Afterburn

by Gilmore, Lee M.

• ISBN13: 9780826333995
• ISBN10: 0826333990
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-31
• Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr

Summary

The Burning Man Festival is a weeklong spasm of radical self-expression held annually just before Labour Day since 1986. In late August 2003, more than 33,000 participants converged in Nevada's Black Rock Desert for this counterculture event staged as an experiment in temporary community. The participants gather to rid themselves of the conventional structures of their life and to 'sample' the alternatives in hundreds of theme camps. The climax of the festival comes when attendees erupt into cheers and applause at the burning of a forty-foot-tall human effigy described as 'part pre-technological idol and part post-technological puppet'. Both Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen have attended Burning Man annually since 1996.

Author Biography

Mark Van Proyen is associate professor of art history, painting, and digital media at the San Francisco Art Institute. Lee Gilmore teaches at the Star King School for the Minsitry in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	viii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
Lee Gilmore
Mark Van Proyen
Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man	15	(28)
Erik Davis
Fires of the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man	43	(22)
Lee Gilmore
Participant Observation and the Study of Self: Burning Man as Ethnographic Experience	65	(22)
Jeremy Hockett
Welcome to the Black Rock Cafe	87	(22)
Robert V. Kozinets
John F. Sherry Jr.
Incendiary Incentives: How the Burning Man Organization Motivates and Manages Volunteers	109	(22)
Katherine K. Chen
Kaleidoscopic Cortege: Art Cars at Burning Man, and Beyond	131	(20)
JoAnne Northrup
Utopia, Social Sculpture, and Burning Man	151	(22)
Allegra Fortunati
A Tale of Two Surrealities	173	(22)
Mark Van Proyen
No Novenas for the Dead: Ritual Action and Communal Memory at the Temple of Tears	195	(20)
Sarah M. Pike
Contributors	215	(2)
Index	217