Joe Bonni

Pilgrimage in Antiquity
The Anthropology of Space & Place

Welcome Home
Modern Pilgrimage and Ritual Place-making at Burning Man
You know sometimes I wonder what home is is it an actual place or is it some kind of
longing for something, some kind of connection?
- Laura Roslyn, Battlestar Galactica, Islanded in a Stream of Stars, Episode 420
Many of the misconceptions surrounding the event spring from [Larry Harveys Burning
Mans creator] dueling views about what it really means. On the one hand, he can describe it in
highly spiritual terms, likening it to the ancient mystery cults where sensory dislocation and
communal exertion bred personal epiphanies and a direct experience of the divine. On the other
hand, he takes great pains to point out that Burning Man is not a religion: that it has no priests and
no dogma, and that each individual is free to interpret the experience as he or she sees fit. On a
third track, he has been known to shelf the spiritual angle entirely and paint the event as strictly
an arts festival and an experiment in temporary community.
This is Burning Man, p119
ABSTRACT

Every year beginning on the last Monday of August and ending on the first Monday of
September (Labor Day), tens of thousands of people gather together in the middle of the Black
Rock Desert in northern Nevada to attend an event simply called Burning Man. An exercise in
radical self-reliance and radical self-expression, the gatherers create the event in which they
participate, building a city on the desert playa, Black Rock City, the fourth largest city in
Nevada for the eight days that it exists. Black Rock City citizen/pilgrims erect innumerable
pieces of art, ranging from elegant but temporary installations, to efforts as impressive and
baffling as a life-size replica of a pirate-ship built on the frame of a school bus which then sails
across the desert sea. Burning Man is a difficult event to describe, not only due to it being a
radically unique and unconventional place, but also because the participants themselves will
offer widely diverse explanations as to why they come and what the event means to them. While
it has been criticized as simply an enormous party in the desert, such a description, as would any
single description, fails to capture the full scope of the event. Drawing on works of ritual theory
from Victor Turner to J.Z. Smith, and in dialogue with a range of theorists views on the social
construction of space and place, this paper argues that pilgrimage is no less vital in a secular 21 st
century than it has been since Greco-Roman times and that a heterotopia, like Black Rock City,
provides a necessary liminal space where modern pilgrims can seek transformative,
transcendental experiences, away from the responsibilities and governmentalizing apparatus of
the real world.

Joe Bonni

Introduction: Theres no place like home.

Every year beginning on the last Monday of August and ending on the first Monday of
September (Labor Day), tens of thousands of people gather together in the middle of the Black
Rock Desert in northern Nevada to attend an event simply called Burning Man. An exercise in
radical self-reliance and radical self-expression, the gatherers create the event in which they
participate, building a city on the desert playa, Black Rock City, the fourth largest city in
Nevada for the eight days that it exists. If you are reading this introduction, then it is assumed
first, that you have watched the accompanying PowerPoint presentation (PPP), Beyond Belief:
A Brief Primer on Burning Man and second, that it is clear that the point of this trek to the
desert made by thousands of counter-culture 1 nomads is, on the surface, a simple one: to witness
collectively the burning of an enormous wooden man on the first Saturday of each September.
But, as journalist2 Brian Doherty states at the beginning of his book, This is Burning Man, which
chronicles the 20-plus year history of the event,
The burning of the statue is a MacGuffin, the thing around which the real story gets set in
motion, not the theme. The real story is what happens to people what they do, what it
means to them, how it changes them when they can make a temporary society qualitatively
different in many respects from their everyday one (2004: 2).
What do they do? What does it mean? How are they changed?
The pilgrims who travel to Black Rock City are also the citys co-creators and re-creators.
Black Rock City, the pilgrims' sacred center - to which the pilgrims travel and at which these

Cf. Theodor Roszaks The Making of a Counter Culture, particularly Chapter 1, Technocracys Children, the
final paragraph of which opens, The young, miserably educated as they are, bring with them almost nothing but
healthy instincts (41). Or less dramatically and perhaps too simply, I offer a nascent and evolving definition of
counterculture as compared to subcultures introduced to me by anthropologist Shannon Dawdy: counter-cultures
protest, while subcultures cope, with dominant ideology; additionally, counter-cultures are generally compromised
of individuals who have to a great degree self-segregated themselves from the dominant social structure, while
subcultures are more often marked as such by the dominant culture. Obviously there is some porousness between
these definitions and I invite comment.
2
Because this paper uses various sources from scholars to journalists to first- and second-hand informants, I will,
from time to time, clarify when I am citing from an academic source if there might otherwise be confusion.

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ritualists find their limen, a threshold into a world where one may not come out the way they
went in (Turner 1969: 107) - has a certain (ad)ministerial class but the pilgrimage itself has no
leaders, no directors, no hierarchy; the pilgrims, burners, are both officiants and congregants of
their ritual peregrination to an expansive space at which they are builders with enormous artistic
freedom, and yet not entirely the architects of what will become their ritual place. They are
liberated by communitas, and encourage each other to strip themselves of the conventions and
restrictions (and clothes) mandated outside of their liminal city (Turner 1969: 96) while
simultaneously, they are also monitored by apparatus of the state which is not willing to entirely
yield to the autonomous and hedonistic energies of the event (Foucault 2001; Linke 2006). One
of Dohertys informants, Tyler, stated about Burning Man, it opens the door to whatever freak
anyone might have inside of them that they dont get to be at home (Doherty 2004: 9). And yet,
as each and every pilgrim pulls up to the gates of Black Rock City at the beginning of the
festival, they are greeted, with the simple phrase, Welcome Home.
How can an empty space in the middle of the desert, a space where many of the pilgrims
themselves have never set foot before in their life, come to be described, and for many
recognized, as home? While at first seemingly hyperbolic, the notion is not so odd however
when one considers that the early American Pilgrims of Thanksgiving Day fame fled from what
they considered an unholy place to lead a holy life on a distant continent unpolluted by European
civilized scandals (Turner 1974: 305) and called the unknown, new world, home. Burners
similarly flee from a home polluted by consumerism, capitalistic practice, homogeneity,
predictability and a dearth of metaphysical confrontation, to a distant desert plain, an unpolluted
tabula rasa, to take part in the largest act of ephemeral collective creativity man has ever known
in an atmosphere largely free of imposed meanings or behavioral norms (Doherty: 4).

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While many burners will suggest that in order to truly understand Burning Man you have to
go to know (Doherty: 9), that is, one needs to participate in a ritual to understand its liminality,
that one needs to inhabit a heterotopia in order to know, as Foucault insists, that we do not live
in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with
quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well (1967/1984), 3 I suggest instead that
through the works of ritual theorists like Victor Turner and J.Z. Smith, and with the help of
several theorists on the social construction of space and place, we will see that pilgrimages are
no less vital in a secular 21st century than they have been for the deeply, religiously devout of
past and present and that a heterotopia, like Black Rock City, provides a necessary liminal space
where modern pilgrims can seek transformative, transcendental experiences, away from the
responsibilities and governmentalizing apparatus of the real world.

The pilgrim to Burning

Man leaves a home usually built for him or her in the quotidian world in order discover what sort
of home s/he can build for herself or himself in a space where they are freed and free
themselves from the weight of the states ocular intrusion (Linke 2006: 211). Burners enter
this temporary autonomous zone (Bey 1991) for some eight days to better understand what
home, community, play can be when they travel from the familiarity of their old home, the near,
the secular, mundane, everyday, ordinary to a new home, someplace far sacred, rare, often
miraculous (Turner 1974:305). They seek a place to satisfy a longing, invent and discover a
new type of human connection oft missing from the office space of the real world which many

Des Espaces Autres, Of Other Spaces, reached print only in 1984, in French. Although not reviewed
for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was
released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death. As the
only English versions are even more unofficial and available online (the version I use here is translated
from the French by Jay Miskowiec) it is impossible to cite page numbers. However, the website from
where I accessed my versions is listed in the references cited at the end of this article. It will be inline
cited as (Foucault 1967/1984).

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occupy for the other 51 weeks of their year. They come to build a ritual playground (Huizinga
1950) called Black Rock City.
To make sense of these pilgrims and their playground we should look first at the importance
and power of pilgrimages as rituals, as work, as play, as opportunities for fulfillment, enrichment
and transformation. Then, after an exploration of what I hope will be seen as the fruitful - and I
would argue necessary - role of pilgrimage, we can look at the playground that is Black Rock
City, the container, the space that allows for the ritual process of pilgrimage to culminate.

Joe Bonni

Part 1
Pilgrims: Follow the Yellow Brick Road 4
I will entice you into the desert and there I will speak to you in the depths of your heart.
Hosea 2:14
I was listening to National Public Radio in late November/early December 2008 and they
were reporting on the 477th anniversary of the celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe (the
celebration of her apparition is the 12th of December). I was immediately reminded of a film I
watched on the first day of a course on Pilgrimage in Ancient Christianity, A Long Journey to
Guadalupe, a documentary by filmmaker, Juan Francisco Urrusti.

