Context: The project investigates the European proliferation of Burning Man, self-identified as the world’s largest temporary city. Burning Man is an annual weeklong event attracting up to 70,000 people to the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Over the course of three decades, Burning Man has transformed from a remote art festival into a prodigious cultural movement with a global profile. Designed within a vast grid of radial streets established around a standing figure called “The Man”, otherwise known as Black Rock City (BRC), Burning Man is governed by a participatory, self-organising ethos. From festival to movement, Burning Man and its uniquely principled gift-economy have been transposed worldwide. Indeed, spearheaded by the Burning Man Project, this ritualised event-centred movement and its so-called Ten Principles has undergone transnationalisation, with its impact felt in Regional Events in thirty countries. Through the practices of artists, designers, computer engineers, spiritual entrepreneurs and other legates within a global “Burner” diaspora, the event’s gift-driven ethos has been appropriated and reinterpreted in these regional translations. Europe is the strongest region of translation outside of North America, with Regional Events in Switzerland among ten European countries.
Research questions: As the first study of this global movement, the project will investigate the dynamics of Burning Man’s diasporisation by way of inquiry on the translation and modification of its Ten Principles in Europe. How is Burning Man’s gift-economy recast outside of Black Rock City? What is the significance of this movement with respect to the dynamics of identity and community in the age of global consumerism and transnational mobility? How does a sub/countercultural event become a cultural movement? To achieve this inquiry, the project applies an innovative template comprising event culture and gift paradigm theory to demonstrate how a marginal cultural event is converted into a global movement.
Impacts: The project is expected to provide definitive insights on self-organised event-centred movements. A benchmark ethnography of a transnational event culture formation, the case study will offer an exemplary application of gift theory. The resulting heuristic advancements for event cultures, cultural movements and consumer culture will be of significant value to the disciplines of Cultural Studies and Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The project is expected to pioneer the field of Event Cultural Studies, enabling the establishment of a genuine Cultural Studies perspective in Switzerland.
