ABSTRACT
In a remote mountain valley in the Indian Himalaya, about twenty Western tourists are gathered around a fire, chanting hymns. Some play dijeradoos, an Australian aboriginal instrument made from a hollowed-out piece of bamboo. As one dijeradoo player puts it (in heavily German-accented English), “good vibration, man, the dijeradoo makes an excellent vibration.” One of the tourists clangs a cymbal in concert with the dijeradoo player, and a third strums the same chord over and over again on a guitar. Meanwhile, a Spanish woman dressed in medieval minstrel clothing juggles fire on a rocky outcropping. A few European children are running around playing with a dog. The tourists and some local men are passing around a chillum (clay pipe), and the air is thick with the smell of charas (hashish). Some local people sell chai (tea) to the tourists while others look on in amusement. The smoke from the fire rises up into the morning sky and hangs over the valley. The event is a Rainbow Gathering, or “gathering of the tribes,” as one of the organizers described it.