The film examines the

political and religious history of what Urrusti calls, the unfathomable heart of Mexico 5
represented by the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe which links both indigenous Mexican
beliefs in the Earth mother Tonantzin and the cult of the Virgin, both figures which can lay some
historical claim to the pilgrimage site at Tepeyac. Although ostensibly a Catholic celebration, the
film shows that the event is complex, diverse, and far more an expression of the myriad ways
Mexicans are Mexican than it is solely a celebration of the apparition of the Virgin Mary almost
500 years ago. The films interviews and narration were in Spanish - one of four languages I
understand poorly6 - and although taking notes was a challenge, I recall that with this film, on the

I wonder if Frank Baum read Van Gennep for in some ways he prophesized Turners theories in that The Wizard of
Oz cleanly tracks a Turner-esque ritual pilgrimage. Dorothy exits from the real world (separation); takes a
pilgrimage along the yellow brick road which unites various classes - Tin Men, Scarecrows, Lions and little girls - in
an egalitarian communitas (all were equaled, stripped of power) arriving at Oz (limin); followed by her eventual
return home, transformed and with a greater understanding of the people who have the most influence in her life
(aggregation) (Turner 1969: 94). Both Turner and Baum were enamored with the theater so maybe the connection
lies there somewhere. There is an argument to be made that more recently, JK Rowling, with her Harry Potter
series has updated Turners tri-partite scheme, while also reaching back to Van Genneps notion of Rite de Passage
(Van Gennep 1960) in that each summer, Potter leaves the dreary suburbs of London, travels to the miraculous space
of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where he discovers a camaraderie and acceptance missing in his
miserable home-life, then faces challenges and tests which result in personal edification and overtly mystical if not
spiritual transformation. At storys end, like clockwork, each spring Harry returns back to the muggle (real)
world, changed, wiser, and quite literally promoted to the next grade of wizard/student.
5
http://www.der.org/films/long-journey-to-guadalupe.html Retrieved 3/20/09
6
From (arguably) best to worst: English, French, Spanish, Italian

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very first day of a course on pilgrimages, the term pilgrimage (and even perhaps
Christianity) was thrown into turmoil. From my notes on the film:
o There are all sorts of contested interpretations with lots of indigenous celebration,
dance, along with hybridized Christian iconography
o Circuses
o Tejano bands
o Indigenous dress and dance more in tune with pagan than Christian practice
o One interview showed an older man comparing Jesus and an indigenous god
two gods, two tales being told
A myth already existed and there winds up a multiplicity of mythologies
particularly regarding the Virgin Mary
I think: A virgin that preceded the Virgin Mary that preceded Mexico as a
state?
o The multiplicity of parties/constituencies at the event can not be overlooked
o There is no single audience or single group of pilgrims
o Hundreds of thousands descend on the city
o The range of the pilgrims expectations is impossible to gauge as a collective
It is this last point that is so salient in regards to discussing Burning Man as a pilgrimage. It
is easy to suggest that ritual is a homogenous event for those who participate. Victor Turner, in a
Levi-Straussian turn, devised a long set of binary oppositions comparing experience in the
liminal state - a condition in rituals where initiates find themselves in a moment that has few or
none of the attributes of the past or the coming state (Turner 1969: 94) - to the experience of
the quotidian. Turner does suggest that liminality offers homogeneity through common cause
and common purpose (and by extension, common effect) as opposed to daily life with its
increasing specialization of society and culture, with progressive complexity in the social
division of labor (1969: 106-7).

But while this ideal notion of a ritual, a homogeneous

experience for all involved, is often transmitted by those in authority - particularly within
political and religious hierarchies - anthropologists, and Turner himself, can not help but notice
that in practice, whether the festival of the Lady of Guadalupe or Burning Man, pilgrimage, as a
unique form of ritual, clearly strains towards universal existential communitas [a unique form of

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corporate support] but such aspirations are never truly met (Turner 1974: 324-5). Instead, we
see a loosening of societal norms (Turner 1973: 200) but at the sacred center, the pilgrimage site,
the corporate and egalitarian support pilgrims show one another in their coming together in
communitas should not be conflated with some sort of common phenomenon experienced by all
pilgrims in the same manner. Instead, a characteristic of a freely-taken engagement gives to
pilgrimage a remarkable quality of spontaneity although there is a definite organization it is
meant to canalize the enthusiastic participation of the pilgrims rather than impose a totalitarian
rule upon them (Turner 1974: 313). Pilgrimages will, as a matter or course, miss the mark of a
wholly homogenous and transcendental experience for all who participate but nevertheless
pilgrimages do provide the possibility for many to bear witness to their own or others
transformation.
But I am getting ahead of myself with all of this talk of communitas, pilgrimage as ritual,
transcendental experiences, homogenous, or more accurately, heterogeneous expectations and
experiences in competition with one another in strange, liminal, heterotopic places. What does
any of this mean?
What makes pilgrimage a ritual? What makes Burning man a pilgrimage as opposed to a
vacation for tattooed and pierced, self-professed counterculture types? What makes Black Rock
City a heterotopia as opposed to just another temporary campsite in the desert? On what can
we base a claim that the Burning Man Festival and its container, Black Rock City, are the
products of ritual place-making?
***
Turner ended his article The Center Out There suggesting that pilgrimage may be most
potent when it imparts to religious orthodoxy a renewed vitality rather than when it asserts

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against an established system a set of heterodox opinions and unprecedented styles of religious
and symbolic action (1973: 229-30) but in other works he regularly mentioned that hippies, the
Beat movement, Karl Poppers notion of an open society, traditional and tribal religious practices
and the blessed blasphemy of the poetry of William Blake all reflected and innovated elements of
the very ritual processes he studied (Turner 1969, 1973, 1974). One project of this paper is to
expand Turners ideas about pilgrimage on and beyond orthodox religious practice and show that
Turners theories are powerful tools to understand not only traditional spiritual practice, but also
new practices which Turner hinted at but never fully explored. While Turner stressed the
religious aspect of pilgrimage in a number of his works it would be folly to suggest that his
notion of orthodox assumed highly structured organization. Organization plays a role in
pilgrimage for sure, but Turner places a far greater stress on egalitarianism than hierarchy.
Turner believed that pilgrimages aspired towards communitas (1974: 307), which he defined at
one point as a communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of
ritual elders (1969: 96).7 He viewed the elders, or any fixed social position with a claim to
authority, as always possessed of some sacred characteristics as opposed to entirely political
and hierarchical. The submission to such sacred leaders was not the submission of a worker to
taxes, a soldier to commander, or one requiring discipline, demanding obligation or reliant upon
fear of punitive retribution, instead it is rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential and
generic human bond, without which there could be no society (1969: 97). Communitas leveled
the social standing of the low and the high it is a direct, immediate confrontation or
7

Ive always felt that communication rather than community is a closer analog for what Turner had in mind
with the term communitas (See Turner 1974: 316-7). Turner used communitas rather than community to suggest a
modality of social relationship which resisted normal structures organized in caste, class or rank hierarchies and
instead allowed for free and open communication between individuals previously potentially segmented from one
another due to social norms (1969: 96-7). Additionally, Turner suggested communitas came in three flavors: 1)
existential/spontaneous 2) normative and 3) ideological (1969: 132). Later in this paper each will briefly be
discussed as Turner suggests that pilgrimages fall generally under normative communitas (1973: 194) while I
believe Burning Man possess important elements of all three and leans towards the spontaneous flavor.

Joe Bonni

encounter between free, equal, leveled, and total human beings no longer segmentalized into
structurally defined roles (1974: 307). For Turner, communitas was not so much a lack of
structure entirely but an anti-structure, society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured
and very undifferentiated comitatus (1969:96). Or more precisely,
While the pilgrimage situation does not eliminate structural divisions, it attenuates them, removes
their sting. Moreover, pilgrimage liberates the individual from the obligatory everyday constraints
of status and role, defines him as an integral human being with a capacity for free choice, and within
the limits of his religious orthodoxy presents for him a living model of human brotherhood and
sisterhood. It also removes him from one time to another. He is no longer involved in that
combination of historical and social structural time which constitutes social process in his rural or
urban community (Turner 1973: 221).

Burning Man possesses its own elders within a rudimentary structure to which a communion
of very undifferentiated (in regards to social power) individuals submit. Such elders include Lee
Harvey, the eldest as the events creator, as well as a full time year-round staff in San Francisco
dedicated to the planning of the event and also a coterie of facilitators who volunteer and/or live
for months at a time at a ranch, Black Rock Station, near the site of Black Rock City. Harveys
council of specialists in San Francisco and loosely bound tribe of facilitators are not unlike the
shrine or temple keepers common to almost every example of pilgrimage offered by Turner in his
writings on pilgrimage in the early 70s. In one particularly potent example, Turner explains
that,
The Vitthal Temple at Pradharpur is administered and managed by six Brahman sub castes of priests
who have had a long history of internal factionalism and litigation over rights to perform rituals,
hold land, and receive offerings from pilgrims for their services and hospitality. As at other pilgrim
centers the simple devotion of the transient pilgrims is countered by the complex worldly
exploitativeness of the permanent servicing, sometimes self servicing structure bound agencies of the
shrine (1974: 314).

