Post-Apocalypse Ethnography

The Trap-Church

by Brad Erickson

Through an unusual and last-minute set of circumstances I was finally able to attend Burning Man, arriving at Black Rock City on Monday, August 26 and departing Saturday, the 31^st after the burning of the man. Having driven through the night to avoid a predicted interminable mass exodus in the morning, I am still overwhelmed by the experience but feel prepared to write down some of my observations, illustrated with photos.

The Burning Man organization’s terse self-description states: “Burning Man is an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” The event itself presents a vexing genre problem; it could be described as an art exhibition, a (serious) utopian social experiment, a (frivolous/debauched) party, a set of rituals constituting a religion or form of spiritual practice, a camping trip, a survivalist challenge, an exemplar of environmental principles or a wasteful sacrifice of natural resources. Depending on one’s experience and perspective it might be any of these and yet in sum is none of them.

Arrival. After several hours in line, I pulled out my guitar and led a sing-along

In broad strokes, Burning Man has grown to become an annual week-long gathering, this year reaching a record population of 61,000 who create an ephemeral city on the blank slate of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, culminating with the fiery immolation of a colossal effigy called the Man.

While I had heard first-hand accounts from friends and had read Lee Gilmore’s book Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, I have to agree with the frequent claim that the only way to understand Burning Man is to participate in it. Like the ritual cycle of Carnival that I took part in during my ethnographic field research in Catalonia, I don’t think that Burning Man is intelligible in terms of familiar frameworks. I don’t intend this essay to bridge this gap or to substitute for participation, merely to offer reflections on my own experience.

Burning Man promulgates the following ten principles, written by founder Larry Harvey in 2004 as “a reflection on the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the events inception.” I present the principles as a list below. They are explained in paragraph form here: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html#.UiSXWLw1aTg

1. Radical Inclusion
2. Gifting
3. Decommodification
4. Radical Self-reliance
5. Radical Self-expression
6. Communal Effort
7. Civic Responsibility
8. Leaving No Trace
9. Participation
10. Immediacy

I witnessed these principles in action with a caveat regarding number 4, radical self-reliance. I found self-reliance to be heavily tempered by constant reminders of human interdependence. At the small camp where I resided for the week, we shared critical supplies and effort to insure we were hydrated, fed, and sheltered. As we dealt with gear that had been forgotten, lost or broken, others made up for it from whatever surplus they had. Food and drink was also constantly shared among neighbors and visitors, creating an affect of care and abundance. On the other hand, those who came with lots of cute outfits and party supplies but failed to provide for their basic survival needs such as water and shelter were mocked, given the derisive term sparkle pony (just one term from the extensive burner lexicon).

I have organized the body of this essay into four short sections. The first, Life in the Dust, talks about Black Rock City in its physical environment and the body techniques used to cope with harsh desert conditions. In the second section I offer my observations about Burning Man as an art movement. In the third, I analyze Burning Man as ritual form, demonstrating its analogues to the ritual cycle of carnival. Finally, I will discuss Burning Man as a utopian social experiment. Many other lenses could be applied, these are merely the perspectives that are most interesting to me.

A cyclist stops to put on a mask in the deep playa as a dust storm hits

Life in the dust

Burning Man is held in an environment so inhospitable not even insects reside there. Daytime temperatures were above 90 degrees all week and dust storms arose without warning. The dust’s corrosive alkalinity rusts metals and rapidly covers ones skin, clothing, food, and water, cakes ones hair into a thick mat, and clogs ones nasal passages. Water is a luxury—you only have what your carry in—but the cleanliness achieved by a short, improvised shower is in any case short-lived.

Venturing out of the city into the empty expanse called the playa, it is imperative to bring water, a dust mask and goggles at a minimum. Many burners wear backpack bladders with tubes leading to their mouths, evoking the stillsuits worn on Arrakis, the desert planet of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Because of the constant need to drink water, the heat and high altitude, many burners have smaller appetites for food, subsisting on such fare as fruit and salted nuts. All transportation is by foot or bike, increasing daily exercise for those with more sedentary lives in what burners call the default world. I lost ten pounds during the week, which I understand is a common phenomenon.

