Theater in a Crowded Fire by Gilmore Lee;

Author:Gilmore, Lee; [Gilmore Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 547588
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

However, a woman who founded and formerly ran the Center Camp Café saw this process as only natural. Individuals, she said, get what they need out of the event and then reach the point where they need to move forward and take that experience into other parts of their lives and the rest of the world.40 This too is an aspect of the experiences of transformation prompted by Burning Man. Although many individuals on this pilgrimage may repeatedly experience life-or perspective-changing encounters, it may be that these experiences cannot be reproduced indefinitely even if the festival itself, theoretically, could.

It has been said that pilgrimage may be better understood as a realm of competing discourses—both secular and religious.41 Burners do indeed engage in a plethora of diverse and sometimes contradictory discourses as they seek to make sense of their individual experiences of the event and to disrupt or reinvent traditional perceptions of community, culture, self, ritual, and spirituality. While events such as Burning Man may temporarily dissolve normative or default societal structures and open up liminoid zones of freedom and autonomy—as Turner theorized—they also reproduce and ultimately support many dominant ideologies. More often, pilgrimages can be seen as serving multiple purposes simultaneously, and Burners tend to see their pilgrimage as being “whatever you want it to be.” Furthermore, despite the extent to which experiences of radical life or perspective change are commonly reported by Burners, it is important to acknowledge that approximately 10 percent of survey respondents did not feel that the event had changed their lives in any way, and roughly another 10 percent said that the event had changed them in some ways but that other experiences in their lives had been more personally significant.42

Inevitably, the heterotopia of Burning Man imperfectly reflects the Utopian visions and aspirations expressed by both participants and organizers, as the event’s core values are not universally or flawlessly embraced and enacted by all. For example, although there are occasional acts of violence or theft—a few people have been victims of random assaults, and bicycles in particular have been a favored target of thieves—such occurrences remain comparatively rare among the tens of thousands of Black Rock City residents. On another level, those whose behavior is perceived as violating or undermining the event’s foundational values or who are viewed as giving nothing back to the community may be seen as spectators by other Burners.

Thus while Burning Man is construed on the one hand as “whatever you want it to be,” this is perhaps best understood as a framework for personal interpretation. As clearly evinced by the criticism lobbed by many participants, there is an idea of what the event should be, and this process too is a dialectic. As the parameters of behavior become more clearly defined and widely enacted, thus constituting an orthopraxy (meaning “correct practice” or “correct action”) if not an orthodoxy (“correct doctrine” or “correct thought”), divergence from these ideals likewise comes more sharply into focus.

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