Indeed, Burning Man is administered and managed by a rudimentary structure (that

some involved have suggested is a bit of a quasi-caste-like system).

Although official

administrators and facilitators in San Francisco and Black Rock Station make up only a small

Joe Bonni

fraction of Black Rock Citys nearly 50,000 strong population 8 and tend to avoid being organized
in any traditional hierarchical sense,9 all of these various members who make up the
rudimentary structure called the Burning Man Project (the official name of the organization
running The Burn) are dedicated to service, to the maintenance of the site, to the needs of ritual
pilgrims, to preparations both sacred and profane: from, trash pickup and handling contractual
obligations with local, state and federal government as well as maintaining a multi-media
network with artists, pilgrims, the entire extended network of burners and believers. Tickets to
Burning Man cost around $300 each and supply a multi-million dollar budget for the servicing of
the structure bound agencies of the unique shrine comprised of The Man, His Temple and
the city they occupy. Such offerings as ticket purchases can suggest a more commercial, selfserving relationship between those who come to Black Rock City and those who facilitate the
Burning Man festival but the ticket price is only a small fraction of the type of exchange that
goes on at Burning Man, particularly between the pilgrims themselves. Once inside, pilgrims to
Black Rock City are prohibited from participating in normal commerce: the exchange of cash for
goods is one of the few proscriptions which, if violated, can lead to expulsion from the event.
The selling and buying of anything save ice (for coolers - proceeds from ice sales are donated to
local charities) and coffee10 is strictly prohibited. Black Rock City prides itself on practicing a
gift economy. Once encamped in Black Rock City there is no coming and going for most
burners so one needs to bring into Black Rock City everything they think they may need to
survive for a week in desert conditions which include temperatures that can run as high as 115
8

In 2008, Black Rock Citys population reached over 49,000: http://burningman.com/whatisburningman/2008/

Although the BRC Department of Public Works (DPW) take a certain pride in claiming to be the lowest of the low
at the event, particularly during the exodus at the end of the festival when DPW workers, who will remain on site for
several more weeks to facilitate breakdown and cleanup, ask exiting burners to donate any remaining food they may
have to their efforts. See Beyond Belief PPP for more info on the BRCs Rangers, DPW and other divisions of
official labor at the event.
10
Coffee is sold at a caf over one-half acre in size which sits under a big-top tent and provides both caffeine and
entertainment (planned and improvised) 24 hours per day.
9

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10

degrees (45 C) during the day and as low as 40 degrees (5 C) at night, not to mention that
sandstorms are a regular part of living on the playa in late August. One is expected to assume
others will have unforeseen needs, to pack extra and to share their excesses with those who may
have forgotten necessary items or encountered unexpected hardship in an environment as awe
inspiring and unpredictable as the event itself.
If it seems problematic to suggest that ticket sales and temporary inversion of capitalist
economies can be or should be compared to more traditional notions of religious offerings and
communal living, perhaps it is because comparative efforts of ritual practice take a certain
amount of imagination that always raise concern for the social scientist. Consider that the very
term pilgrimage is also fraught with difficulties when applied to diverse practices across
historical and cultural divides.
Classicists and historians have argued as to whether the term is bound, if not invented for,
ancient Christianity and whether using it to describe non-Christian practices in the past is to
assume a connection between Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian practices that may
overemphasize continuity between these different cultures. Conversely, to deny the term a more
universal application is to ignore the fact that almost every observable practice of early
Christian pilgrimage can be paralleled by and was surely borrowed from pre-Christian pagan
(and Jewish) practices (Elsner & Rutherford 2005: 2-3). Art historian Jas Elsner and classics
professor Ian Rutherford have suggested that pilgrimages need not always be a journey
undertaken exclusively or even principally for religious reasons (2005: 4).11 Sacred travel
writings from the Greco-Roman era described the theria, a form of pilgrimage in classical
Greece (2005:12) involving state delegations sent to participate or observe in festivals and/or
sporting events. Oracles, healing sites, initiations into cults and dedication ceremonies all
11

Quoting Holden and Purcell (2000), 445

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11

involved ritual travel to sacred places12 at which, la Turner (and Van Gennep), important
transformations were sought before returning home healed, initiated, transformed or having
fulfilled sacred vows (Elsner & Rutherford 2005: 13-17). These are but a few of pre-Christian
ritual pilgrimages both secular (e.g. theria) and sacred. Elsner and Rutherford sum up the
possibilities for pilgrimage across cultural and historical boundaries when they remark that, One
might say that for the religiously minded (or for those with a tendency to become so) any kind of
journey has the potential to become a pilgrimage (2005: 5).
In Afterburn, a collection of essays and articles about Burning Man, religious studies
professor Lee Gilmore offers a definition of ritual, not unlike Turners but, akin to Elsner and
Rutherfords historical examination of pilgrimage, she offers room for pilgrimage to possess a
purely secular experience.
Pilgrimage I define as a ritualized journey to a specific location that has been tinctured with cultural
meaning, intended to connect individuals to a shared experience of something outside their ordinary
existence, and experience frequently described as having sacred or spiritual qualities, and
which can arise in both religious and secular contexts. By this measure, Burning Man can be
understood to have these qualities (2005:51-2).

Another of Dohertys informants, Steve Mobia, described his early experiences at Burning
Man as extremely profound on a transcendent archetypal level as well as cosmic level it
completely transported me (Doherty 2004: 65). Where exactly Mobia was transported, and
whether or not it might be considered a spiritual transformation or involve a connection to a
divinity is less important to burners than the recognition that they are inspired inspired to
build, to think about their lives anew, to immerse themselves in the liminality provided by the
city they have already been inspired to build and, if nothing else, inspired to behave in ways they
would not otherwise. Charlie, a burner who built a twenty foot tall wood burning hearth in
the shape of a heart at the 2000 Burn explained to Doherty, Watching strangers fall in love,
12

Throughout this article I will use there term sacred place rather than the more alliterative sacred space for
reasons which, I hope, will become clear in the second half of this article.

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12

watching people smile in the radiant heat I never though it could do that. How could we build
such a crazy gift (2004: 201)? Doherty himself noted,
One night at the hearth, I saw a young woman, crying, burning her drivers license and a one-dollar
bill. She was saying something to two people surrounding her old friends? People who just
happened to be there? I couldnt tell about new beginnings and transcending the past, but her act
was far more articulate than her words. She laughed though the tears, saying how she thought she
ought to be burning a hundred-dollar bill but just wasnt ready for it yet (2004: 201).

One of Gilmores informants, Jeff from Berkeley, described his experience at the burning
of the Man, the ritual of rituals held on the Saturday night before Labor Day after many burners
have spent some five or so days exploring the art, surviving the heat, setting up camp, visiting
friends and strangers alike, partying, being present.
In the beginning the Burn was complete catharsis. The first time, I had no idea what to expect. For
one, it was so different from the rituals that I knew my Bar Mitzvah was nothing like this! The
drums, the night, the flames, the spectacle, combined into an intoxicating whole. When the Man
burned, you knew something was happening. Shit was coming down. The old, the heavy, the
burdensome was going up in flames (Gilmore 2005: 47).

But one need not participate in any specific rituals in Black Rock City in order to be
connected to a shared experience of something outside the ordinary. Lest my suggestion of
being present above be taken as a new-age-ish, vacuous description of the obvious (viz. when
are we not present?), consider the following story from the Burning Man website posted by a
burner calling himself Gandalf the Grey describing an educational moment during his first
morning on then playa.
The next day I came out of the motor home with a cigarette in mouth, Corona in my hand, a pair of
Versace sunglasses and absolutely nothing else on. I could feel the sun and various peoples eyes
caressing my naked body. It was quite liberating. All of a sudden out of nowhere a man came up to
me and introduced himself. He was a Mexican, and from afar looked as if he were a woman. As he
approached I noticed he was man dressed as a woman. He offered to shake my hand. I extended my
hand and he then proceeded to grab my balls. I was able to dodge this snaky maneuver and slapped
his hand away. He then walked away. And then I looked around. Oh yes we were in the alternative
thinking district alright. We were parked right outside the Jiffy Lube tent [a theme camp where
anyone may anonymously stop by to receive a hand-job, no questions asked]. For two heterosexual
guys this was a very intense realization. It seemed as if we had done some sort of quantum leap and
landed on planet gay. We were not scared or offended by what we saw. In fact it was quite
educational.

