Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Theater in a

Crowded Fire

Ritual and Spirituality

at Burning Man

Lee Gilmore

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley  ·  Los Angeles  ·  London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

For credits, please see page 223.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gilmore, Lee, 1969-.

    Theater in a crowded fire: ritual and spirituality at

Burning Man / Lee Gilmore.

        p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-25315-5 (cloth: alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-0-520-26088-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    1. Burning Man (Festival). 2. Ritual—Nevada—Black Rock Desert. 3. Black Rock Desert (Nev.)—Religious life and customs. 4. Festivals—United States. 5. United States—Religion—1945-. I. Title.

    NX510.N48G55 2010

    394.2509793’54—dc22

                            2009052480

Manufactured in the United States of America

19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For Spencer Daniel Ardery Meiners

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Into the Zone

2. Spiritual, but Not Religious?

3. Ritual without Dogma

4. Desert Pilgrimage

5. Media Mecca

6. Burn-a-lujah!

Appendix 1. Demography: The Face of the Festival

Appendix 2. On-Line Survey

Appendix 3. Burning Man Organization Mission Statement

Notes

Bibliography

DVD Contents

Credits

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. The Burning Man, 1996

2. Mahayana Bus and Silver Skull art cars by unknown artists, 2003

3. Gomonk and Builder Ben, Early Man, 2003

4. David Best, Temple of Joy, 2002

5. David Best, Temple of Honor, 2003

6. David Best, Temple of Stars, 2004

7. Ronald McBuddha by unknown artist, 2002

8. Irie Takeshi, The Medium Is the Religion, 2003

CHART

1. Black Rock City, 2001

Tables

1. Participants’ Perspectives on Religion and Spirituality

2. Age of Respondents at Time of Survey

3. Burning Man Organization Data on Participants’ Ages

4. Burning Man Organization Data on Participants’ Income, 2003

5. Burning Man Organization Data on Participants’ Income, 2004

6. Burning Man Organization Data on Participants’

    Amounts Spent on the Event, 2003

7. Location of Survey Respondents

8. Survey Respondents’ Years Attended Burning Man

Acknowledgments

As solitary a process as writing often is, this book could not have been created without an extensive community to support it. First and foremost, I wish to thank the global community of Burning Man participants, without whom this project would quite obviously not have been possible. I am especially grateful to each of the hundreds of Burners who participated in my research by giving the gift of their time in interviews, conversations, or filling out the on-line survey I conducted in July 2004.

A number of Burning Man staff members were very helpful in facilitating data collection, fact checking, and obtaining permission to produce the DVD that accompanies this text, especially Andie (Actiongrl) Grace and Jess (The Nurse) Bobier. Special thanks are also due to (Maid) Marian Goodell, who—unbeknownst to either of us at the time—helped to inspire much of the work that follows in these pages when she invited me to join the fledgling Burning Man Media Team in 1998, thus deepening my involvement in and commitment to this community. Finally, I am indebted to Burning Man’s founder and ongoing executive director, Larry Harvey, for his time, invaluable insights, and inspiration.

As will become apparent in the pages that follow, I am embedded in a rich and colorful community of Burners with whom I have camped at the event over the years. Thus I should like to thank all the members of the BLD Village for providing a welcome place to call home in Black Rock City, especially Patrice (Chef Juke) Mackey. As core organizers and founders of the BLD for many years, Eric (Frog) Pouyoul and Rachel Ruster are to be commended for their patience and service to the greater community. A special debt of gratitude is also due to Craig (Newt) Lauxman for taking me to my first Burning Man in 1996. James Marshall provided an invaluable service in helping me to configure the more difficult technical components of my on-line survey. Lisa Hoffman generously granted permission to reproduce her original artwork (chart of Black Rock City). Other nods of appreciation are due to Jeff Anderson, Yoni Ayeni, Amacker Bullwinkle, Bridget Connelly, Felix Baum, Jennifer Baum, Jeanie Bier, Kathleen Craig, Margot Duane, Will Francis, Mike Fusello, Katrina Glerum, Dennis Hescox, Jennifer Hult, Jessica Spurling, John Spurling, Candace Locklear, Blair Miller, Yu-Shen Ng, Argyre Patras, Kate Shaw, Shin, Hillary Sommers, Tim Spencer, Kayte Stasny Kelly, Dawn Stott, Dan Terdiman, Jan Voss, Michael Urashka, Alx Utterman, and Michael Wolf. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues who provided helpful feedback on portions this manuscript, including Jonathan Korman, Niki Whiting, and Ben Zeller.

