Tom Dawkins Burning Man is unlike any festival you’ve ever been to. It takes place in the middle of one of the harshest deserts on earth, in temperatures which often head over 100F (38C) by day and drop towards freezing at night. It has no line-up, no headline acts, and no promotion. Attendees are required to bring in everything they require, with no food stalls available when they don’t feel like cooking and not even a bottle of water for sale. And yet it pulls 45,000 people out into the middle of nowhere for a week. ere’s nothing on earth like it. Burning Man is a true community, literally the second biggest city in Nevada for the week it exists, and a place where people are bound together by the elements, gift giving and a shared love of art and expression. Burning Man began as a bonfire ritual to celebrate the summer solstice on a beach in San Francisco in 1986. Larry Harvey and Jerry James built a crude wooden effigy which was burnt during the event. Fun was had and they decided to do it again the next year. e “man” being burnt grew to 15 feet (4.6 meters) in 1987 and 40 feet (12 meters) in 1988 while attendees increased from the initial 20 to 200. By 1990 there are 500 people on the beach and the event was shut down by police without the man being burnt. It was subsequently re-assembled and taken out to the brutal Black Rock Desert to be burnt at a seperatelyorganized event focusing on situationist art and performance. In 1991 the first official Burning Man festival took place. For the five years following the attendance doubled every year, reaching 10,000 by 1997. Ten years later over 47,000 participated in the event. Describing Burning Man to someone who has never been is nearly impossible. It’s a vast city layed out in an orderly clock face structure with named roads. ere’s a functioning postal service and airport, and hundreds of venues, all organized by attendees, play a bewildering variety of music. Everything is given away, there is no vendors or commercial operations allowed. Vast and tiny works of art dot the desert playa, many of them interactive and designed to be climbed on or played with. “Mutant vehicles”, cars and buses converted into mobile works of art, from giant cats to Spanish galleons to the Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars, cruise slowly around with thousands of people on bikes darting around them. Clothing is optional and strange and
e Tribes Casebook
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