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13

Later in his post, Gandalf did acknowledge the impact of The Burn itself:
The final and most glorious part of it all was the burning of The Man himself. I remember holding
my co-pilot up, with tears running down my face saying: this is the most amazing thing in the
world!! I looked at this girl beside me as the explosions began. She looked up at me with these
beautiful blue eyes and asked: Why are you here? I looked down at her, drew her close and said:
Because Im lost. We kissed as fireworks and flame exploded everywhere. It was epic. 13

My own first journey to Burning Man was also epic and inspirational. Having been fired
from a business I helped co-found, having spent over a dozen years in independent journalism
and instead of editing my own newspaper finding myself hiring a lawyer to protect my financial
interest in the company I had co-founded, I took a sabbatical and drove westward, away from my
crumbling home in Boston to participate in an event which those who had gone to before me
assured me would help me find some solace. Turner, paraphrasing Max Webers beliefs on why
individuals seek the corporate support of pilgrimages in times of stress summed up my situation
rather well.
The need to choose between alternative lines of action in an ever more complex social field plus the
increasing weight of responsibility for [ones] own decisions and their outcomes, prove too much
for the individual to endure on his own, and he seeks some transcendental source of support and
legitimacy to relieve him from anxieties about his immediate security and ultimate fate as a selfconscious entity (Turner 1973: 215).

After eight days in Black Rock City, I decided to leave journalism altogether, returned home
to finish a BA abandoned almost 15 years earlier and less than three years later found myself
moving to Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. My personal epiphany, like others at Burning Man, veers
more towards Gilmores definition of pilgrimage than Turners as Turner tended to stress
religious over secular transformations, however, that is not to say that spirituality is absent from
Burning Man. Jeff from Berkeley, above, looked to his Bar Mitzvah as a point of comparison
and in another quote in Gilmores article he suggested that the only event that had more spiritual
meaning in his life was his familys celebration of Passover (2005: 49). Conversely, Turner
13

http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/tales/GandalfTheGrey.html Retrieved 3/17/09

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himself made more than one reference in his writings on ritual to the Beat movement, hippies,
and other counterculture movements of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and how these movements
employed ritual process in a similar fashion as did more structured religious organizations. In
regards to counterculture movements and why the members of such movements may turn to
rituals infused with notions of the sacred, Turner suggested that it is during periods of rapid
social change when pilgrimages and other liminal or underground (as opposed to mainline)
manifestations of the religious, not to mention the esoteric and the occult, surface once again as
significant, visible, social phenomena (1973: 196).
Burning Man was likely born out of a personal crisis of its creator 14 and grew through the
pure desire of artistic and hedonistic individuals looking for an arena to express themselves in
manners unavailable at home. But it is also worth noting that the festival grew to prominence
during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, during the information age revolution (as compared to
the age of print, or the industrial revolution or the nuclear age, potentially parallel global cultural
revolutions which resulted in social discontinuities). Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis a book
looking at the links between technology and spirituality has suggested that during the boom years
of Silicon Valley, for the digerati, Burning Man became a place for people to burn away the
ungodly excess in a potlatch gift economy (Doherty 2004: 99).
While Burning Man should hardly be considered religious in any organized or traditional
sense of the word, esoteric and occult would not be inappropriate terms to use to describe an
event where tens of thousands of travelers gather together on the same day every year to witness
14

While the first Burn is known to have taken place on a beach in San Francisco in 1986, exactly why Lee Harvey
took some friends and a rickety man built of lumber out there is still a matter of mystery. Harvey avoids offering
simple explanations, To seek the sources of things that way, to affix great significance to the first act is like looking
for the tiniest trickle of a tributary that eventually flows down into the Mississippi and confusing that for the Mighty
Mississip. In fact, its the sum of a thousand tributary waters. [People] want first causes in a mystical sense, as if
everything radically emanated from some singular and unconditionally real event a just-so myth that explains
things like how a nightingale and the cricket entered our human realm There were all these things that led to that
simple act in the beginning and disposed us to continue acting in certain ways the answer becomes my entire life
story (Doherty 2004: 25).

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15

the ritual burning of a 30 to 70-foot tall wooden man. Chris Radcliffe, a burner since 1991 told
Doherty that early on there was a sense of something new, nebulous, but overwhelming
nonetheless.
There was this group of awe of what wed done. The synergy of the place, the statue and our
isolation taken as a whole made us realize we were doing something new. There was no imposed
ritual or meaning. We had backed into a new version of an induction ritual. By having this shared
experience, in this amazing place, it created a unity among us that nothing else possibly could. We
had this continuous group 'wow.' (Doherty 2004:74)

Jim Mason, a former Stanford anthropologist and long-time burner who credits Burning
Man with turning him from academic to artist has also noted that Burning Man is a place for
individuals to discover themselves anew through celebration with countless others: Burning
Man has become the reckoning of the identity and self worth of thousands of people. Its a ritual
of inversion, where the standards of everyday society are inverted and suspended (Doherty 2004:
11, 155-6).
Given Turners acknowledgment that socio-political factors can open the door for new, occult
and esoteric ritual to take shape which are unlike religious forms of the past, Gilmores secularist
interpretation of ritual focused on transformation, and Elsner and Rutherfords rich history of
pilgrimage literature from Greco-Roman times onward which includes both religious and secular
journeys, there is no need to play fast and loose with the theoretical underpinnings of pilgrimage
as a model of ritual employed transhistorically, transculturally, and across the secular/religious
divide: Burning Man, for all its unique qualities and newness, bears the marks of a modern
pilgrimage.
While I have stressed here those cases of individuals finding something powerful, awesome
and inspiring at Burning Man, Dohertys This is Burning Man also chronicles stories of those
who attended Burning Man and left unimpressed, untouched, disappointed and even broken. But
such diversity in the experiences of burners should not allow one to deny that Burning Man is
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ritual. Turner, in his attempts to determine the meanings of plants used in Ndembu rituals met
with conflicting and opposing definitions from different informants (1969: 60-1). Anthropologist
Donald Moore has written on the conflation of ritual and political roles of various leaders and the
diverse perceptions of recent history by a host of informants from the people of Tangwena in
eastern Zimbabwe (Moore 2005). Bourdieus Kabyle informants offered different durations and
different dates for the ritual calendar period called lyali. Bourdieus informants were not
worried about whether or not their practical understanding of when lyali took place matched an
ethnographers theoretical abstracted calendar (Bourdieu 1977: 105-6) and nor are burners
concerned about providing interrogators a homogenous account of a ritual as rich, complicated
and bizarre as The Burn. The notion that rituals can simultaneously provide for communitas as
well as independent innovation along with diverse participation and understanding of said ritual
is posited succinctly by religious studies professor Catherine Bell.
Ritualized practices, of necessity, require the external consent of participants while simultaneously
tolerating a fair degree of internal resistance the type of authority formulated by ritualization
tends to make ritual activities effective in grounding and displaying a sense of community
WITHOUT overriding the autonomy of individuals or subgroups (emphasis Bells 1992: 221-2).

By this time it may seem odd that in an analysis of pilgrimage I have spoken so little about
the journey itself (Van Genneps, separation). This is perhaps because while Burning Man
possess a sacred center (a limen, a threshold) and many participants are transformed and return to
their previous lives changed for the experience (aggregation), and although all burners must
travel to Black Rock City (it is in the middle of nowhere after all), Burning Man is unlike most
pilgrimages where communitas is, in its most intimate flavor a matter of the road itself
(Turner 1974: 321). From Medieval European pilgrimages where peasant and Lord walked
together to modern India where caste systems are at least blurred if not done away with during
journeys to temples and shrines, the road to sacred sites is oft considered the place where

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communitas builds and crests, often, because due to their popularity, the sacred centers become
too tightly organized (Turner 1974: 321). But as has been, I hope, amply described, Black Rock
City can hardly be considered too tightly organized (see PPP for more detail). Each pilgrim
arrives at Black Rock City in different manners, and from diverse locations. Some burners
skydive into the event15 while others travel through Reno, Nevada, the closest major city where
one can load up on supplies and take one last shower before eight days of sandstorms and
blistering heat. Some arrive in expensive RVs with refrigerators full of fresh food and others
show up with only a ticket and a gut feeling they will be provided for. In some ways, Reno,
Nevada could be considered akin to the first hint of journeys end in the pilgrims movement
toward the holy of holies, the central shrine (Turner 1973: 214). Reno is a common stopping
point for those flying in and meeting other pilgrims because it is the last major city in which one
can acquire supplies (especially food and water) before beginning the final lag of the pilgrimage.
Every year, increasing numbers of pilgrims drive down a long two lane highway, heading about
one hundred miles northeast of Reno, Nevada [where] their destination is the widest stretch of utter
desolation in the continental United States, nearly four hundred square miles of desiccated lake bed
(Doherty 2004: 1) Its a long, maddening, crazy-gorgeous drive out to the Black Rock playa a
liminal experience, a funnel that deposits you in a new, seemingly magic realm (2004: 50).

Along this last stretch of highway one may finally come upon other pilgrims in regular
number, passing easily identifiable art cars, converted school busses, stopping at a taco stand
(where local entrepreneurs have set up temporarily to take advantage of the tens of thousands of
hungry souls on their way to the festival) and immediately recognizing other burners whom one
has never met before but via common dress, smile, attitude, one immediately identifies and
strikes up conversation with these strangers as if long-time friends. The last two recognizable
towns along the primary road into Burning Man, Gerlach and Empire, remind burners with road15

A myth surrounding Burning Man is that anyone who skydives into Black Rock City is allowed in for free. While
the Burning Man website denies any truth to this myth, on any given day multiple burners arrive via air-drop, many
of them stunt divers, only expanding the carnivalesque atmosphere vertically into, well, the atmosphere.

