with constructionism is that it is
also cognitive, and Psychedelic White seems to
set up a materialism that becomes defined as
pre-cognitive. Simply put, stuff happens, not
randomly of course but pre-cognitively. As the
opening quotation in the book has it, citing
Deleuze: not recognition but encounter (p. 1,
also p. 194). Thinking comes later, after
unmediated sense data have impacted bodies,
including it seems the ethnographer’s body.
There is encounter and only then is there
conceptualisation. So when the author asks
‘Why Anjuna?’ (p. 5). The answer is ‘To form
new concepts’, and ultimately to better under-
stand whiteness. First comes the encounter,
then the conceptualisation.
But does this happen? Can it? Does an agent
or a mind enter the social world as tabula rasa,
an empty page waiting to be imprinted? Are
actors free of intent, free of social values, free
of knowledge, however imperfect prior to
encounter? Are ethnographers? The thrust of
cultural anthropology in the last twenty years
has been to deny such a proposition
emphatically.
And so too does Psychedelic White. For
despite its protestations, it cannot evade the
pre-existing construction of social meanings at
its field site. In the micro-space studies on the
beach, in the bar, at parties, the interpretive
help of Erving Goffman is sought. Goffman’s
work is all about the definition of the
situation, the construction and reading of
cues that direct interpersonal behaviour in
small public spaces. In this it draws upon the
American tradition of symbolic interactionism
that goes back to the pragmatists. For this
body of thought, the cognitive, constructed
intersubjectively prefigures and shapes, even as
it is re-shaped by, action and encounter.
We can draw the same lesson from
other allies that Psychedelic White employs.
Book reviews 507

The subcultural research of the Birmingham
School of Cultural Studies is cited, including
work by Stuart Hall, Paul Willis and Dick
Hebdige. But like the interactionists, these
authors are interested in prefigured shared
meanings as well as social relations. Like Arun
Saldanha, the Birmingham School had higher
ambitions than Goffman in moving from the
small spaces of social psychology to the more
expansive spaces of national ideologies and
practices. But like Goffman, identities were
again constructed out of shared norms,
repetitive actions flowed from shared expec-
tations, common insignia from an agreed upon
code of dress and accessories. So too the freaks
and their fellow travellers in Anjuna comprise
a subculture with their own intersubjective
thinking-as-usual.
To use a final theorist in this tradition, also
favoured by Saldanha: Pierre Bourdieu’s use of
habitus is I think closer to the author’s
formulation, in that agents sometimes seem
to be primarily carriers of a set of capitals they
have unselfconsciously inherited. The freaks in
Goa construct a shared habitus, including a
constrained set of practices, the utilization of
preferred props and accessories, and halluci-
nogenic and musical preferences. But Bour-
dieu’s actors are not unreflective, indeed the
considerable variance in individual prefer-
ences and dispositions around the class-
based ideal types shows that personal choices
are being selected from a broad menu.
Moreover, besides shaping rules for encounter
and channelled outcomes, the habitus is
also described by Bourdieu as ‘a system of
schemes of perception and thought’ (Bourdieu
1977: 18).
To summarize this second point: the allies
whom Arun employs are in their different
ways cultural theorists for whom the cognitive
precedes encounter, even as understanding
may be transformed through it.
Third, discomfort with the cognitive leads in
Psychedelic White first to a glance at ethology
(Chapter 1), the human animal and its bodily
practices. But ethology proves to be a way
station en route to a still more daring
theoretical destination: the materialism of the
physical sciences, and ultimately with the
machine as a form of complex system. I have
two reactions to this unexpected end-point.
First, that the machine in the humanities and
social sciences has a profound place in modern
intellectual thought, with the obsessive pre-
occupation of the modernists of the 1920s and
1930s with the machine-age aesthetic, from Le
Corbusier’s enunciation that ‘the house is a
machine for living in’ to comparable declara-
tions by other members of the avant-garde
including Marcel Duchamp’s view that ‘the
idea is the machine for making art’.