Critical intellectual and financial support was provided by the Media, Religion, and Culture Fellowship program of the University of Colorado School of Journalism. I am especially grateful to Stewart Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Diane Alters for instituting and administering this program, and to Ronald L. Grimes, who participated in one of the seminar discussions held in conjunction with this program, for his singularly insightful and helpful grilling. The Graduate Theological Union (GTU) also provided generous financial support through its Newhall Fellowship Program, as did the Association for the Sociology of Religion, which granted a Fichter Research Award in partial support of fieldwork expenses.

Within my camp at Burning Man, I have been joined by a number of other academics throughout the years who, in becoming part of my ethnographic landscape, came to indelibly shape many of the directions this work would take through sharing their insights and analyses of the event over many a dusty cup of coffee. First and foremost among these compatriots has been Mark Van Proyen, of the San Francisco Art Institute, with whom I was privileged to coedit a collection of essays titled After-Burn: Reflections on Burning Man. Mark has been a great colleague, friend, and mentor dating to my first years on the playa, and much of the ultimate success of this project is due to his early faith in my work. Patrick Gavin Duffy also deserves a nod for organizing the first panel of academics to present a session on Burning Man at the conference Community and the Environment, held at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1997, in which I was privileged to participate. D. S. Black was likewise an early intellectual colleague who helped to inspire me to write about this event. I am very fortunate to have been joined by other colleagues who became campmates over the years in Black Rock City, in particular, Rob Kozinets (York University), John Sherry (University of Notre Dame), Graham St John (University of Queensland), Sarah Pike (California State University, Chico), Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont), and Grant Potts (Austin Community College).

Pike also served as the outside reader for my Ph.D. dissertation, which brings me naturally to extending my deep gratitude to each of my committee members and mentors whose support and critical insights became so central to this work. My adviser, Ibrahim Farajaje, stood steadfastly by my side throughout my years at the GTU and was an inspirational model of creativity, difference, and innovation; without his support this project almost certainly would not have come to be. From the first day I walked into his office, he shared his unbridled enthusiasm for my work, and the knowledge of his abiding faith in my scholarly abilities kept me going at many a frustrating moment. Clare Fischer’s close mentoring and support over the years was likewise indispensable to my success; her consistently careful reading of my work and critical feedback were invaluable. Jerome Baggett was also an important critical reader and enthusiastic champion of this work. Finally, Sarah Pike has provided immeasurable professional support and encouragement far beyond her role as outside reader for my dissertation.

Some of the material included in this book has been previously published elsewhere, as listed in the credits. Specifically, I wish to thank the University of New Mexico Press, the University of Arizona Press, Rutgers University Press, Brill Academic Press, Greenwood / Praeger, and Berghahn for their support of my work and for graciously granting permission to reproduce some of my earlier work for this book.

The DVD that accompanies this book has been a collaborative project between my husband, Ron Meiners, my mother, Elizabeth Gilmore, and me. Ron in particular played a foundational role in creating this portion of the project by setting out with his video camera to document his perspective on Burning Man—including interviewing a number of our friends and campmates—from the moment he first set foot on the playa in 1998. Without this footage, the production of the DVD would have been impossible. My mother generously spent countless hours editing the footage into its final form, and thus played an indispensable role. I also wish to thank University of California Press, especially Reed Malcolm for his enthusiastic support and encouragement of all facets of this project, and Juliana Froggatt for her thorough and adept assistance in shepherding this book into publication.

Last, but most certainly never least, I wish to thank my husband, Ron, for providing unwavering support, inspiration, and love throughout the long years of doctoral study and beyond. As a Burner in his own right, he and I have shared countless conversations about Burning Man. His perspectives and analyses are inextricably infused and woven into the pages that follow. I am deeply and enduringly grateful for his love and companionship.

