easily surpass 100° Fahrenheit during the day, and plunge to 40° in the evening.
Constant rehydration is required: “piss clear” is a maxim of the event. Sunlight and
desert dryness expose the body’s needs and its fluids become suddenly (and literally)
salient. These realities of daily existence are often related in informant interview and
dialog to a more primitive state articulated as “back to nature” or more “authentic”
than ordinary lived experience.
A number of scholars have focused on the commercialized and commodification-
ridden elements of modern raves. In a popular statement on this perspective,
Thornton locates rave “subculture” within commercial industries such as publishing
and recording which “specialize in the manufacture and promotion of ‘anti-
commercial’ culture” (1996:157). Her study traces multiple instances of the
commercial co-creation of the rave subculture to argue the important involvement of
culture industries in subcultures such as rave and to critique the popular notion that
raves are subversive acts of resistance (see ibid.: 116–62). The commodification rap
is perhaps the main reason Burning Man’s organizers and participants tend to
distance their community from rave, for they seek to position their event as
unsponsored, uncommodified and non-commercial.
Yet it is in this critique that our study of Burning Man can add much to our
understanding of the qualities of raves or, most accurately, post-rave phenomena.
For, as St. John (2001:14–16) emphasizes, doof culture in Australia emphasizes
volunteerism and freedom from corporate influences. As Kozinets (2002b) details,
through its rules (such as “no vending”), Burning Man attempts ideologically and
ritually to distance itself from the mainstream marketplace, offering consumers a
place they can imagine they have suspended authoritarian market logics. The result
is the freedom from social distancing in which participants build community, and
the freedom from passivity in which they express and transform themselves. As Belk
et al. (1989) and Kozinets (2001) have pointed out, the sacred and the commercial
exist in an uneasy cultural tension with one another throughout contemporary
Western society.
The anti-market and anti-organized religious elements are classic characteristics
of festivals and other carnivalesque events, with their ritual inversions and anti-
authoritarian discourses and themes (Duvignaud 1976; Falassi 1987). Festivals
provide ritual power for inverting, temporarily overturning, and denying currently
dominant social orders. In this exploration we begin to discover the way in which
sacred experiences at events such as doofs, Neo-Pagan festivals, and Burning Man
carve out sacred times and spaces for participants to define themselves in commercial
society.
ConclusionsThis chapter stands as a teaser to substantial explorations of the theme of the sacred
at Burning Man. We can only hint at the future possibilities of exploring this stance
further. We suggest as a provisional conclusion that Neo-Pagan sensibilities and
discourse, and the cultural imperatives that underlie them, can contribute much to
298 ROBERT V.KOZINETS AND JOHN F.SHERRY, JR