Before I tell the story, let me define a couple of key terms and their relevance to this book, particularly my use of “tribe” and “counterculture,” both imprecise words that largely depend on their context. But they also seem like the best words to describe what I think is important about Burning Man post-2004.
A definite tribal aesthetic crept its way into the fashions and costumes of Burning Man in the early 2000s, with the “feather and leather” look popularized by camps such as El Circo and designers like the late Tiffa Nova becoming a popular burner look by 2006. And there’s certainly something inherently tribal about this particular pow-wow, where groups from across the land come to dance around big fires.
But neither meaning was what I had in mind when I chose the title for this book. I meant to convey the most basic definition of a tribe, that of a division of society whose members share certain customs, beliefs, and leadership, even if that leadership is disbursed among members in a non-hierarchical fashion.
Rather than the ethnic tribes of Native Americans or Afghanis, I was thinking more about the extended social groups from big cities across the country that developed a family-like cohesiveness, as writer Ethan Watters discussed in his acclaimed 2003 book, Urban Tribes: A generation redefines friendship, family, and commitment. (the paperback version even had a new and more intriguing subhead: Are friends the new family?)
In fact, Watters is also a San Franciscan who attends Burning Man, a fact that greatly informs his work and his coining of the term “Urban Tribe.” The year-round planning and preparation for Burning Man — and the deep interpersonal connections that are forged or strengthened on the playa — was some of the strongest glue that bound his tribe and others together.
“’Whatever happened to getting married?’ I asked a carful of friends. This was half a dozen years ago while we were on our way to Burning Man. The U-Haul trailer we were pulling carried two dozen eight-foot lengths of two-by-fours, thirty bedsheets, a couple hundred yards of rope, thirty cases of beer, and all the other makings of our homegrown art project,” was how Watters began his first chapter.
He then explored the social dynamics of these tribes, which had become like surrogate families for many big city denizens, and profiled and discussed a wide variety of tribes from big cities across the U.S. It was a fairly new phenomenon that was related to the fact that many young urban residents were delaying marriage until their 30s and 40s. Watters saw important social significance in how these tribes formed and behaved.
“That the meaning and momentum of an urban tribe might exist outside the combined strength of the individual friendships — that the tribe might have a life of its own — was one distinction these groups had from groups of friends one might have at other points in life,” Watters wrote.
Urban tribes can exist in many forms, but as Burning Man endured and became an annual pilgrimage for a growing number of people — particularly in the Bay Area, its most fertile breeding ground — I realized that the event had spawned a fascinating and interconnected network of these urban tribes, many of which had a life and longevity that was beyond the control of any of the individual members who cycled through them over the years. And Burning Man was a touchstone for these groups, in cities through the world.
“You can go all over the country and meet people connected to the Burning Man culture, and you feel a real and instant kinship with them,” Watters told me in 2010 as we discussed the intersection of his book and mine. Since he explored the question in 2003, Burning Man had both fed and been fed by the social dynamics that Watters discovered.
Could Burning Man really have achieved the longevity and continuing dynamism that it did if there weren’t these urban tribes to create it anew every year? And could these urban tribes have continued for so long without an event like Burning Man and its projects to rally around? The energy of the two sides certainly kept the coin spinning.
And what began to interest me even more was this question: Is Black Rock City best understood as a well-developed urban culture, a city comprised of myriad urban tribes from around the world that pull together for one week out of the year, but continue to shape their surroundings year-round?
“It is a book-worthy question,” Watters told me, giving me a few things to think about as I explored the question, from the role the playa’s challenging environment plays in shaping tribes to the importance of women in triggering this new generation’s “ambient energy” to the fact that “these groups can produce as much human capital as you put into them.”
These tribes became incredibly important in the lives of many of their members, altering their conception of themselves and the world in which they lived. The culture that Burning Man helped create began to have a real and tangible impact on San Francisco and other cities. These tribes, and their values and rituals, were altering the culture in their cities.