Introduction

Every summer during the week leading up to Labor Day weekend, tens of thousands of people from around the globe descend on the Black Rock Desert, a desolate and otherwise obscure corner of northwestern Nevada whose principal feature is an ancient and absolutely barren plain of crackled clay known as the playa. Their destination is a colorful and eclectic arts celebration known as Burning Man. For a brief time Black Rock City—or BRC, as this settlement is sometimes called—becomes the fifth largest metropolis in the state of Nevada as participants—collectively referred to as Burners—design, construct, and dwell in thousands of makeshift shelters and tents. Laid out along a carefully surveyed system of streets forming an arch of concentric semicircles, BRC stretches over two miles from end to end, surrounding a large central open space within which an extraordinary assortment of interactive and often monumental art installations are created (see chart 1, pages 36-37). Many of those in attendance don fanciful costumes as they carouse in this carnivalesque setting, making merry and making themselves at home in the desert’s harsh and alien environment.

At the center of it all stands a forty-foot sculpture called the Burning Man—a towering wooden latticework figure perched atop a fanciful platform, lit with multicolored shafts of neon, and filled with explosives designed to detonate in a carefully orchestrated sequence when the figure meets its fiery demise at the festival’s climax. Ostensibly genderless and void of any specifically stated meaning, this effigy—affectionately called the Man—retains the same general humanoid shape and appearance from year to year and is ultimately offered up in blazing sacrifice with each annual iteration of the event (fig. 1; see also DVD, chaps, 1, 3, 4, and 7). Marking the festival’s traditional climax, this dramatic rite—colloquially termed the Burn—is met by participants with considerable fervor and enthusiasm. Once the flames have transformed the Man into a mound of flaming coals, ecstatic celebration reverberates throughout the city until daylight returns. Finally, at week’s end, all physical traces of this temporary community are completely eliminated, and the city fades back into the dust, as everyone packs up and returns to the mundane routines of everyday life, or what some Burners have termed the default world. Yet for many participants, emotional and other intangible traces remain in memories and friendships formed, lingering like the alkali desert dust that still adheres to one’s camping gear months after returning home.

Burning Man is many things, and most participants would probably agree with an oft-spoken dictum that it can be whatever you want it to be. Indeed, independent and idiosyncratic points of view, alongside ongoing participant critiques about the nature of the event and its meaning, are cornerstones of this community’s ethos. Yet among the many frameworks within which this event can be situated—arts celebration, social experiment, or orgiastic revelry—one of the experiences that it fulfills for many participants is ritual. In particular, Burning Man can be a venue for those who wish to express and ritualize individualized conceptions of spirituality but who resist the doctrines and institutions of religion. On both large and small scales, Burning Man participants may partake of a variety of unconventional and inventive rites—from the central shared rite of the Burn to intentional gatherings among smaller groups and individual private gestures to the embodied experience of the entire event as a transformative journey or pilgrimage. I am far from alone in noticing a general social trend as many individuals seek after spiritual experiences while conceptually positioning these quests outside the rubrics of what they understand as religion.¹ In this regard, I argue that Burning Man is an important site on the vanguard of this contemporary movement in which creative expressions of spirituality and alternative conceptualizations of religions are favored, thereby destabilizing and reinventing normative cultural assumptions about what constitutes religion.

I use the terms spirituality and religion with considerable caution—and others such as alternative and ritual can be similarly problematic—recognizing the difficulties and ambiguities inherent in any attempt to unequivocally define them. They are the sort of terms whose meanings seem perfectly obvious, until one tries to unpack their countless associations or definitively fix their meanings. As perhaps befits our infamously individualistic society, interpretations of spirituality and religion tend to be highly individualized and context-specific. Even thornier is the notion of somehow separating spirituality from religion, given the mutually self-referential and ultimately synonymous nature of the various ideas implied by these terms. Still, a reasonably sized segment of the U.S. population may describe themselves as spiritual but not religious; this number has been estimated to be as high as 19 percent, although other surveys place the number of unaffiliated believers closer to 5 percent.² Yet it remains difficult to ascertain precisely what is meant here, let alone determine a reliable head count given the inherently diverse nature of such outlooks.

FIGURE 1. The Burning Man, 1996. Photo by Lee Gilmore.