In addition to dressing for the conditions, burners also dress as performance, displaying a vast array of home-made costumes from simple to elaborate, becoming part of the spectacle themselves. And there is yet another condition requiring further precautionary adornment of ones person. At night, as bikes and art cars cruise the city streets and the playa’s expanse, one could easily be run down if not are well-lit. Persons wandering without lights are referred to as darkwads but in practice, politely told that they are “too dark” when encountered in the night by those just avoiding collision with them. In order to be seen, burners string their bikes and themselves with light emitting wire, and other devices such as the blinking diodes I put inside the goggles on my forehead and the fiber optic antennae I wore, earning me the burner name Bug.

"Bug"

Winds can reach 70 miles an hour. Tent stakes are useless and must be replaced with steel rebar, pounded deep into the dry surface. Tents become ovens during the day. One of the main benefits of living in a group camp is the presence of shade structures, the most common being monkey huts, made of tarps tied to hoop structures of pvc pipes. Our monkey hut contained a kitchen area and a seating area. Our other amenity was an outdoor shower; a plastic cube with a showerhead hung from a pole. Larger theme camps had multiple structures including domes or areas shaded by sail-shaped sections of fabric that allowed free-flowing breeze to cool the area. Theme camps also organized spaces as performance stages, bars, cafes, dance floors, yoga studios, day spas, chill spaces, and a variety of other uses such as a Jewish temple, a human carwash or an orgy dome. These spaces provide opportunities to get out of the sun, get a drink (a cup hung from a karabiner is another common accessory), participate in organized activity or simply meet people. Without phones or Wi-Fi, it is notoriously difficult to find ones friends; the solution is to make new ones.

Inside the Monkey Hut

The city is arranged as two-thirds of a clock, a semicircle, with streets marked by the hour from 2:00 to 10:00 o’clock and ten rows extending outward. The effigy of the man, this year standing upon an alien spaceship, stands 2400 feet from the center of city.

New directions in art

Even before the art arrives, the desert itself calls up multiple associations. From Moses to Mohammed, prophets went into the desert to seek revelation. The devastation presents a post-apocalyptic world; when populated by

mutant, fire-belching art cars piloted by dusty, wildly-appareled humans, the playa resembles a scene from the film Mad Max. And as I mentioned earlier, the water-hording society of the desert planet Arrakis is a frequent reference and the landscape more generally resembles the surface of a desolate moon. As stars light up the sky, one senses oneself on the very edge of the universe. Some art and costumes reference space travel and extraterrestrials, reinforcing the impression that an interstellar bus might pull in at any moment to whisk you away. The playa is an enormous blank canvas on which human art appears but that canvas has also been previously filled with human ideas about desert landscapes.

An array of installations

Outside the influence of museum curators and their patrons, unrestricted by the constraints of walls and two-dimensionality, burning man’s artists follow their own whims and interests yet have coalesced into three dominant genres that form a new frontier of artistic expression both in terms of their forms and the modes in which that art is appreciated.

The Lady

The first, desert installations can be small or monumental and are often interactive through being entered, climbed or manipulated by human touch or blowing wind. Many of these are buildings such as the large Temple, built and burnt each year, which serves as a place of peaceful retreat and where participants leave messages and gifts for those who have died or otherwise process personal trauma in their own way. The Trap-Church, poised to snap down on parishioners, hosted satiric sermons, weddings, and musical performances with organ accompaniment. Many structures inhabited the central playa, near the Man and Temple, but others could be encountered far off in what is called the deep playa, distant from the overstimulation of booming sound systems and bright lights where psychedelic warriors retreat into spaces of visions and chance encounters before emerging, dust-enveloped, back into burner society.

Seahorse detail of El Pulp Mechanico

Art cars or mutant vehicles are another major genre. Cars, buses, trucks and golf carts are transformed into ships or insects or animals or trains. The larger ones take on passengers, affording a perspective in motion of other vehicles, installations and the desert itself. Many are equipped with sound-systems, their competing beats producing a constantly morphing kaleidoscope of sonic events. The cars are moving art, art that serves as transportation for the viewer and a moving place from which to view other art; all of these features constituting a new way to create and experience art.

