The Archaeology of Burning Man

A few months ago, I read and enjoyed Carolyn White’s book The Archaeology of Burning Man. In fact, I blogged about it. 

Last month, I was given an opportunity to review the book more formally and I took some time over spring break to write up my review. Unlike my often half-baked blog posts, I tried to make this view at least two-thirds baked. Enjoy below!

Carolyn White’s The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City, represents a significant contribution to the archaeology of the contemporary world in an American context. The book documents the design, organization, and infrastructure of Black Rock City, the site of the Burning Man festival, in the Nevada desert as well as the creative ways in which “burners” celebrate the event. The festival, which regularly attracts over 50,000 participants embraces radical inclusion, anti-capitalism, self-reliance, and practices designed to protect the delicate desert landscape. Individuals and groups camp in Nevada desert “playa” for a week to socialize, celebrate, share, create art, and ultimately witness the burning of a number of massive structures at the conclusion of the event. White’s book documents the annual construction of Black Rock City which provides the infrastructure necessarily to make the festival run smoothly, the distinctive domestic forms within the city’s well organized blocks, and the city’s breakdown at the end of the festival and the return of the playa to its original state. The book is detailed and descriptive with enough of a theoretical foundation to frame her argument effectively.

After an introduction to the origins and current status of the Burning Man festival, White situates her work amid a quartet of theoretical perspectives: Henri Lefebvre tripartite division of space into private, public, and intermediary, Michel De Certeau’s division between the strategic and the tactical in his approach to movement through various urban forms, Georg Batailles’s notion of the effervescent as a way that society burns off excess energy, and, finally, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the smooth space of the desert and the structured and striated space of Black Rock City. While these theoretical perspectives add significant texture to her work, she leans most heavily on Lefebvre’s division of space to structure her description of features on the playa. Distinguishing between private, public, and intermediary spaces allow the reader to understand how the smooth and undifferentiated space of the playa becomes the striated, ordered space of the city. The use of Lefebvrean divisions also helped make sense of the tactical and strategic structures that shape festival goers experience of the city and the opportunities for the kind of wasteful energy that produces the festival’s famous creative effervescence.

The main body of the book consists of six chapters that document the construction, operation, occupation, and breakdown of Black Rock City. Chapter three outlines the design of the Black Rock City and its division into blocks established for festival goers and for the various forms of infrastructure necessary to make the festival function. Chapter four describes core infrastructure of the site from the main gate and perimeter fencing to waste removal, bike rentals, media center, radio station, cafe and ice shop. In many ways, these features paralleled the design of traditional cities with a commercial district characterized by the cafe and ice shop in the center, amenities, such as port-a-potties strategically located throughout, and service related infrastructure at edges of the city. Chapters five, six, and seven shift from planning and design of the city to the spaces occupied by festival goers. White describes the organization of household camps in chapter five and how residents used vehicles, tents, hexayurts, and shade cloth to create a sense of public and private as well as shelter their living and socializing spaces from wind and sun. Chapter six documents camps which celebrate particular themes from an activist driven camp set up to champion the potential of a homebuilt ebike to a more effervescent camp such as “the jungle.” Chapter seven explores the strategies employed by larger agglomeration of camps called villages. Villages, like theme camps, tend to emphasize a theme, but also consist of more elaborate and larger communal spaces for socializing, food preparation, bathing, relaxing, or showcasing village theme related activities such as yoga or a New Orleans style bar. The final chapter details the break down and removal of Black Rock City that begins with the burning of the festival’s eponymous effigy and concludes with the removal of every trace of the festival from the Nevada playa. The remarkably systematic approach to collecting “MOOP” (matter out of place) and to returning the landscape to standards set by the Bureau of Land Management has clear parallels to archaeological methods, especially those used by intensive pedestrian archaeological survey.

The final chapter of the book serves as both a conclusion and an opportunity for some methodological and disciplinary reflection. White surveys how the various theoretical models shed light on the dynamic spaces of camps and villages and the static spaces of the Black Rock City plan. The tactical and strategic movements across the city intersect with barriers dividing public from private spaces and celebrate the effervescent qualities that shape encounters with the Burning Man event. White proposes that the short lived, but intense dynamism of sites such as Burning Man contribute to the development of new forms of “active site archaeology” that not only acknowledges the tactical and strategic approaches to public and private spaces in Black Rock City, but also traces new methodological and ethical ground responsive to sites that are constantly in motion.

These final meditations highlight the most intriguing character of White’s book. Her inclination to play with Henri LeFebvre’s distinction between public, private, and intermediary spaces extends from the ephemerality of the festival to the book itself. White does an admirable job making public to the reader the correspondingly public spaces of the various households, camps, and and villages as well as the key infrastructure at Burning Man. In fact, the book itself represents a kind of intermediary space that mediates between the various public spaces at Black Rock City and the world of the reader. In contrast, the author’s experiences living and working at Burning Man remain distinctly private and out of sight as do many of the private spaces in the camps that she documents. The reader is left to imagine how she participated in the life of the festival, whether the festival represented a transformative experience, and the experience of working amid the chaotic blend of sun, dust, wind, and revelry remain obscure. Indeed, by obscuring her encounter with Burning Man, This clever strategy of revealing and obscuring leaves space for the reader to encounter the festival in their own terms and seek out glimpses of the archaeologist working behind the shade cloth windbreak.