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side signs that this is their last chance for gas, water, and gambling, reaching out, like their taco
selling brethren, to profit from the unexpected tens of thousands of visitors to these two tiny
towns which have a combined population of just under 500.16 The very last few miles of the
journey may even include brief traffic jams as the procession slows while tickets are taken and
vehicles searched for stowaways at the gates to Black Rock City.
But for these last miles, the journey to Black Rock City is unlike traditional pilgrimages and
a prime example of Burning Mans tendency towards inversion. It is a journey taken primarily
alone or, most likely, with only a few close comrades for the majority of the ride. It is not so
much in the journey but in the axis mundi of Black Rock City where Turners communitas
explodes. Money becomes meaningless, play and work blur, creativity and participation are
capital in this bounded place.
Earlier in this article (footnote 7) I mentioned that Turner posited three types of communitas,
existential, normative and ideological. Because Turner believed that the most potent exhibition
of communitas within pilgrimages was during the journey, he was of the opinion that pilgrimages
reflected the normative flavor of communitas (Turner 1973: 194) which he defined as a
situation,
where under the influence of time, the need to mobilize and organize resources to keep the members
of a group alive and thriving and the necessity for social control among those members in pursuance
of these and other collective goals, the original existential communitas is organized into a perduring
social system (Turner 1969: 132)

Influenced by his research into traditional pilgrimages where the organizing of thousands of
individuals from diverse backgrounds and seeing to their needs was of primary concern to this
spontaneously formed corporate body, it is not hard to imagine why Turner should look at
normative communitas as the most acutely expressed within pilgrimages of the three types he
16

499 to be exact, according to the 2000 US census. The impact of Burning man on these two towns and the
reactions of local citizens - positive and negative could provide fodder for another paper altogether.

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defines. While there is no doubt that the collective goal of survival mobilizing resources is a
common one among all burners once encamped in Black Rock City, it is perhaps in his
definition of existential/spontaneous communitas that we find a closer definition to the type of
communication and spontaneous corporate solidarity that takes place at Burning Man.
Existential communitas is,
the direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities which, when it happens, tends to
make those experiencing it think of mankind as a homogeneous, unstructured, and free community
(1973: 193); Approximately what the hippies today would call a happening and William Blake
might have called the winged moment as it flies or, later mutual forgiveness of each vice (1969:
132).

Additionally, Turners notion of ideological communitas, utopian models or blueprints of

societies (1969: 132) which supply the optimal conditions for spontaneous communitas to erupt,
is also applicable to Burning Man. I would therefore argue that not only does Burning Man
reflect well Turners notion of how it is pilgrimages provide communitas necessary for a proper
liminal space to exist and allow the ritual process to take place - but I would go so far as to say
that at various times throughout the pilgrimage to and from Black Rock City, communitas is
perhaps more wholly expressed in this modern ritual than in many of the more traditional ones
Turner examined.
Regardless of how their journey began, and the specific and individual predicaments of their
pilgrimage, once at their destination burners will explore a sacred site part divine and part divine
comedy. Some will leave healed, some hung over. But, as Erik Davis put it, the point of
coming, the point of travelling to Black Rock City, is to bring thirty thousand creative
individuals in close contact and send them back into the world subtly deformed or transformed.
Should we even be asking more of Burning Man than that (Doherty 2004: 283)?
***

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20

And what of Black Rock City? Eight days after the first pilgrims arrive, it will all fall apart.
The city is constantly either growing or dissolving (Doherty 2004: 3). While I have used the
term axis mundi to occasionally describe this sacred center of Burning Man, I do so in the spirit
of Eliade who wrote that in a homogeneous and infinite expanse, it is impossible for
hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred, to occur (Eliade 1957: 21). And indeed, tens of
thousands of individuals wandering aimlessly about the endless acres of the Black Rock desert
would not a pilgrimage make. However, for Eliade, a necessary center, an axis mundi,
heterogeneous from the bleak neutrality of profane experience (1957:21-2) must have a certain
permanence, like, for example, a built temple, occupying an ancestrally, mythologically marked
place in an otherwise indefinable expanse, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a
territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different (1957: 26). If
this center, the axis, the pole between earth and heavens was broken, as J.Z. Smith discussed in
To Take Place, Eliades model falls apart (Smith 1987: 2). Since Black Rock City does indeed
fall apart each year, but is again rebuilt the following, and it indeed is a different place compared
to its immediate surroundings a heterotope a break from the homogenous landscape of the
desert, it should be considered an axis mundi of a particularly Smithian (J.Z.) flavor. Rather than
a sacred place conceived of as already existing, in myth, and recognized in ancient temples,
made by gods and les histoires (stories and histories), and perduring for only as long as the
temple stands, the sacred pole remains unbroken or the priestly class can continue to convince
worshippers to tithe, the sacred place of Burning Man should be considered not the recipient but
rather the creation of the human project (Smith 1984: 26; emphasis mine). The Temple does
not make the people; the people make and remake the temple.

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21

Turner too noted the importance of large scale sacred centers and their pattern of separating
spatially the place of communitas from the space of the quotidian.
Where, then, in the complex large-scale societies and historical religions are we to look for the
topography of the inclusive, disinterested, and altruistic domain? The short answer, as we have seen,
is in their system of pilgrim centers (1973: 208).

But it is Kant who reminds us that if we are to understand the importance of these centers,
whether made with ancient myths and millennia old bricks, or temporarily marked by tents and
theme camps, we must remember, for all Kants apologies to Christianity, that it is from the
human point of view only that we can speak of space (Kant 2003: 26). With the ghost of Kant
as our guide, let us now speak of inclusive, disinterested and altruistic domains from a
distinctly human point of view, that is, the social construction of unique, othered, sacred places.

Part II
Playgrounds: I dont think were in Kansas anymore.
This isnt what the real world is like (Doherty 2004: 198).

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there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the consecrated spot cannot be
formally distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the
temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and
function playgrounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which
special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the
performance of an act apart (Huizinga: 10).

All the grand theorizing of just what space is, what place is, what physicists thinks about
space or what the phenomenological philosopher professes to think about it, or the geographer,
etc. leaves us with only confusion about something as fundamental as where it is we exist, or as
Heidegger might say, how it is we dwell. It is in his etymology lesson, Building, Dwelling,
Thinking, (1971) that he makes a rather prescient suggestion: being and building - our own
being in space and our own building of space as social creatures, or the universes being and its
being built (in the sense of the unknowable - divine? - acts that shape and have shaped the
universe) - bring together ontological questions of universal creation and attempts at subjective,
phenomenological understandings of productive action. We are forever defining, redefining, and
adjusting notions of our relationship between ourselves, the world in which we exist and interact,
and how, over time we are changed by this world and change it. The relationship between time
and space are only some of so many various ways in which we can try to understand just where
we are, when we are, how we got to where and when we are (e.g. contested histories) and what
we might want to do (and have the power to do) about our given predicament (given each of our
present emplacements in a variety of possible social hierarchies and physical/geographic
environments).
Given that there are so many tortured theses on topography, I borrow stylistically from
archaeologist Adam T. Smith (Smith 2003: 31-2), when I offer here some rather straightforward
definitions I have come to embrace regarding space and place and why it is I have preferred
the term sacred place for this article. My definitions are imbued with notions of politics and

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social power, and only flirt with subject-object relations. I dont claim to know or be able to
explain succinctly whether or not the notions of space and place requires a divine creator, or a
subject, or exist a priori, nor do I think many of those who have attempted to sort this out have
done such a fine job of settling the matter. But I do agree with Mircea Eliade, that when
homogeneous space is broken, only then do we have the opportunity to build something
different, unique, personal, perhaps revolutionary and paradigm shifting, and it is in these
places, that the notion of sacred can come out to play.
Space: is either unbounded, in an idealized sense, or with the potential for extensive (and
maybe infinite) expansion17. Any notions of boundaries in space are imposed by dominating
powers, be they conflicting governments, parents (restricting a childs imaginative notion of
a world ever expanding and daily presenting new frontiers) or the divine (heaven vs. earth,
mortality vs. immortality, the creator bidding into existence an infinite universe from
somewhere beyond). In this definition of space, both abstract/ideal and real notions are
perfectly acceptable so long as any possible limits of these spaces are imposed upon the
inhabitants of them by an authoritative power (be it real as in government, supernatural as in
the divine, or some of both, as in the parent).
Place: An area clearly bounded through the negotiation of subjects with each other
(culturally defined) and/or in contest and cooperation with dominating powers (politically
defined). Unlike space, where individual agency can do little to nothing to change potential
boundaries, individual agency plays a considerable role in boundary making, as well as
unique use of place. Place is best understood as a locus of meaning (Smith 1987: 28) and
as such, within any space, there can be multiple places, uniquely cut from the fabric of space
and imbued by a places inhabitants with design, purpose, flavor, fashion, all of which can
be independent of (though born from) the greater space from which place trends towards
some form of independence.
.