There is difficulty too in labeling this social phenomenon a movement, as that term can imply something far more unified than the loosely aggregate affinities into which the so-called pastiche or cafeteria spiritualities of new age seekers, neo-Pagan devotees, Buddhist dabblers, and yoga practitioners (along with myriad other communities and spiritual ideologies) are usually, and sometimes uncharitably, lumped. Such associations may be united only by their self-conscious locations outside traditional or mainstream religious institutions, and even this stipulation can be called into question, as some members of more mainstream traditions may also use the term spiritual but not religious in describing their perspectives.³ If taken too literally, the many vagaries surrounding alternative spiritualities or spirituality but not religion render these distinctions ultimately meaningless. Yet these critical precautions aside, spiritual but not religious is a commonly used turn of phrase and one that many Burners themselves employ. For these individuals, this outlook implies a quest for spiritual experience and expression, and an often-ritualized connection with something more, that takes place apart from most traditional religious institutions. Burning Man constitutes a place to encounter and ritualize this sensibility.

This ritualizing often involves creative appropriations of cultural and religious motifs from a vast global well of symbolic resources. Crosses, devils, buddhas, goddesses, labyrinths—the list is potentially endless—are here patched together in a heterodox hodgepodge, through which participants explore, comment on, play with, and parody religion and spirituality. (See DVD.) At Burning Man, the random flotsam of human history and global cultures washes up on the Black Rock playa for one week, then washes out as participants return to the default world, having shared in an experience that often leaves residual traces on participants’ senses of self and notions of culture. This phenomenon could be said to exemplify what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously termed bricolage, a process by which we cobble together our belief systems about the world based on the sensory, cognitive, cultural, and historical ingredients available to us, or in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, by whatever is at hand.⁴ It is also akin to what some scholars have characterized as syncretism, a term originally applied—often disparagingly—to the merging of two different religious traditions to create a third tradition, although at Burning Man the sources are as infinite as the bounds of human culture, history, and imagination, and the result is unmistakably indeterminate and dynamic. To borrow yet another term, this one from the electronic music and deejay cultures that intersect with the festival, Burning Man is a mash-up, an idiom that refers to the mixture of two or more popular songs from different genres to form a new polyphonic creation. In this implicit invitation to play with the stuff of diverse cultures, reshaping them to one’s likings or whims, Burning Man serves to render the constructedness of cultures transparent, highlighting their native hybridity, adaptability, and plasticity. Through this process of creatively exploiting a vast array of cultural signs, Burners ritualistically and self-consciously de-and reconstruct ad hoc frameworks in which to create and perform self-reflexive spiritualities, which can become for many a profound life-changing experience.

It must be acknowledged that many participants and observers alike deny that Burning Man has any spiritual or other redeeming qualities whatsoever. Certainly there are thousands of participants—as I discuss at greater length in the pages that follow—who state emphatically that Burning Man does not entail any sense of individual or collective spirituality per se, although many of these individuals may still engage in a ritualized quest for self-discovery while electing not to cloak such experiences in mystical terms. Such competing perspectives are part and parcel of the very nature of the event. It is through an ongoing process of argument and dissent that participants themselves come to define, refine, and perform collective notions of what the event is all about. Furthermore, many would argue that Burning Man is merely a grand party—an excuse for debauchery and a license for transgressive behavior that is disconnected from any overt sense of spirituality, or any occurrence of significant change in one’s life, community, or culture. Yet while the event is undeniably rife with opportunities for bacchanalian and hedonistic indulgence, this aspect of Burning Man need not preclude its spiritual, introspective, and transformative qualities. Indeed—America’s Puritan heritage notwithstanding—religious traditions that do not include some opportunity for joyous, and occasionally excessive, ritualized celebration as part of the package deal are comparatively rare.

I should also state at this juncture that I have chosen to forgo a specific examination of the consumption of either licit or illicit consciousness-altering substances at Burning Man. Although such activities are for some an undeniable aspect of the festival—and at times the subject of gratuitous media attention—my observation has been that drug use is by no means a universal practice in this context. I therefore concluded early in the research process that although there may indeed be some connection between the use of substances that have been called entheogenic—that is, engendering an awareness of God or the divine—and participants’ reports of transformative or spiritual experiences in this context, a focus on these questions would shift attention away from the inquiries into ritual and cultural performance with which I am primarily interested here and that I find ultimately more compelling.⁵

ONE PARTICIPANT’S ARRIVAL STORY

I entered into Burning Man as a participant first and as a participant observer second, and this insider position has had inevitable and interesting consequences for shaping the perspectives that are indelibly stamped on this text. Before I attended the event in 1996, I had heard about it from various friends and acquaintances but had been of the opinion that it would not be the sort of thing I would enjoy. I felt that I would generally prefer to appreciate the desert environment on its own terms, if at all, rather than overrun by crowds and revelry. However, when a couple of good friends announced that they were planning to go, I figured if they could handle it, so could I.

