On the Edge of Utopia: Performance & Ritual at Burning Man (review)

Even to those of us deeply familiar with it, Burning Man, the desert arts festival held annually in northern Nevada, remains a strange and curious event. Fire, art, dust, and bodies collide and collude to make bizarre and unforgettable transformations of everyday interactions and ordinary aesthetics. The high desert weirdness of it all ensures that Burning Man continues to defy easy explanation. Rachel Bowditch, a performer, theatre director, and scholar, attempts to make some sense of the strangeness. She is not the first academic to do so, but hers is the first book to approach the event from the perspective of performance studies. For this reason alone, I thought, it deserves a close reading, because a performance studies approach might reveal things about Burning Man that have been obscured by other disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.

What I did not expect was that Burning Man might reveal things about performance studies. Bowditch recognizes early on in her research that performance studies, a very young field, has no native methods for studying Burning Man. So she chooses to adopt an ethnographic stance and to take on the role of participant-observer, with the ultimate aim of offering “the reader a glimpse of what it is like to attend the event” (xxiv). This is a bold and risky move: bold because it suggests a kind of fearless intellectual curiosity driving the researcher headlong into territories unknown, and risky because it quickly becomes apparent that Bowditch has very unorthodox ideas about what constitutes ethnography. The resulting book is something of a cautionary tale for interdisciplinary scholars who casually borrow theories and methods from other disciplines.

Doing even rudimentary ethnography requires a set of practised skills. Typically, it is an iterative process, requiring the researcher to record observations as accurately as possible and then to review these notes in order to distill a number of concepts and constructs relevant to the interactions observed. Turning once more to direct observation and interviews with informants in the field, the ethnographer tries to confirm or disconfirm, validate or invalidate the working concepts. Only then does she begin to develop a theoretical analysis, grounded in the ethnographic process of discovery. Instead of conducting this iterative process of theory building and analysis, Bowditch gives us what appear to be undigested field notes, a raw and unpalatable mixture of her visual and somatic impressions, along with snippets of interviews with Burners. She seems eager to show us the dust engrained in her notes and to give voice to stream-ofconsciousness thoughts, hoping that these can, through some phenomenological magic, grant us insight into the nature and meaning of the event. In an important way, her approach reflects one of the central tenets of Burning Man: immediacy of experience.

As if to hedge against the limits of this approach, Bowditch introduces a new theoretical concept or motif every few pages. We are told that Burning Man is “a counter-cultural movement” (5–7), a “secular pilgrimage” (21), Foucault’s “heterotopia” (80), Bey’s “temporary autonomous zone” (85), a latter-day Native American potlatch (103), a “utopian, counter-Empire performance” a` la Hardt and Negri (111), an exemplar of Baudrillard’s America (117), and a “modern-day saturnalia” (134) to boot. Typically, these theoretical motifs are abandoned within a few paragraphs, often derailed by minor details that have caught the author’s attention. For example, an analysis of Burning Man’s “Center Camp” as an example of a Goffmanian “front stage” quickly devolves into a discussion of who ran the place and how many cups of coffee were served there in 2004 (128–29). Very rarely, an exceptionally skillful writer – one whose compelling, virtuosic voice persists in commanding our attention – can save a solipsistic and impressionistic narrative such as this one. Bowditch’s prose, however, is flat and flabby and leaves the reader bored, distracted, and unmoved.

Perhaps the major problem is that the titular themes of the book...