The machine-age aesthetic has been fully
discredited, but this did not prevent the rise of
cybernetics and systems theory in the 1960s
asserting multiple linkages between physical
and human systems, not least between the
determinate machine and the brain (Ashby
1963). This was a literature it seems that
inspired Fe
´
lix Guattari (p. 185). But here is my
second reaction to Arun’s machine proble-
matic. It reminded me of my own dissertation,
an ethnography to be sure, but an ethnography
that was influenced by cybernetics and
theories of complex systems even as it
interpreted everyday life in an inner-city
neighbourhood (Ley 1974). In the context of
a discussion in Progress in Human Geography
a decade ago, I read parts of the book again
after a gap of years. To my eye what had worn
well was the ethnography itself. What seemed
forced and awkward was the cybernetic
problematic, innovative and untested when it
was written. I think there is a broader lesson
here. In ten to twenty years readers will
continue to be intrigued by the power and
508 Book reviews

panache of Psychedelic White as ethnography,
but will find the framing machine discourse no
less forced and awkward.
My fourth point concerns the familiar
challenge of reflexivity in doing ethnography.
There are a number of points that could
profitably be engaged: about going native;
about going undercover; about the deploy-
ment of values (though the judgments on the
habitus are judgments I share, not least after
the rape and apparent murder of a 15-year-old
British girl caught up naively in the Anjuna
drug scene in March 2008); about the author’s
apparent participation in this scene which he
relays with honesty—a conundrum not unlike
William Whyte’s admission to vote-rigging in
a Boston election in his classic ethnography,
Street Corner Society (Whyte 1955). And
about the challenges of field work with a
population who are both secretive and rarely
coherent, leading to an unusual paucity of
voices in the text.
But my query about reflexivity loops back to
the previous commentary. In light of the
emphasis on immanence, on encounter
not reflection, on the ‘faciality machine’ not
consciousness, how does one prepare for doing
such an ethnography? What do we make of
Arun’s statement about searching in advance
for a theoretical and political perspective?
(p. 47), of moving sequentially from phenom-
enology to the politics of place, to post-
colonialism, to Foucault and discourse, to
deconstruction, to actor-network theory, and
finally to carrying the works of Goffman and
Deleuze/Guattari to the field site in prep-
aration for the major research trip (p. 111)? It
seems that rather than immanent encounter,
the ethnographer is struggling to establish a
way of knowing, a cognitive code, prior to the
encounter itself, a perspective which is in flux
and open to change. This is the view of
Goffman, Bourdieu and, despite its rejection in
the book, the view of constructionism. Is it not
possible that such a view also describes rather
well the bizarre subculture on the beaches of
Goa whose tragic lineaments are otherwise so
intriguingly presented by Psychedelic White’s
creative ethnography?
David Ley
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
q 2009 David Ley
Ambivalent encounters and
theorising at the beach
A young ethnographer goes to the beach in
Anjuna, Goa with Goffman’s Behavior in
Public Places, and Deleuze and Guattari’s
A Thousand Plateaus (1987) in his backpack.
He tells us that over the course of the
fieldwork each book of theory became
saturated with seawater. It is the palpable
grit of the beach and the saturation of theory
in the brine of seawater that makes Psyche-
delic White such a captivating read and
important contribution.
Psychedelic White is an ethnography; some-
thing geographers talk about but rarely do.
To some extent, the methodology appears to
have been forced on the researcher. Goa freaks
take a ‘vehement stance’ against the exposure of
their subculture: interviews were often refused
or skirted. The illegality of trance parties made
explicit investigation into the political economy
of parties difficult and even dangerous. The
book has few photographs or direct quotations.
It relies instead on field notes and participant
observation, and offers vivid description of the
Goa trance scene from 1998 to 2005.
The author’s body was an important
medium for theorizing. It resists easy classifi-
cation by race or nation: Israelis addressed
Book reviews 509

him in Hebrew; he was invited to private
parties of white freaks; his experience of being
confronted by police whilst smoking a joint
with two Belgium friends was that of a
European foreigner. And yet he speculates
that younger ravers were less friendly when he
met them during daylight because they
confused him with local Indians. His ‘fuzzy
phenotype’ allowed access to different worlds,
and his ambiguous grasp on freak status was a
means of understanding the whiteness of Goa
trance culture.
