Burning Man Culture Through an Ethnographic Lens
“We invite people out to express themselves, their individual selves, individuality: The Great American Value. But in order to survive – just survive in this howling desert – they have to become communal.” – Larry Harvey co-founder and creator
Burning Man is a week-long event in the desert where people come once a year to experience interactive art, music, and a strong sense of freedom of self-expression. While that all sounds lovely and fun, it is also very much about survival. The event takes place in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, about 2-3 hours outside of Reno, in a dried up lake bed. It is extremely hot during the day, and extremely cold at night, and a whole lot of dust flying around. It is a community that builds itself up, stays for a week, and disappears almost as if nothing happened. There are 10 extremely important principles for the event and in understanding the culture of this community. They are listed here, as they are in the Burning Man Survival Guide:
Radical Inclusion: Anyone can be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-Reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Radical Self-Expression: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility: We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience. (Burning Man Survival Guide)
There is no doubt that Burning Man -- aka Black Rock City (BRC) -- has created its own community and culture, and there are a specific series of events and people involved in the process. Through my newly-developed ethnographic lenses, I studied one documentary and one written anti-consumerism based ethnography about the history and culture of Burning Man. Though the creators of each piece go about their ethnography in very different ways, both display all of the aspects of an ethnographic piece. They use extensive participant-observation, thick description, activity theory, and grounded theory; all while using people within the discourse community for in-depth interviews.
The documentary Dust & Illusions: 30 years of Burning Man, directed by Oliver Bonin, is impressive with its extensive footage of the event itself and of the people and places that led up to its ultimate exponential growth. Bonin went to his first “burn” in 2003, and after that experience he decided to set out on a mission to learn more about the event. The interviews with the creators really give you a sense of how this culture was created, and how it has changed over time. The initial creators are Larry Harvey and John Law – the men who decided to build a man and bring it to Baker Beach in San Francisco and burn it with a few friends. Bonin dives right into this discourse community and interviews the founders to get a good sense of how things were established. He then brings in the rest of the interviewees in chronological order, which also helps give a good flow to the series of events on how the culture has evolved, and what the event is all about from year to year. He interviews everyone from the founders, random long-term participants, and influential artists.
Bonin’s footage of the event shows his participant-observation first hand, which really gives the idea of what it’s like to be there. In addition, his interviews display the activity system of this community well, by showing how important the structure of “The Man” is, along with all the other art that takes months to build. People use wood, metal, and all sorts of recycled pieces to create beautiful, interactive, and usually burnable art installations. However, it’s easy to see through the documentary, that even with all of the tools they use to create this week-long city, the communal aspect of the people involved is just as vital to the process.
Bonin does a great job covering all aspects of this community. His documentary is very much a thick description of the culture of Burning Man, both inside and out of the event. He does this with a combination of interviews and meeting footage outside of the event, and the footage of his observations and experiences inside the event. Another way he pulls this off is by collecting all of this data over a long period of time. It took him about 3 years from start to finish collecting all his data and creating the film, and the overall feel and success of the film seems well worth it. While the result of all of these things creates a thick description of the culture, all of the methods along the way is what I would consider Bonin’s grounded theory. He uses a series of different ways of collecting data and let the timeline be the guide of how it plays out in the film.
The piece of ethnographic writing is extremely interesting, and looked at from the angle of consumerism or “anti-market”. Robert V. Kozinets (2002) focuses on the distance that Burning Man creates from our consumeristic society, in the form of an “anti-market” event where participants are focused on “…communal practices to distance consumption from broader rhetoric’s of efficiency and rationality” (p. 20). He attended his first burn in 1999, and with his ethnographic lens, looked and this culture and how the participants escape form the markets of society.
One of the major rules of Burning Man is that there is absolutely no vending, which is a major part of their activity system. The community considers itself a gifting community, as listed in their 10 principles. This principle evolved from the longing of this community to escape to a place where they aren’t blasted constantly by advertisements. Kozinets (2002) emphasizes, “The entire community’s consumption experiences are socially constructed as distanced from, or even outside of, consumer culture and the market” (pp. 23-24). He is right on point here. Burning Man is covered in places to go and eat or get a drink, but you don’t pay for them. For example, there is a Pancake House camp where you can go from 8:00am-12:00pm (hours set by camp) and get yourself some free pancakes with friends; so long as you bring your own plate and utensils! The point of this is not only to bring the people in a community closer, but also to bring them far away from the consumerist society that we live in today (Konzinets, 2002).
Some of the aspects of Kozinets’ piece that I enjoy from an ethnographic viewpoint is the organization of his paper. He begins with what Watson and Humphreys (2009) refer to as “plain ethnography” (p. 40), in his description of what he saw and experienced when he was at the event. He describes smells, feelings, setting, people, and general energy; and it’s a great hook and way to introduce Burning Man. This is also the reader’s opportunity to learn about his first hand participant-observation. In addition, he has several different sections to describe both his experiences and how they correlate to his idea that – maybe – Burning Man is a place for consumers to escape the market.
However, Kozinets’ article is not as much of a thick description as Bonin’s documentary. Kozinets is very much focused on the ‘anti-market’ aspect of the festival, and does not go into as much detail about the experience. This works well for the purpose of his article. With that said, he does observe the activity system of Burning Man to ask a question about what these certain activities [like gifting] mean to this community and the event.
His approach to learning about the discourse within this community is also very different from Bonin. He uses the internet – such as blog sites, Burning Man websites, and comments/conversations on these pages – to learn about the anti-market aspect of this culture. With his first-hand experience and data collected through many Burning Man created documents and websites, Konzinets created his grounded theory that the participants in this culture have a strong desire to escape consumerism, which brought him to beg the question: “can consumers escape the market” (2002)? He concluded that while the event presents a temporary escape, the ultimate spending in order to make such an event happen means that it cannot completely be emancipated from the market (Konzinets, 2002), and I have to agree with him on this.
In conclusion, both of these pieces display all aspects of an ethnography, while functioning in very different ways. While they have many differences with their usage of ethnographic themes; in the end they both use these themes to bring together a piece that helps the reader or viewer understand Burning Man and the culture it has created much better. Bonin does a great job giving a broad picture of almost all aspects of the community. While, Konzinets uses his ethnography to ask a big – and I think very important – question about the activities within this system and what they are trying to accomplish by executing them.
References
Bonin, O. (Director). (2009). Dust & Illusions [Documentary]. USA: Madnomad Films.
Kozinets, R. V. (2002). Can consumers escape the market? Emancipatory illuminations from burning man. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(1), 20-38.