I will let Yi-Fu Tuan take it home for me:

Space is more abstract than place. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get
to know it better and endow it with value if we think of space as that which allows movement, then
place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place
(Tuan 1977: 6).

It could be argued, that given these definitions, place is akin to home. And in fact J.Z. Smith
has argued just that. Much of the value-laden, intimate, and meaningful experience of place has
17

Such as the principality as discussed by Foucault, There is no fundamental, essential, natural and juridical
connection between the prince and his principality the link is external, it will be fragile and continually under
threat the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality (2001: 204).

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been derived from reflection on the home place. It is perhaps an irony that home is most
frequently perceived as meaningful from the perspective of distance (1987: 28-9). Smith goes
on then (after a peculiar nod to Country and Western singer John Denver), to deal with a
conundrum that I opened this paper with regarding Burning Mans Black Rock City: How can
an empty space, the middle of the desert, a space where many of the pilgrims themselves have
never set foot before in their life, come to be described, and for many recognized, as home?
Smith answers by first quoting a particularly poetic and pertinent passage from William Goyens
novel, The House of Breath.
people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never
known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it
until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME (Smith 1987: 29; emphasis
Goyens).

And then Smith offers an analysis, that, along with Goyens words, I think few burners
would find exception with.
The nostalgic literature of home is filled with these sorts of reveries: moments of significance,
private or shared, incomprehensible to those outside. Home is perceived as the condensation of such
reveries. Home is not from such a point of view, best understood as the place-where-I-was-born or
the-place-where-I-live. Home is the place where memories are housed. As such, home is unique:
Theres no place like home (Smith 1987: 29).18

To summarize: A place is bounded, cut from a potentially unbounded space. A place is

endowed with value by its inhabitants, space by authority. Once endowed with value, oft
incomprehensible to others outside the place, a place can come to be thought of as home, even if
it is a new place, a place filled only with hope. I feel confident now that I can now move on to a
discussion of Black Rock City as such a place. Welcome home.
***

18

The very last words of Dorothy before her return to Kansas. But it is worth mentioning, that all of the characters
in OZ, were drawn from her Kansas Home. Oz is populated with her memories, an entrept for her, fears, hopes,
desires, and a place to address them and test them in ways she can not back on the farm. Oz is a home away from
home that in numerous sequels, Dorothy would visit again and again.

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25

The Black Rock desert is a nearly timeless expanse of space for most of any given year. It is
generally only through historical or geological time that one can contemplate change in this
space. Formerly Lake Lahontan, it has been dry for some 9,000 years now, and has, for much of
human occupation in the region been known as a desert. In the present day, it is only for a few
weeks before the Burning Man festival and for a few weeks after that it is imbued with a human
notion of time.19 As the space is transformed, as a city of tens of thousands rises from the
pristine, ancient, dead lake bed that is the playa, a heterotopia of deviation will be built and
linked to a slice of time that will be measured in considerably different manners by the
administrators of the event, who work year long out of San Francisco 20 and Black Rock Station,
than it will be for the pilgrims themselves (Foucault 1984/1967). The burners long journeys
have often already separated them from the strictly marked times and schedules of their
quotidian capitalist/consumer work-a-day lifestyle, and has emplaced them in an arena which
may only last eight solar days, but within which, how those eight days are divided, marked,
experienced, will be individualized, heterochronic, and unprogrammed to a great degree, marked
not by corporate, government or normative social apparatus, but instead, by an enormous peer
pressure to play a voluntary act, not ordinary or real life but rather a stepping out of
real life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own (Huizinga 1950: 68). According to Huizinga, play and ritual are one and the same, and just as Van Gennep
and Turner required liminality - and in pilgrimages in particular, a sacred center, to induce such a
threshold - for Huizinga, All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off
either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course (1950: 10).

19

Various parts of the Black Rock desert are used for a number of annual amateur rocketry events, occasional landspeed record attempts, and film production but none involve the annual extended stay and preparation as does
Burning Man.
20
Arguably a liminal space and deviant heterotopia all its own

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26

Foucault too was aware of the necessity of a differentiated place which draws us out of
ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws
and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space (1967/1984). For Foucault, these
fantasmatic arenas exist,
probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed
in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted
utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are
simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places,
even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are
absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of
contrast to utopias, heterotopias (1967/1984).

Foucault suggested that the sleeping car for a honeymoon couple, or brothels, cemeteries,
museums, or especially a ship (and I would add, particularly, a pirate ship), could be read as
heterotopias depending on who was using them and for what purpose (1967/1984).

The

heterotopia, like Eliades axis mundi, exists in a space outside, in a fissure of sorts, cutting
through the mundane, between private space and public space, between family space and social
space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work
there is a space in between still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred (Foucault
1967/1984).
The desert has often been conjured as the tabula rasa upon which culture could inscribe its
playgrounds, heterotopias, or sacred places. Whether Christs 40 days of temptation, Carlos
Castaedas entheogenic transformations or the oasis,21 all of which offer an unexpected
inversion to the landscape one that allows transformation, biological and spiritual rejuvenation
the desert has come to represent to many, an emptiness, a void, an opportunity to produce
difference and more so, a challenge. For burners this is a basic truth (Gillmore 2005: 52).
21

Recent research has suggested that oases may not be the natural havens once thought. In Oman, at least,
archaeologists are proposing that these places which break up homogenous space of the desert may have required
human intervention to be maintained even if they may have had natural origins. (Personal Communication with
Royal Ghazal, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago, 3/21/09)

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27

Participants must be prepared to endure a degree of hardship and sacrifice in the harsh physical
environment of the desert and it is not without significance that deserts have a long history as loci of
transformative possibilities in the western popular imagination Burning Man participants also
often make enormous commitments of time, energy and money well above the cost of admission and
supplies in order to CREATE elaborate art projects and theme camps (Gillmore 2005: 52; emphasis
mine)

It is in the act of creation that, as Tuan suggested, a small portion of the Black Rock desert
will be endowed with value and transformed into place. A few acres of art and anarchy, one
week and one day long, and yet these are not the important measurements of this place. For
Foucault, the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of
absolute break with their traditional time (Foucault 1967/1984). And at the moment each
pilgrim is welcomed home at the entrance to Black Rock City, quotidian time ends and instead,
there is only the time remaining until The Man burns. 22 The desert may appear vast and endless only mountains off in an unknown distance offer any sense of border - but the art and
camaraderie of Black Rock City and its citizens appear simultaneously bounded within the
simple arc of the city (see PPP) but infinite as well; there are an impossible number of people,
places and events to engage with.

As Jim Mason told Brian Doherty, The isolation [of the

desert] is important. So people go out there and lose track, both willfully and unconsciously, of
other responsibilities, and they are willing to have a great time of excessive play and excessive
work (Doherty 2004: 263).
It is through this excessive work and play that a place is produced out of a nearly empty
space. But not just any place; like Foucaults heterotopia, Black Rock City is a different place,
and, located between work and leisure, there is something sacred that rises out of this temporary
autonomous zone which does not engage directly with the state but is a guerilla operation
which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form
22

Burners can check the burningman.com website year-round for a countdown of the number of remaining days
until the next Burn.

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28

elsewhere/elsewhen the TAZ can occupy these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal
purposes for quite awhile in relative peace (Bey 1991; Bey preferred the abbreviation/neologism
TAZ).
Beys TAZ is far more concerned with the production of spaces free from governmental gaze,
than creating an opportunity for sacred or ritualistic events. But his language in describing these
encampments of guerilla ontologists, revolutionary origin mythmakers who strike and
runaway, whose autonomy is only temporary - here today gone tomorrow - and illusory - here
today, maybe over there next year (or maybe a few miles down the road, well let you know) provide a useful model for understanding the political/historical necessity for such autonomous
places. Beys essay on the TAZ begins with a nod to pirate utopias, islands which supported
intentional communities, whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and
determined to keep it up, even if only for a short, merry life (Bey 1991: 97). Indeed, the pirate
utopia motif is not lost on burners. By accident and uncoordinated individual choice civic
structure began to develop around Burning Man attendees began to take care of one another
out there, to build the structures of civilization, because they wanted to, because they could,
because no one else was going to (Doherty 2004: 58).
Black Rock City boasts its own medical center, wi-fi network, peace officers (Black Rock
Rangers all volunteer, no enforceable authority), department of transportation, sanitation,
multiple newspapers, low-wattage pirate radio stations, an airport and even a Lamplighters
Union (a group of volunteers who, each evening don tunic and turban and in a process part ritual,
part pragmatic, light the hundreds of gas-filled lamps that mark the main thoroughfares of Black