Eric Meyers, a longtime burner who is one of the editors who generously donated his time to improving this book, took issue with my “counterculture” label, arguing that it was the American culture itself that Burning Man was helping to shape, not simply those who actively resist the larger culture.
“I also feel that BRC is the farthest thing from counterculture out there — cuz it’s not anti-anything. It’s more of a parallel culture or a benign shadow culture or an alternative culture,” he wrote to me, a point that you’ll hear event founder Larry Harvey echo later in this book.
And it was a good point, but one that I don’t quite agree with, mostly because I think people are drawn to Burning Man precisely because of its countercultural attributes, and they are what have the most powerful and transformative impact on those who attend. Black Rock City stands apart from the larger world — indeed, that’s what makes it so special to people and so enduring.
Within a capitalist world, our personas and social standing are often derived from the job we hold or career we have chosen (which itself is often limited by our class and family connections), our environments are usually regulated by corporate or government entities, and many of our daily social interactions are actually economic transactions. We aren’t exactly who we really are, so most burners refer to this as the Default World.
The central tenets of Burning Man stand starkly opposed to such paradigms — indeed, deliberately challenging them. Participants are encouraged to build the city of their dreams with almost no regulations or limitations, most economic transactions are prohibited in favor of a gift economy, and the encouragement of “radical self-expression” allows participants to pick any persona they choose (right down to picking a new “playa name” if they’d like), while the twin ethos of self-reliance and participation create the expectation of a far more engaged citizenry than the real world asks of us.
In 2004, writers Ken Goffman (aka R.U. Sirius) and Dan Joy weighed in on defining the term with their book Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, seeing the same distinction that I’m trying to make: that there are aspects to countercultures that define them by more than just distance from the dominant culture.
As they write, “…we reject the definition of counterculture as simply any lifestyle that differs from the prevailing culture. Clearly, the definition of counterculture is up for grabs, but we contend that, whatever their differences, there is a singular mutual intention motivating nearly all who defined themselves in countercultural terms up until the last few years. They were all anti-authoritarian or nonauthoritarian. Our defining vision asserts that the essence of counterculture as a perennial historical phenomenon is characterized by the affirmation of the individual’s power to create his own life rather than accepting the dictates of surrounding social authorities and conventions, be they mainstream or subcultural. We further assert that freedom of communication is an essential characteristic of counterculture, since affirmative contact holds the key to liberating each individual’s creative power.”
That last notion is at the very core of Burning Man. When someone decides to make fire art with the Flaming Lotus Girls or build a dance camp with Opulent Temple or build the outlines of Black Rock City with the Department of Public Works or create a camp and weird art project from scratch with a bunch of their friends, they choose what kind of person they want to be in this strange new world. They choose how to express whatever creative energy they feel welling up inside of them.
Goffman and Joy overtly place Burning Man on their list of modern countercultures: “Punks, avant-garde artists, the hip-hop underground, anti-globalization activists and Black Bloc anarchists, Wired-reading technoculturalists and hacks, club culture trendoids, conscious rappers, educated psychedelicists, Burning Man, modern primitives with steel implants and piercings dangling from every organ, denizens of the sexual underground, pagans, postmodern academics, funkateer, New Agers, riot grrls, slackers, ravers, natty dreadsters, Zen Buddhists, Gnostics, lonely iconoclasts, Deadheads, poetry slammers, Goths, tree huggers, libertines, and libertarians — all are sometimes defined (and self-defined) as countercultural.”
Yet it doesn’t feel quite right to place Burning Man on a list that is actually comprised of many of Black Rock City’s component groups of citizens. Indeed, many of the thousands of theme camps at the event overtly define themselves with many of the labels above, from the dance camp ravers to Death Guild denizens to the polyamorous players of Space Virgins.
In a society that generally restricts the activities and reach of countercultures, Burning Man courts and magnifies smaller subcultures, giving them a home and base of operations. Perhaps that’s why Burning Man has endured for so much longer than most countercultures, because it isn’t a counterculture as much as a space that reflects and helps shape a wide variety of distinct subcultures, ultimately giving these disparate groups a bit of shared culture, uniting them into a new American counterculture.