Travelling to India and the use of psyche-
delic drugs for self-transformation are, in
Saldanha’s assessment, part of a long history
of white culture, an urge to overcome one’s
self, to become different, a ‘line of flight’
inherent to white modernity. In Anjuna by the
late 1990s, this creative line of flight had
‘grown heavy’ and ‘closed in on itself’, and the
racism and white exclusivity of the freak
subculture are aspects of this. Saldanha
understands racialization to be an ‘event’
that emerges from the ways bodies connect to
physical and social environments; his is a
spatialized, material reading of race. White
bodies in Anjuna are viscous: they stick
together and filter out other, contaminating,
bodies. They do this through the way they
occupy flea markets and bars, by the timing
of and access to parties and chillum circles.
They do this through a visual economy of
dress, tanned bodies (achievable only by
whites), Enfield motorcycles, and strict
norms of drug culture. And they do this
through a practiced contempt for most Indians
as—at best—uncool, worse, dirty and
stealthful.
Goa’s psychedelic trance culture is white,
but it congeals around other social classifi-
cations as well, and it would be interesting
to hear more about this. Nationality, for
instance, is extremely viscous for some
(but perhaps not for others). Italians are the
most ardent chillum smokers in Anjuna; there
are villages, bars, shacks, guesthouses, beaches
and dance-floor corners almost exclusively
occupied by Israelis. Many young Israelis
arrive directly after completing their military
service and the army is ‘habitually invoked’ to
explain the large number of Israeli youth
in Goa. In the case of Israelis, backpacking in
Goa seems a line of flight from but imbricated
within the Israeli military machine. Does such
an understanding alter a generalized reading
of whiteness? And does a particularized
reading of whiteness begin the work of
‘freaking’ whiteness that is the core of
Saldanha’s antiracist politics?
The same might be asked about the work-
ings of gender. Is whiteness inhabited equiva-
lently by men and women of hetero- and
dissident sexualities? More generally, how
does gender articulate with race? The book
conveys gender performances among white
freaks in Anjuna as utterly conventional.
Writing favourably about Goa in the late
1980s, as a community that brought ‘members
to the same level, as they free [them] from the
stigma of origin, nationality, education and
social stratum’, a Swiss journalist cited by
Saldanha nonetheless isolated gender as the
one resistant social classification: ‘Only gender
still plays a small role’ (p. 210). Little seemed
to have changed in the period described in
Psychedelic White. My question is this: to
what extent does the repetition of hetero-
normativity fix or loosen racial classification?
Can we think whiteness apart from other
social formations? And—once again—does
theorizing this specificity begin the work of
freaking whiteness? In her early work, Alison
Blunt (1994) described how the travels of
bourgeois English women to Africa in the
nineteenth century worked as a wonderful
tonic for and release from at least some of the
510 Book reviews

norms of British bourgeois femininity. But this
instance of movement around gender norms
was predicated on the stability of their race,
class and national identifications. How does
the stickiness of gender norms in Anjuna work
in relation to racial classification? Saldanha
offers some fascinating examples to think
with. For instance: white western women
sunbathing nude on beaches in Anjuna have
spawned domestic tourism; busloads of Indian
men come to gaze upon these white bodies and
fantasize about these white women’s promis-
cuity. This is a tense contact zone and
seemingly little more than gross stereotypes
structure these encounters. It involves, as
Saldanha notes, an acting out of Indian
patriarchal culture. But might we also read it
as another instance of white liberal feminism,
with white women performing their liberation
anywhere, oblivious to local norms and
custom? And does it not involve a fascinating
inversion of western assumptions of where
sensuality, unmoored from convention,
resides? Local men come up with all kinds of
ruses to get close to these white bodies. Some
falsely present themselves as masseurs, and
their success depends on white women’s
stereotypes of their cultural skills and capa-
bilities. As this gendered, racialized politics
gets played out, are stereotypes merely
entrenched or are some assumptions—for
instance, who is a tourist and who is local,
the racialization of desire—shifted in interest-
ing ways? It’s hard to know.