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Rock City)23. Some of these players are volunteers, some are part of the paid administration, but
youd be hard pressed to know just who is which by their actions alone.24
Beys TAZ is not a perfect analog for Burning Man. Bey implies that the TAZ is the opening
salvo in an anarchist revolution. Getting a TAZ started may involve tactics of violence and
defense (1991: 101). He goes on, however, to indicate that violence should be avoided, that the
purpose of a TAZ is to avoid altogether having to submit to anothers rule; one can not truly
claim to exist in an autonomous zone if they are still threatened by the authority of the state. The
TAZ, for Bey, is a microcosm of that anarchist dream of a free culture (1991: 101). Perhaps a
bit like Leibnizs monad, each TAZ in the present is pregnant with the possibility of a future
made of an infinite reproduction of TAZs (Leibniz 1991: 19-20). Lee Harvey, Burning Mans
founder, doesnt necessarily object to the notion that Burning Man is a special place that could
give birth to more special places. We want people inspired by what happens at Burning Man
we make a model of the world, a model of civilization, temporary but striking. We want them to
go home and reform their towns and cities and apply any lessons they learned to where they
really live instead of seeing it as a chance to escape that world (Doherty 2004: 268). The
transformations that take place, in this sacred place, need to be carried back out the door, through
the threshold, under the limen, and onward to places all around the world. Whether this exodus
of change be via a scattering of more TAZs, or more permanent efforts to effect long-term
political change within the current system, is a conundrum that is intertwined in the very problem
of trying to offer a simple explanation of Burning Man: TAZ? Heterotopia? Communitas leading
to liminal and transformative epiphanies? A party? Hakim Bey, perhaps lingering under the
shadow of Huizinga, might not think calling Black Rock City a party-place is such a bad idea.
23

"Clad in flowing robes with flames that rise from the hem, hundreds of monastic volunteers selflessly and silently
trudge through the Black Rock City at dusk every evening, bearing over their hunched shoulders the poles from
which hang the lanterns that they hoist to the lamp spires (Doherty 2004: 57).
24
For full details on Black Rock Citys infrastructure see: http://www.burningman.com/on_the_playa/

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The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual
desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for
erotic pleasure, or to create communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss (1991: 105).

It is this very affect that occurs when on the night of the Burn, The Man has collapsed and
the protective perimeter around Him is let down, and thousands dance and sing around an
enormous bonfire. All that is left of The Mans smoldering remains becomes a community wide
celebrated sacred center. A communitas explodes in an effervescent and instantaneous ecstatic
expression practiced by nearly all in attendance, from those who have never been to a Burn
before (consider Gandalfs kiss with a stranger) to those who have danced around the fire more
times than some of the dancers themselves have danced around the sun.
My goal of offering these various spatial models to define and understand Burning Man, is
not simply to understand this single event, or any other single sacred center. Instead, I offer that
these types of places are necessary, universal, and provide, however temporarily and imperfectly,
an opportunity to escape one of the primary concerns of anthropologist Uli Linke, that in the
ordinary, every day world, controlled by the state and corporate interests,
bodies are nationalized within the spaces of state, the subjects somatosensory skills, along with the
corresponding repertoires of affect, are pushed into the political field of vision: in specific contact
zones, the minutiae of bodily matters are brought into focus, into visibility, as objects of scrutiny and
censorship. In the modern era, under a militarized capitalism in the 20th century, these scopic
regimes become operative in all interior zones of life, from consumerism to practices of violence
(Linke2006: 211).
.

If I understand Linke correctly (and I may not), in her article Contact Zones she expresses
deep concern that an overlooked aspect of authoritys ability to ideologize the inhabitants of a
space can come in subtle moments, contact zones, places designed by the state where one is
perpetually under the states ocular apparatus, interiorization, discipline, and subjection by
desire which become, according to Foucault, integral to the governing modus of modern
political power (2006: 211). Linke stressed the physicality, the tactility of these zones where a

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nationalist propaganda of sorts, a political gaze comes to invade the crevices of everyday life
(2006: 211). Linke, however, was not entirely clear just what constituted a contact zone and
instead describes more the potential of such places existing and veers towards a vivid (lurid?)
description of the semiotic power of nationalist ritual and architecture, and their ability to intrude
upon and affect the ideologies of inhabitants of highly authorized spaces.
However, the apparatus with which Foucault has been obsessed with in his works, like the
prison or the institution (or one zone Im not aware that Foucault looked at much, the military)
are far better contact zones which quite viscerally and literally change physically the
individuals who enter them, leaving subjects transformed, scarred, disfigured, refigured, branded,
shaved, violated, cured, etc. Where Linke fears to tread, Foucault has gone (probably personally)
and in his essay, Governmentality, he describes the long-dure of the states use of a growing
number of institutions resulting in the formation of a whole series of governmental apparatuses
that make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence
of the state and what is not, the public versus the private and so on. The state, according to
Foucault, is less concerned in our era in exercising greater control over its territorial boundaries
(which are in the first-world, more or less fixed) than it is in exercising sublime control over its
inhabitants (Foucault 2001: 220-1). To governmentalize is not just to govern, but to do so in
such various forms and means, through a variety of efforts and institutions (as in
compartmentalize) so as to create disciplined citizens whom, ideally, have completely accepted
these modes of governmentalization (from mad houses to truant officers, red light cameras to the
FDA); for the subject properly governmentalized, the very notion of life without these apparatus
should seem barbaric, not a human way of living at all. Through various governmentalizing
efforts, authority provides for its population - its inhabitants - not only those very things they

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need for their good and welfare, but does so with a variety of wholly intrusive apparatus,
primarily concerned with securing the state for authority, but in a manner that disciplines the
inhabitants so thoroughly that the very notion of being without these measures is almost
impossible to fathom. To governmentalize is to instill a mentality of being governed; a state of
being so habituated to being disciplined and monitored, protected and inspected, so as to suggest
that any other state of being is one of vulnerability, powerlessness.
Heterotopias, then, are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak
about (Foucault 1967/1984). And while institutions can provide heterotopias so that those who
are perceived as different or may behave outside prescribed social norms can be geographically
othered, paradoxically heterotopias also offer brief moments of escape from the myriad
attempts by the state to manage our lives more and more completely and create a homogeneous
and ordered existence. For despite the often imperceptible grip of the state posited by Foucault
in Governmentality, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remains
the possibilities of resistance, disobedience and oppositional groupings (Foucault 2001: 354).
I offer the temporary autonomous zone as the antidote to Linkes contact zone, Van
Genneps liminality as the antidote to Eliades homogeneity, Foucaults heterotopia to his own
warnings on governmentality. None of these binary oppositions are exactly aligned to one
another, but as has hopefully been shown, each describe an analytical trend of identifying both
quotidian domination by authority, and various but perpetual efforts and opportunities to create a
place to resist, to innovate, to discover unique qualities about oneself, to transform. And even if
all these places betwixt and between are themselves only temporary, the transformations they
allow are phenomenologically persistent in immeasurable, but real and impacting ways. Turner
stressed that there is an opposition between social life as it is lived in localized relatively stable,

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structured systems of social relations and the ritual process of pilgrimage and its panculturual,
antistructural sacred centers, located beyond, and defying, the panoptical reach of the state
(1973: 191-2). For burners, Black Rock City - with borders made only of plastic snow fencing
and for sure invaded by the occasional state police officer wandering (lost) among the revelers offers a safe-haven a chance to live one week in a world where our own inclinations can be
indulged with no fear of negative repercussion and gives us the strength to realize we neednt
live in fear of what others might think (Doherty 2004: 224).
De Certeau said that a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as strategy is
organized by the postulation of power. He calls tactics an art of the weak (1984:37-8). Bey
similarly calls his temporary autonomous zone a tactic of disappearance (1991: 128).

Both

Bey and de Certeau describe aptly the type of place produced through the tactics of burners on
the playa they erect a place organized with a near absence of state power to provide an
opportunity for individuals to disappear from the radar of the real. Black Rock City offers all
within it at least some freedom from the governmentalizing apparatus of the world outside its
one millimeter thick, day-glow orange, plastic perimeter a chance to disappear and the freedom
to be, to dwell as fully and completely as one can bring themselves to do amongst cooperative
strangers seeking a similar opportunity.
Perhaps though, the most unusual example of governmentalizing that has taken place
during the history of Burning Man is yet another example of the events ability to invert the
status quo. One apparatus of the government that is omnipresent for the organizers of the festival
is the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Part of the Burning Man Projects

agreement with the BLM is to return the desert to the same pristine condition the organization
found it in before the festival began. Despite early legal wrangling in years past, the BLM now

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regularly compliments Burning Man organizers on their constant ability to erase almost entirely
any evidence that thousands of people lived there for eight days. This is in no small part due to a
constant mantra of Leave No Trace being repeated in images and by word of mouth throughout
Black Rock City. Pilgrims themselves are continuously picking up litter and committed to
packing out what they packed in. A combination of volunteers and Burning Man employees work
for weeks after the event to insure the land is returned the way it was found, including the
patrolling of miles of the aforementioned orange perimeter fencing which catches trash
accidently blown away from campsites. The citizens and administration of Burning Man have
done such an excellent job of preserving the desert that BLM has adopted the Burning Man
standard25 for Leave No Trace events and now requires all large scale events held on public
lands in the United States to meet this level of clean up.
As a result of a quasi-governmentalizing that burners have accepted and instituted among
themselves, the tactics of the weak have succeeded in disciplining the discipliners at least for a
short time, in this small place, each year.

