In 1980, I took a semester off from college to live in Summertown, Tennessee, in a spiritual community/social experiment known as The Farm. It was founded by a man named Steven Gaskin and a group of dissatisfied, creative, expatriate Berkeley intellectuals with a taste for anarchy and a penchant for mind-altering chemicals. The Farm tried to create that elusive creature in American culture — a society based on the free exchange of goods and services.
As happens with many such experiments, the inclusion, sharing, and freedom that the Farm embraced eventually led to its morphing into a microcosm of the society from which it was hatched: co-opted, subtly capitalistic, justifiably paranoid, and full of loonies. I’ve always been proud of my Farm experience, though. Despite its flaws, its existence and my part in it represented, for me, an important part of our national identity: we’re this paradoxical mixture of wanting to be self-sufficient, and yet we’re desperate for a social connection that reaffirms that we can justify the space we take up on the planet.
A similar proprietary fondness comes across in Brian Doherty’s This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, a balanced and well-organized chronicle of an event that began with two men — Larry Harvey and Jerry James — burning an eight-foot wooden man on a beach in San Francisco in 1986. Now their brainchild has become cause for a week-long festival in a “temporary city dedicated to art, liberty, and inspired insanity” 150 miles outside of Las Vegas. Last Labor Day, the celebration attracted over 30,000 participants.
Despite keeping what I thought was a firm finger on the pulse of popular culture, I had never heard of Burning Man until I read the book. Most of my friends and acquaintances had heard of Burning Man. How had this cultural phenomenon stayed off my radar? Okay, I’ve been out of the country since 1999. And I don’t own a television. But this is a big deal, right? An experiment in which you go to the boiling desert for a week and are expected to bring along everything you need to live and create art. An event in which our social norms are tested and broken. An event in which people coexist without violence, without commerce, and without judgment.
Doherty’s book fills a surprising void in the extensive “literature” surrounding this phenomenon. “If you don’t know what it is,” he writes on his website, “then you need a book to explain it.” And it’s true. His task is doubly difficult: The event has spawned blogs, newsgroups, bulletin boards, online clothing stores, documentaries, and a host of sociological and cultural studies and articles that make you wonder how anyone can contribute more usefully to the body of information on the event and its history. Serving as a testament to Burning Man’s Silicon Valley, California origins and information technology acumen, the event’s website is one of the most professional, user-friendly, and thorough sites I have ever seen. Based on his nine-year involvement with the Burning Man event as both participant and volunteer, Doherty decided that the event finally merited and needed a historical and cultural documentary. In a well-organized work of moderate length, he manages to compress a chronology of the event and its political and social landscape, biographies, and a surprisingly objective philosophy of social experiments that would pass muster with fanatics and detractors alike.
From his carefully crafted writing style, it’s obvious that Doherty — a self-described student of anarchy with a fondness for fire and things that make loud noises — is an ardent disciple of Burning Man. It is his dedication to the event that has allowed him access to a host of sources, including organizers, longtime attendees and performers, and past participants who've since broken with Burning Man, but whose insights are necessary to get a complete sense of the event's history and evolution.
He also demonstrates, without being too heavy-handed, what others feel is so important about Burning Man — its intent to bring people together in a creative community based on the free exchange of ideas and the concept of, for lack of a better term, reciprocal survival. He avoids making judgments about the event other than to quietly reiterate through example and anecdote that this yearly festival is important to American culture on a variety of levels, even if one takes issue with the temporary “society” that is created there.
The result is evident in Doherty’s vivid description of the festival’s early organizers. As if Doherty is ashamed to admit that the Burning Man “regulars” are, for the most part, the Bay Area community of literati not usually found in ghetto or on reservation, he downplays their level of education and professional backgrounds. The reader gradually realizes that, for the most part, this is a club of privileged white guys, however disenfranchised, creative, and rebellious.
Doherty is at his most effective when showing through history and example how the organizers of Burning Man learned to adapt and grow into their environment without forgetting the intent of their original experiment. With its compelling chronicling of a social experiment, This is Burning Man’s carefully detailed information allows even a detractor to understand and admire the vision of people who did not let growth stand in the way of their original intent. Even in the face of more rigid restrictions by the Bureau of Land Management and the neighboring town of Gerlach, Nevada, Burning Man basically remained three guys with a coffee can of money, paying to have the world participate.
It is this vision, however, that, suggests Doherty, polarized the two main organizers at that time — John Law and Larry Harvey. Doherty’s account of some of Law’s objections to Burning Man’s growth is one of the few times Doherty strays from the objectivity he has tried to maintain. Law became concerned about, among other things, the health of the desert and the permanent scars that thousands of visitors were leaving on an ecosystem that only appeared barren. Doherty writes, “To sincerely lament damage to the playa by Burning Man requires an almost mystical belief that there are certain surfaces mankind just should not touch.” This is key to the heart of this book and this event: Burning Man can be viewed as life-affirming, but it also implies a proprietary interest in anything we can get our hands on. Doherty doesn’t have a problem with that, and seems to have little patience for people who do. But his mindset belies the criticisms that Burning Man is mono-racial, quintessentially Anglo American, and economically and socially biased. The events that attract people to the desert for this week — self-reinvention, lack of sexual inhibition, willful and usually mandated destruction, absence of rules or control — are not seen as attractive by all cultures and classes, nor are they economically feasible (tickets now range from $220-$350 for admission; equipment and transportation can cost hundreds more).
It’s a small bone to pick when evaluating the effectiveness with which Doherty handles a lot of contradictory and volatile material. But when some proponents and organizers define the event by its creation of “a broad sense of participatory, collaborative, creative work,” it should be understood that this participation and collaboration is subjectively based, and therefore not as broad as some would infer.
If there is anyone remaining in North America who has not heard of Burning Man, This is Burning Man serves as the most complete primer possible. Future students of social movements who will only be able to experience this event as history will be well served by it, though it is likely the hope of Doherty and all fans of Burning Man that this particular history live forever.
Penny Newbury
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