A halting ambivalent assessment may be the
best we can do. The goal of the antiracist
politics envisioned by Saldanha is to prolifer-
ate race beyond stabilized racial formations; it
involves ‘freaking’ whiteness by working ‘its
lines of flight toward a situation wherein skin
colour, genitals, AIDS, hunger, obesity, beauty,
wealth and speed connect in less predictable
ways’ (p. 207). My impression is that Anjuna
is an unlikely site for such a politics. The norm
for freaks—like tourists in most places—is to
minimize contact with Indians. Saldanha
nonetheless holds out hope for ambivalent
cosmopolitan ethical encounters in Anjuna.
‘Phenotype itself,’ he writes, ‘propels bodies to
ethics, to making decisions about how to
behave as rich whites’ (p. 169). But what
guides these decisions and where can or should
ambivalent encounters between white Eur-
opeans and Indian poor go? And when and
how do the ethics of individual encounters
turn to politics?
The final paragraphs of the book are
disarming. Saldanha locates himself tripping
in the morning phase of a dance party. A tired
woman in a sari carrying a baby taps his hand
for change. ‘With a faint smile’, he writes,
‘I gently pushed the begging woman away, as
always . . . The only way to participate in the
party as a tourist, to enjoy the dancing, was to
bracket the deep social inequality that made
your enjoyment possible. Goa’s trance-dance
experience can’t emerge without this amnesia’
(p. 212). Saldanha clears none of the mess
away: we are left both with complicities and
the belief that trance-dance tourism offers
more economic possibilities for locals and
more potential for a creative disordering of
race than other forms of elite tourism that
threaten to displace it. Given this latter
assessment, the author seems to come
up against his Deleuzian proclivities by
outlining a pragmatic politics of planning
and regulation of trance-dance tourism in
Anjuna. This is a carefully theorized book—
without loyalty to its theoretical purity. It is
one that poses difficult dilemmas for the
western reader through a prose that ‘puts you
there’, in the shifting sands of both Goa and
critical race theory. For all of these reasons, it
is a wonderful book to engage students in
debates about whiteness, western privilege
Book reviews 511

and the ethics and political economy of
tourism.
Geraldine Pratt
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
q 2009 Geraldine Pratt
The question of construction
There is no better way for one’s first book to be
broached for critical reception than by leading
figures in the field. I am deeply grateful for the
generosity of Bruce Braun, David Ley, Audrey
Kobayashi and Geraldine Pratt. I thank Rachel
Slocum and Susan Smith for organizing this
exchange and Vincent Del Casino and Mary
Gilmartin for publishing it. Both at the AAG
author-meets-critics session in Boston and in
the texts collected here, much has revolved
around the concept of social construction. My
book claims to supplant, or at least compli-
cate, the social-constructionist framework for
studying race. Its main concept ‘viscosity’ does
not render social constructionism obsolete,
however, but historicizes its assumptions and
implications. Deriving from constructionism
itself an emphasis on contingency, particular-
ity and relationality, viscosity describes how
flows of people become sticky in relation to
each other and particular locations. The claim
to newness lies primarily in attending to the
range and complexity of processes that such
contingency entails.
This book was therefore meant not to
enforce a full-blown paradigm shift but to
alert scholars to the ever-present possibility of
refining conceptions of how systematic dis-
crimination and segregation come about in the
world. It is still about construction, still about
the social, but I try to push these terms a lot
further. In a Marxist vein, it is the stubbornly
unjust world that demands the adequacy of
concepts. Novelty must be judged on the
productiveness it enables in making our
description of the world lay bare conditions
and tendencies otherwise occluded from view.
However penetrating it once was, the con-
sensus that ‘race is a social construction’
without questioning which processes do the
constructing is missing much of the reality of
racism.
One worry raised among the reviewers is
how turning to Gilles Deleuze and Fe
´
lix
Guattari helps in combating racism.
The reason for social constructionism to
enter the study of race was after all to debunk,
with renewed force, the still-hegemonic
assumption in the West that racial inequality
is ultimately inevitable. According to this
ideology, bodies seek their ‘natural’ place in
society according to inherited unequal
capacities and preferences which are clearly
delineable. Social constructionism has spent
most of its theoretical energy disclosing the
quasi-metaphysical foundations of racist, sex-
ist, nationalist and other reactionary appeals
to a self-explicatory grounding of social
inequality. Arguing that there exists a materi-
ality to race then risks returning to some form
of essentialism or reductionism.
