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Dancing on common ground
Exploring the sacred at Burning Man
Robert V.Kozinets and John F.Sherry, Jr
Where on Earth can you find tens of thousands of people gathering in a gigantic
festival intended to provide a huge variety of entertainment? Where can you find
people costumed, covered in glitter, or in feathers, riding unicycles, wearing funny
hats, body paint of every color, or nothing at all? Hundreds of art cars and
extraordinary vehicles, from starlit UFO taxi cabs to mobile taxidermied horses,
giant glowing lobsters, Viking ships, or enormous flame-belching dragons? Endless
miles of participatory “theme camps”—with names like Astral Headwash, Lingerie
Planet, Mad Cow Country Club, Technofartz Camp, Porn Star Lounge, and the
Temple of Atonement—where festival-goers artfully offer up to one another a
bizarre concatenation of spiritual and carnal sustenance and smart, regressive, pop-
culture-inundated, ironic fun? Dozens of radio stations? An immense range of art,
from massive sculptures made of books to digital kaleidoscopes? Where? You can
find them about 120 miles east of the city of Reno, in the middle of the desert near
the center of the state of Nevada, in the United States of America. For one week
every year, you can find this combination of unparalleled weirdness and
breathtaking inspiration at Burning Man, and at no place else on Earth.
While it began in 1985 in San Francisco with Larry Harvey Jerry James, and a small
group of effigy-burning bohemians, Burning Man now hosts over 29,000 people,
temporarily becoming Nevada’s fourth largest city. In colonizing fashion, for one
week the event’s participants inhabit the bleak Black Rock Desert, transforming it
into “Black Rock City” Burning Man also transforms social space, blending a “no
spectators” experiential ethos with a variety of other important rules, such as “no
vending” and “radical self-expression.” For one week, participants come to live,
celebrate, and co-create a utopian play space on the blank canvas of the desert floor,
which is called the “playa.” With its pioneering, endlessly experimental, libertarian,
individualist, flag-flying, diversity-seeking, hardworking ethos, Burning Man could
be considered a quintessentially American event.
Burning Man shares common ground with rave and post-rave phenomena, and
with other contemporary events like neo-pagan festivals, women’s music festivals
such as the Lilith Fair, Oregon’s Country Fair, and Rainbow Family gatherings. A
variety of commonalities between these events can be ascertained. Burning Man
shares ideologies drawn from the human potential movement and New Age
philosophies, invoking primitivist, techno-shamanic and neo-pagan myths,