Abstract
Burning Man is an annual participatory arts event and temporary city co-created in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Also known as Black Rock City, it has spawned a global movement with over 100 “regional events” (or “burns”) worldwide. Conveying qualitative findings from surveys targeted at European Burning Man participants (or “Burners”) and triangulating these findings with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in Germany, the chapter explores the complexities of Burning Man’s stature as a transformational event prototype. We recognise burns—Black Rock City and its worldwide progeny events—as experimental heterotopia, or “counter spaces,” that enable a proliferation of ritualesque and carnivalesque performance modes. By addressing Burner values and motivations, we discuss the appeal of burns, notably their multiplex potential for personal and cultural innovation. As this chapter illustrates, the performative/transformative logic of Black Rock City, the complexity of which is mirrored and mutated in progeny events, inheres in an ethos known as the Ten Principles. Part of a larger project addressing the transformative innovation of Burning Man, the multi-methodological investigation of this event culture focuses on the principles of Gifting and Leaving No Trace highlighted in German Burner initiatives.
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01 March 2022
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Notes
- 1.
The exceptions to this prohibition are the sale of beverages at Center Camp Café and ice at Arctica.
- 2.
The Ten Principles are Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy. For an explanation of each, see: https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles. The principles are sometimes reworded or amended at regional events. In this chapter, the principles are capitalised and italicised.
- 3.
Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016.
- 4.
Interviewed by GS, 8 April 2016.
- 5.
Based in the Department of Social Science at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, from 2016–2019, and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Burning Progeny included events in Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA: https://www.burningprogeny.org/.
- 6.
Similar to the BRC Census, respondents were highly educated and tended to situate themselves on the left of the political spectrum, although the wealthy were less represented in our sample than at BRC over the same period. Further details of our comparative results are accessible at: https://www.burningprogeny.org/surveys.
- 7.
Throughout this chapter, percentage values are rounded to the nearest whole number.
- 8.
The word cloud visualises the 100 most frequently used words in the answers (minimum word length: 3 letters; words with the same stem are grouped together).
- 9.
It should be noted that references to Kiez Burn did not arise in the surveys (the first event was organised in June 2017, when the majority of S2 responses were already collected). The fieldwork and the survey data are thus independent while yielding similar results, which may suggest that our ethnographic findings are also prevalent at other regionals.
- 10.
Interviewed by BV, 10 May 2019. All further quotes are from this interview.
- 11.
Spießer is the colloquial expression for the unhip or “square” Germans fiercely attached to philistine norms and values.
- 12.
Sentimental retro-pop music often detracted as kitschy and nostalgic.
- 13.
The significance of gratitude is acknowledged at other burns. For instance, in the 2017 Afterburn survey of San Diego-based regional Youtopia, participants were asked to rank the Principles on a scale of one to five, with Gratitude and Consent added as additional principles. Gratitude scored first with a mean score of 4.64, followed by Consent (4.63) and Immediacy (4.44) (San Diego Collaborative Arts Project n.d.).
- 14.
Many Kiez Burners arrive from the English-speaking expat community of Berlin. According to the results of the 2019 Kiez Burn Census (online survey with 314 respondents), English was more widely understood than German at the event.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
See St John (2019a, 16–19) for a more elaborate discussion of LNT including its genealogy.
- 18.
Wandering Rangers are Kiez Burn’s volunteer community caretakers and mediators, modelled after BRC’s Black Rock Rangers.
- 19.
Among our interviewees, rapid growth is commonly regarded as detrimental to the social dynamic of the event culture as it creates an uneven balance between veterans and newcomers. A typical example mentioned is Midburn, which grew from 3,000 participants in 2014, to 12,000 by 2018, a population explosion influencing Midburn’s cancelation in 2019.
- 20.
Interviewed by BV, 31 July 2018.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Interviewed by GS, 4 April 2017.
- 24.
Interviewed by GS, 8 April 2016.
- 25.
Interviewed by BV, 19 April 2018.
- 26.
Interviewed by GS, 4 April 2017.
- 27.
Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016.
- 28.
Interviewed by BV, 9 July 2018.
- 29.
Interviewed by GS, 5 April 2016.
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Vitos, B., St John, G., Gauthier, F. (2022). Burning Man in Europe: Burns, Culture and Transformation. In: Nita, M., Kidwell, J.H. (eds) Festival Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88392-8_5
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