Customer Reviews

Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa

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A friend gave this me this book to read because I am involved in neo-spirituality and alternative medicine and I must say that I found the book to be suprisingly easy to read. The author recalls events with vivid detail, well enough to transport the reader to the various sites of study; then uses this beautiful imagery to illustrate his theories on neo-spirituality and globalization. Although I do not fully understand some of these theories (I am not a social scientist), this is a beautiful read and certainly a necessity for anyone in this field of study.

The first thing I have to say about this brilliant book is: PUBLISHER! come out with an inexpensive paperback edition!! This book is of wide interest to travelers, students of cosmopolitan culture, and reads like a travelogue. The publisher has priced it as an academic textbook of interest only to libraries. That is insane.

This book is of strong interest to hippies, club kids, neo-hippies, followers of Burning Man, festival freaks, psychedelic people, world travelers, students of counterculture history, and electronic music lovers/producers/DJ's. It is rich with stories of modern India and Spain, Goa, Pune and Ibiza, and the role these places play in the modern global nomadic counterculture. It is a fascinating study of world countercultures, and how the hippies of the sixties became transformed into the ravers of the nineties and the freaks of the new millennium.

It is also an inspiring travelogue for present and aspiring expatriates, and other global nomads, who see the road as a home instead of a way of getting somewhere. I just also finished reading Tim Ferris' "4 Hour Workweek", and see strong connections between the two books. Both books are about people who use their imagination to transform their lives and challenge the conventional, sedentary existence that most people live.

For at least the next three decades the major changes happening in the world will be occurring on the transnational front. People who embrace lives of hypermobility will be best poised to experience and facilitate this. This applies to people who do not consider themselves counterculture types.

Though this book is about the "expressive counterculture", d'Andreas makes a strong case that global capitalism and the counterculture are caught in a constant dialectic struggle. The freaks, no matter how hard they try to avoid it, become the avant-garde of global capitalism and tourism. They have become the risk-taking scouts for big corporations. Anyone interested in mainstream global capitalism will benefit from this detailed work.

Publisher: make this book affordable!!

A challenging and difficult introduction yields to a wonderfully adept description of the island I have come to love. Well observed.