A variety of structures at Camp Chakralicious

Finally, the theme camps combine architecture with artistic design and social orientation to produce a range of visual, auditory, and tactile environments spanning seemingly infinite themes: Sacred Spaces, Glamcocks, Sukkot Shalom, Lil’ Crack Whore, etc. I searched out friends who had previously told me their camp name: Hookahdome, Chakralicious, Free Radicals, Tissue and a Plan, Gender Blender, Camp Sass and Cosmic Dog. Sometimes I found them; sometimes I did not. The camps are art forms that may combine visual design, experimental living space, performance space and service provision among other functions.

During my own experience of the art at Burning Man I felt that, despite the excellent pieces of art one can encounter in a gallery, that such art and venues were generally an impoverished arena of stale ideas and conventional interactions, leaving me unenthusiastic about the state of mainstream art.

Burning Man as ritual form

As an anthropologist with a particular interest in ritual and religion, I found myself understanding Burning Man through the framework of Carnival; both the Carnival cycle I had experienced in the Catalan city Vilanova i la Geltrú in 2006 and in the writings on Carnival and the grotesque found in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, Rabelais and His World.

The Man atop a flying saucer

In broad strokes, Carnival is a ritual cycle that begins with the arrival of King Carnival—known in Vilanova by a host of sobriquets including King of the Senseless, Prince of Cuckoldry, Duke of Fools and the Corrupt, Count of the Insolent, Baron of Nocturnal Debaucheries, and the Lord of the Tall Banana in Bloom, Voyeurs and Young Punks. During his brief reign, no one works or thinks about their mortgage, the city is crisscrossed by processions of fantastical vehicles and people in costumes, many of them pranksters who dress as faux police and write ridiculous citations, who reverse roles through transvestism, or who emphasize the bodily appetites through sexual farce and copious eating and drinking. The ordinary rules of decorum and propriety are thrown out and all types of vulgarity celebrated. After a week of such revels, in which people get very little sleep, the King dies on Ash Wednesday, is mourned with bouquets of phallic vegetable and then burned in culminating ceremony that fills the central plaça with flames, pyrotechnic explosions and smoke.

The Man ignited

Burning Man also begins with the arrival of the man as the central figure of the drama. The weeklong festivities include costumes and fantastic vehicles and satire, even down to the faux police and many other pranksters such as the Bureau of Misinformation who gave out subway tokens (for a nonexistent subway), announced nonexistent events and services or generally heckled and mislead people seeking answers. Alcohol, food and other stimulants were in constant use and people slept very little. At the end, everyone gathered at the playa to witness the burning of the man, who for me, seems to be yet another incarnation of King Carnival.

Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival’s grotesque body is also evident at Burning man in the bodies of people, bikes and cars hybridized with other species or artificial life-forms. This body is open to the world through hybridization and also through the orifices as they perform their functions and often marked by scars when the border between body and world breaks. Performances and costumes emphasize the lower bodily strata of thirst, hunger and sexual desire, and the cycles of birth, illness and death. A scholarly comparison would require more detail and critical engagement. My purpose here is merely to signpost Burning Man as an analogue to Carnival and reflect on the ways that human beings constantly draw upon their wealth of cultural resources to express themselves in newly relevant ways.

From the shores of Utopia

The ten principles listed above appear to be empirically derived, based on observable practice rather than aspirations that few people attempt to implement. I did have a few conversations with people about changing the world but for the most part I witnessed utopian principles in action rather than utopian ideology. And it is probably important to point out the distinction between utopia (literally no place) of impossible ideals and eutopia (the good or happy place) actually experienced through sensual pleasures and good conduct between others. This distinction was made by Thomas Moore and remains useful in considering all social experiments and programs as a relationship between aspirations and practice. Going out on a limb and inviting you all to a tea party (to borrow a phrase from Rebecca Solnit), I will further venture that imagining a better world is such a prevalent part of human experience that I propose our species be called homo utopos rather than homo sapiens, the evidence of our wisdom being much less obvious than that of our social imagination.