On arriving at Black Rock City, I discovered a hot, dusty, and somewhat dangerous place populated by several thousand hearty souls. My friend and I had driven through the night from San Francisco and pulled off the two-lane highway onto the Black Rock playa at dawn. We were greeted by the ticket taker, stationed with one or two lonely compatriots in a trailer just off the pavement. She told us that a fatal motorcycle accident had happened a few nights before and warned us to drive very carefully. Black Rock City itself was still several miles off, and she pointed us in a straight line farther east, instructing us to watch the odometer and then turn sharply north after a number of miles, proceeding with caution a few more miles toward the Burning Man encampment. My companion, already a veteran Burner, followed these somewhat vague directions with little trouble. My imagination raced as we traversed the vacant expanse of the playa—kicking up clouds of dust in our wake—and I was swept away by the feeling of heading into the unknown. Finally, as we drove along the edge of the encampment in search of our party, I could see that many tents and other forms of shelter were already haphazardly set up within a generally circular space. Along the sides of a wedge-shaped open space within this circle—then called no man’s land—was a sprinkling of art installations: a small Stonehenge-like monument named Mudhenge, a cacophonous assemblage of piano parts called the Pianobell, the still-under-construction mock-strip mall HelCo, and Pepe Ozan’s imposing monument the City of Dis. (See DVD, chap. 6.) At the center of no man’s land stood the Burning Man—the same forty-foot-high skeletal mannequin that continues to be built and burned each year—propped up on a short stack of hay bales, awaiting its fate.

Many things about the event are rather different now. For one, it is much closer to the road and four or five times as large in both population and physical size (in 1996 the number of participants was about 8,000, as opposed to almost 50,000 a decade later). Arriving at night, one is immediately confronted with a glittering vista of colorful lights and throbbing sounds as Black Rock City pulsates and tantalizes in the darkness. Where once participants set off alone or in small caravans into the vast desolation of the playa, now they typically sit in multiple lanes of traffic temporarily laid out just off the pavement before proceeding through one of several ticket-taking stations. But all this had not yet taken shape when I rolled onto the playa that first morning and found myself unexpectedly thrown in with a group of organizers and other already longtime attendees who were the denizens of Safari Camp, my first home base. This provided me immediately with a glimpse into the event’s inner workings, civic issues, and assorted politics and gossip, all of which I found quite fascinating.

It was also a much wilder event in those days. Population growth and attendant safety concerns would lead to regulations prohibiting both firearms and unfettered driving the next year. But these regulations were not yet in place, and one night I found myself tagging along with my campmates as they loaded pickup trucks with tanks of propane, a small catapult launch, and a number of guns and drove a few miles from camp for their annual wild propane hunt—skeet shooting one-gallon tanks of propane. I was absolutely terrified. I was put off by the guns, afraid of stray bullets, and fearful of the exploding fireballs above my head. Although I was somewhat reassured by the generally responsible demeanor of those around me and what appeared to be their genuine safety concerns (it should be noted that they also collected all the spent casings, leaving no trace of our doings), I still stayed far from the action.

Yet my experience of the totality of the event that year pushed my boundaries, as I have come to believe it was in some sense designed to do. I began to ponder my feelings and question many of my assumptions about what constitutes community, creativity, and self-expression. A couple of nights later, after the Burn, I found myself back on the distant reaches of the playa with some of the same characters, and this time I was offered the chance to join in. Someone handed me a rifle, gave me some quick pointers, and invited me to take out a small can of propane sitting on the ground maybe twenty feet away—an easy shot, perhaps, but the resulting fireball was no less cathartic. I had never before held a gun, and this experience caused me to challenge my preconceived limitations and enabled me to face one of my fears head-on.

After the event was over and I had returned gratefully to the comforts of my comparatively dust-free home, some impulse in me longed to be back on the playa. I subscribed to the Burning Man e-mail discussion list in an attempt to keep some connection to the event alive and present even in my dreary office cubicle. As a result, I was immediately plugged in to the San Francisco Burning Man scene in a way that I don’t think would have happened otherwise. Because most list members were in the Bay Area, parties and other opportunities to meet were frequent. Despite the adventures they had provided, I hadn’t really connected with most of my fellow