I contend that combating racism, both in
reality and in intellectual discourse, needs to
engage this risk. If by ‘naturalization’ we mean
reification (assuming contra Darwin that
nature equals stasis), then social construction-
ism does not denaturalize race enough. The
leakage of identities does not only occur
because mental and discursive categories
cannot fully capture them, but because the
identities are themselves leaking. Bodies need
to literally stick together in space and time to
make identities, and they are by nature
incapable of doing this perfectly. Contingency
is therefore much more profound than the
512 Book reviews

study of race has implied so far. It remains
unclear in Paul Gilroy, who Kobayashi cites,
whether what needs to be battled is only a kind
of thinking (race-thinking). Being ‘materialist’
means, to me, understanding the construction
of identities as myriad assemblages of feelings,
physical conditions, objects, and a capitalist
economy circulating those objects; critical race
theory has so far placed little importance on
the visceral, architectural, and climatological
dimensions that racism encompasses. By
limiting his critique to race-thinking instead
of the full array of institutionalizations of race,
Gilroy ends up expunging huge swaths of
materiality.
Antiracism, as advocated in very different
ways by Gilroy, Christianity and Islam, civil
rights and human rights discourse, multi-
culturalism, neoliberalism, and postmodern-
ism, usually aims explicitly at the
transcendence of race. As Braun notes, this
aim is not a real possibility from a Deleuzo-
guattarian perspective. In fact, it can jeopar-
dize actual intervention in the conditions that
produce racial differentiation in the first place.
Kobayashi and Pratt repeat a crucial argument
of Psychedelic White: the psychedelic creativ-
ities of white modernity show simultaneously
an intrinsic will-to-transcend and the dangers
of microfascism. An immanent instead of
transcendent antiracism delves into the nitty-
gritty of the situation we find ourselves in,
instead of proposing a staircase to some
raceless realm. Though race cannot be
transcended, its ‘thickness’ is not the same
everywhere, and it can certainly be changed
beyond recognition. The possibility of humans
becoming arranged by something else than the
racist capitalism of the last five centuries, itself
grafted onto the species’ biogeography shaped
over some 30,000 years, is remote but real.
Even then race would strictly not be trans-
cended, but dissolved, or petered out.
The irony of having to use essentialist
categories such as ‘whites’, ‘Indians’ and
‘tourists’ to describe bodies which are con-
ceptually taken to shimmer around those
categories was noted by Braun. Though few
philosophers would propose that language can
function without some level of essentialism
(‘cow’, ‘green’), an emergentist account has to
demonstrate the possibilities of variation. This
can in the case of Goa trance be done by
respecting the exceptional bodies, however
few they are, which the book does in many
places. Another tactic is insisting such terms
describe not actual identities, but virtual
attractors to which heterogeneous bodies
tend. In actual reality there are messy flows
that make it difficult to discern who is ‘white’
or ‘freak’; in virtual reality, there are
temporarily stable ‘essences’ of whiteness
and freakness which direct bodies towards
some degree of order (on essentialism, see Ellis
2002). Realism is an art in balancing the actual
and the virtual, but in order to avoid
epistemological anarchism its description
needs to lean slightly towards an essentialist
understanding of power differentials.
To account for bodies escaping the ever-
refining colonial-capitalist system of tenden-
cies towards essentiality—the faciality
machine—I draw on Levinas, the ‘most
ethical’ of contemporary philosophers who
explicitly puts ethics first, before ontology.
Braun is correct that Levinas’ ethics jars with
my ontological edifice. Deleuze and Guattari
belong to an anti-idealist legacy, whereas
Levinas arrives at ethics in a more scholastic
way through readings of Husserl, Heidegger
and the Talmud. The jarring is necessary,
however, to attain suppleness in the materialist
edifice. As my ethnography shows, ‘molar’
realities (gender, poverty, tourism) demand
engagement from participants, including
the researcher. Deleuze and Guattari shun
Book reviews 513