Reverberating Rhythms: Social Identity and Political Participation in Clubland
Exhibition at Paintworks 
 
Tribal Gatherings: Neo-Tribe Theory and Electronic Dance Culture.

An art exhibition was held at the Paintworks exhibition space in Bristol from the 16th to18th March 2007. The event combined text and photographs taken from the project with music, paintings, prints and mixed media exhibits. It was co-produced and curated with artist Richard Brown. 242 people attended. Feedback questionnaires rated the exhibition highly favourably and showed that many of the attendees were not academics. The exhibition was deemed a success in providing an innovative and effective way to disseminate findings to a wider public.

Accompanying handout for the exhibition:

"It's nice to have a sense of belonging isn't it? There's pleasure in being part of a group". Lu-Lu, Free Party DJ.

This exhibition represents a collaboration between artists and social scientists to share a thought provoking message: what if in today's society we weren't getting more alienated and individualised, but instead we were becoming more group oriented, more collective, more tribal?

This is the argument put forward by Michel Maffesoli, a Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne, Paris. In the English translation of his book Time of Tribes (1996) he argues that in our daily lives we are members of many tribes - these groupings of people may be fleeting or contradictory, but they have their own sense of what's right and what's expected and they all share a pleasure in simply being with each other. It may appear disordered, but it's energetic and meaningful. This, he calls 'neo-tribalism'.

For the past two years Sarah Riley has been part of a team who have been learning some of what it means to be involved in electronic dance culture. By recording what people at Free Parties and Drum and Bass nights have to say, Sarah and the other researchers, Yvette Morey and Chris Griffin, have been exploring the relationships between neo-tribe theory and dance culture. This exhibition is one outcome of that research.

Tribal Gatherings is funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of a 'Festival of Social Science'. This annual festival aims to share with the public some of the work funded by the ESRC, which has a remit to support a wide range of research on issues about life in our society. Tribal Gatherings is the outcome of a collaboration between Social Science and Art. Award winning artist Richard Brown has worked collaboratively with Sarah Riley to find a way to express some ideas of how we might analyse what it means for young (and not so young) people to participate in the biggest and most spectacular subculture since punk: electronic dance culture - the only youth subculture to be outlawed, as well as normalised and commercialised. What can these people's stories tell us about life in the context of contemporary British society, which has been described as post-industrial, post-modernist and post-politics?

In The Time of Tribes Maffesoli expands his ideas of what social organisation in the 21st Century might look like. Big ideas don't come easy - and Maffesoli thinks you should work for them. In his introduction, entitled 'a few words of warning', he explains he doesn't want to write book that's easy to understand, that sort of book, he argues on page 2, is for "academic bean counters". Whether this exhibition is made by bean counters or not is a decision you can make (see our suggestions box). What we can tell you now is that three very dedicated academics from Bath University with a lot of letters after their names took a year to work through Time of Tribes so you don't have to. Richard Brown then had to listen to us. You only had to show up, but we know you can work it out. As Maffesoli (p,110) tells us "The barbarians are at our gates, but should we worry? After all, we are in part barbarian ourselves".