The Temple viewed from the Man's flying saucer

In a age defined and measured by economics and dominated by the wealthy and their corporate instruments (that are surreally granted legal personhood); creating a commerce-free, uncommodified space—however imperfectly realized—is a radical intervention. Burning Man facilitates the uncommodified flow of goods and services but also hugs and compliments and conversation. Many camps were organized to give away goods and services, whether free bars, cafes, day spas, or dance clubs or smaller scale endeavors. As I rode my bike through the city I was offered grilled cheese sandwiches, cold cans of beer, bacon, and frequently received sprays of cooling water, sometimes scented with rose, peppermint or geranium. I was invited to sit in the ego chair where I received a flood of compliments. From the greeters at the gate to the numerous encounters I had throughout the week, nearly everyone I spoke with gave me a hug.

Absinthe service

I started Friday morning at Grandma Frum’s Painful Candy and Coffee Shop. Serving myself from a large carafe I joined a man on the couch under a shade structure who introduced himself as Amit. He had been an undergrad at UC Berkeley and had taken a class with the famous folklorist Alan Dundes who I had worked with as a graduate student. A conversation about the folklore of Burning Man and broader anthropological questions about race, gender and social models ensued for nearly three hours, various other people came and went either as listeners or participants. Amit asked for my email address and gave me a hug before we parted.

After a midday bike ride on the playa I stopped to talk to the staff at the Bureau of Misinformation. A woman named Sunny held a bullhorn with which she made periodic announcements. “Happy Saturday!” she said to a passerby who responded “it’s Friday.” “Fuck you” said Sunny. Sunny offered me a Bloody Mary and I accepted. “Today only, get your laundry done for free over at Slut Garden,” Sunny announced. Sunny gave me a sticker and a subway token. I gave her some checkered sunglasses I had found in the dust the previous night. She put them on declaring them a much better match for her uniform. A couple approached asking for directions. Sunny’s colleague provided an address that I knew to be in the opposite side of the city.

Bureau of Misinformation

An hour later I was sampling absinthe at my neighborhood absinthe bar where a collective of people served 18 varieties of homemade absinthe, complete with traditional service. I began talking to a woman from Seattle who I learned was a singer, we shared an engaging conversation about music and I made her the gift of my band’s CD. The woman, Nicole, thanked me and told me that her camp had a spa dome and asked if I would like to come over. I accepted and sat on a deck chair in my striped microfiber underwear in a shaded dome as Nicole wiped the dust off my body, massaged my hands and feet, misted me with scented water and applied sunscreen to my shoulders. All the while her camp mate fanned me and served me sparkling mineral water. I put my shirt on, thanked and hugged Nicole and returned to my own camp.

The vision also concerns the environment and the principle Leave No Trace was accompanied by the concept of MOOP (Matter out of Place), which was anything that was not playa dust. Smokers put their ashes into metal tins and many people carried moop bags for anything they found which did not belong on the playa. My campmates told me that going to Burning Man had made them more attentive to moop in the default world and generally more conscious of the waste they generated.

A common discussion had at Burning Man is in fact how to bring the practices of this temporary society back into the default world. I am aware that the Burning Man organization provides numerous benefits and services to the nearby community of Gerlach and the Pyramid Lake Reservation, that burners organize events in the places they live throughout the year and that individuals try to carry the social experiment home in various ways. As an anthropologist, activist, social philosopher and utopian ethnographer, Burning Man throws me back onto some fundamental questions raised by the study of Carnival and also by other intentional communities. Are phenomena such as these merely steam valves, escapes from a world whose structures remain unchanged or even reinforced by their ritualized oppositions? That these events transform some individuals I can easily accept but I do not know if such transformed individuals can transform the world beyond their small personal orbits. Certainly, if spreading kindness, friendship and generosity where they tread is their only contribution, burners may still enrich those they touch but I do not know whether such actions can or will lead to societal transformation. Burning Man returns me to the first questions of the Greek philosophers; questions that the burners not only appear to ask and hypothesize about but for at least one week out of the year attempt to live. What is the good life? And how should we conduct ourselves and organize our society in order to get it?