Conclusion: A horse of a different color.

What is Burning Man? The second epigraph on the cover page to this article poses multiple
possibilities: party, sacred center, art festival all of these things none of them quite
something unique, heretofore unknown and still seeking its own definition, an inclusive identity,
an impossible ascription - for any one pilgrim will always contest anothers limited definition of
the event. Erik Davis, in his own contribution to Afterburn, noted, Black Rock clich has it that

25

From the Burning Man 2008 Special Recreation Permit Stipulations: The average total surface area of debris
collected from either the fall or spring transects [random sampling areas from the area permitted for the event] will
not exceed the equivalent of 1 square foot [of debris] per acre from any inspection area.
http://www.burningman.com/media/doc/preparation/blm_stipulations/08_blmstipulations.pdf Retrieved 3/20/09

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you cant say anything very penetrating about Burning Man because its diversity and
contradictions undermine any generalization you might attempt to make (Davis 2005: 15). He
goes on to suggest that the prankster-ish motif or much of what goes on in Black Rock City is an
attempt at an evasion of significance (2005:15). I would suggest that while many burners
attempt to avoid re-creation of quotidian meaning in their art and play at Burning Man, their
efforts are overripe with significance, so much so that the chances of any one individual
possessing enough knowledge about the signifier, signified and referent of any act, art, theme
camp, etc. and claim even a modicum of understanding of the singular - significance of the
moment is slim at best. This overabundance of meaning may remind one of Henri Lefebvres
tripartite scheme regarding socially constructed space. Lefebvres triad, three moments of
social space (1974: 39) suggested that space could be:
1) Perceived. That is sensed, touched, seen, smelled: the desert sandstorms pelting your
body as the sun burns your skin; the merciful shade of a campsite; the surprise of a 300
pound man stepping out of the darkness hugging you and staining you with his sandy sweat.
2) Conceived. The plan of the space by the architects, which in the case of Burning man
includes bureaucrats from BLM, administrators from the San Francisco Office,
infrastructure personnel and builders from Black Rock Station, and lastly, but not least
important, each of the pilgrims themselves building their own place within a place. Just as
each individual who traverses through the streets and camps of Black Rock City has an
individual perception of the event based on the small fraction of the whole which are his or
her personal experiences, there are also myriad conceptions of the space despite influences
from maps and an archetypal circular landscape familiar to almost all who attend.
Bureaucrats delimit the space of Burning man from the rest of the land under their
management. Administrators are concerned with a blueprint being somewhat recognizable
by the time pilgrims show up. Pilgrims, particularly those building theme camps, but no less
so the simple camper, conceive of space from an ego-centric point of view. All involved
with Burning Man have an imagined conception of the event, a process of their own ideas,
some of which bear resemblance to others imagination; some are purely hallucinatory and
individualized.
3) Lived. The juncture of the first and second; a spatiality that encompasses both imagined
and real experienced elements. In ones imagined map, one knows where the porta-johns are
located. On the trip there, one can smell the mix of sanitizing chemicals and human waste.
While waiting in line, one meets a stranger whom they will sleep with that night, while, right

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behind them, someone on psilocybin mushrooms ate tuna-fish left too long in the desert heat
and is desperate for their turn to make an offering in the little blue temple.
While I find Lefebvres model less clear-cut then he seems to believe it is (he felt it would
lose all force if it is treated as an abstract model (1974: 40)) it does reveal that attempting to
describe any place is actually an attempt to make sense of complicated and diverse references to
intersections of power, resistance, and other social and individual actions dynamically in play.
He acknowledged that the three realms of perceived, conceived and lived space should be
interconnected, but unless favourable circumstances such as a common language, a consensus
and a code can be established whether they [can] constitute a coherent whole is another matter
(1974: 40). While Burning Man has a common language, and a code of sorts can be found in its
gift-economy, general anti-consumerist motifs, and its do-ocracy including radical selfexpression and requisite participation, finding consensus on how exactly one should go about
practicing these codes is nearly as difficult as finding a repeating pattern in Pi. As I noted about
the festival surrounding the Lady of Guadalupe earlier in this paper, the same is true for Burning
Man: The range of the pilgrims expectations is impossible to gauge as a collective.
Each species of plant has its own needs of soil and sun and rain, said Victor Turner.
Perhaps what is required is to follow and love ones own path (1974: 325). And while Turner
was speaking of appreciating ones own historical religious tradition, I cant help but think that
his words need not be bounded by orthodox practices, particularly when he reminds us to prize,
minute particulars customary oddities and quirks even, as providing the best conditions for that
shared flow-pattern which is communitas between man and man, and man and what he believes
transcends him the fact that we come to communitas by a particular pilgrimage track or road
should not mean that we scorn or deny other roads, other ways (1974:325).

I have bandied about the term sacred throughout this article without offering a specific
definition of just what the word means in the context of Burning Man. This has not been an
oversight. Sacred is odd, quirky, differently perceived, conceived, lived, it is not an antithesis
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to the equally vague, profane as Eliade suggested, instead, sacrality is, above all, a category
of emplacement (Smith 1987: 104).

The sacred is that which takes place in extraordinary

circumstances, in Eliades break with homogeneity, in Foucaults spaces between work and
leisure, in Turners liminal zone betwixt and between. Burning Mans founder, Lee Harvey
speculated that all the great religions begin, not with some conceptual or philosophical
breakthrough, but with an overwhelming new experience (Davis 2005: 25). And from the
theria of ancient past, to the Lady of Guadalupe, to Burning Man, it has been shown again and
again that people will endure great hardships and travel long and far to have such experiences.
***
In Gbekli Tepe,26 Turkey, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has uncovered what
appears to be the worlds oldest monumental structure. Excavated since 1995, archaeologists
have found at Gbekli Tepe human made T-shaped limestone monoliths, arranged in circular
patterns with carved images of a menagerie of snakes, spiders, boars, foxes, birds, and other
beasts (Curry 2008). The site has been dated to 11,000 years ago, which besides making it the
oldest ritual center known, also suggests it may have been constructed before hunter-gatherers
gave up their nomadic ways and began staying put to farm. Schmidt has found no evidence of
long-term occupation at the site and thus believes that this ritual center was not a permanent
settlement and instead, that hunter-gatherers from across the region gathered here periodically,
pooled their resources temporarily to build the monuments for some ritual purpose, and then left
(Curry 2008). While Schmidt has both supporters and detractors of this theory, a theory that
suggests that worship and ritual centers came before agricultural settlements - the opposite of
contemporary thinking on Neolithic agricultural development27 - most researchers, including
26

Turkish for navel hill.

Among Schmidts supporters is Stanfords Ian Hodder, among those who wish to wait for further evidence
regarding the proposition that ritual sites precede agricultural ones is Harvards Ben-Yosef.
27

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Whitman Colleges Gary Rollefson, agree that Gbekli Tepe was a major focus for regional
celebrations or ritual activity (Curry 2008). Harvards Ofer Bar-Yosef has argued that evidence
of permanent settlement has simply not yet been found, It's impossible to have such a large site
without people there to take care of it. And while Schmidt acknowledges that a complicated
ritual center like Gbekli Tepe might have required a few administrative personnel he insists
the site was exclusively a ritual destination rather than a settlement (Curry 2008).
It would seem we have always (or for at least 11,000 years) needed these places, pilgrimage
centers, places marked out of vast otherwise ordinary spaces and filled with enigmatic symbols
which beg for interpretation even far beyond the lives of their makers. Burning Man is just one
of the newest reiterations of this need. If the journey and the experiences had at Burning Man
seem at times at odds with traditional notions of ritual, sacrality and pilgrimage, it is perhaps
because the problem is with the word traditional not with Burning Man. The traditions of the
pilgrims to Gbekli Tepe, Lourdes, the Lady of Guadalupe, and Burning Man are all, to various
degrees, inscrutable and diverse. We live in a world now where cultural change and hybridity
happen at an exponentially faster and faster rate and we have never lived in a world without
change. We are othering ourselves every moment of every day, exploring, changing and
producing relevant and useful rituals anew. To ignore this is to stubbornly search for connections
to a nebulous notion of sameness among, say, all the similar trees in a forest but not even notice
the beauty of the curious sapling in ones own backyard, which, like Leibnizs monad, is
pregnant with the possibilities of powerful trunk and branches and near-immortality like its forest
brethren, but unique nonetheless with near-infinite opportunities to go its own way.
Home is not where one is born or where one lives, it is any place once endows with value
and shares with others whom they open themselves up to. Home is connection; it is a longing for

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understanding. Home can be anywhere there is earth. Home is anywhere there is heart. And for
both burners and those wandering in Turkey on the cusp of the Neolithic revolution, home is,
even if temporarily, where the hearth is.

I hear her voice

In the mornin hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And drivin down the road I get a feelin
That I should have been home yesterday
Take Me Home, Country Roads
by John Denver

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