Saturday 17 March 2007

Burning Man

A few years ago I went to a festival in the Nevada desert, called Burning Man.

I've just come across a paper entitled Burningman and the Ritual Aspects of Play which cites Huizinga and Turner. This paper appears to be a prelude to the author's PhD dissertation “Reckoning Ritual and Counterculture in The Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography and the Self in Reflexive Modernism." which also sounds very interesting.

I haven't read these yet but I'm going to leave them here as a bookmark for myself and any others who might be interested in reading it for me and commenting on their thoughts about it :)

2 comments:

Seth said...

There's a conference coming up soon at Buckingham Chilterns University along these lines. They don't seem to have anything about it on their own website, but you can find details here.

Gareth R. White said...

Cool, thanks for the link, Seth.

The conference appears to be organised by the "Faculty of Creativity and Culture". That sounds like a fun place to work. I bet they party.

Stripped of non-ASCII characters, the brief looks like this,

"This conference aims to explore how meanings have proliferated in the experience and in the production of space"

And this bit sounds pretty trippy:

"Liminal Space(s)
Victor Turner notes: Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, edgemen, who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the cliches associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other[s] in fact or imagination.

How can this notion be applied to liminal spaces as potentially [places] of scrutinization of the central values or axioms of the culture in which [they] occur, and unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized or fixed in structure (Turner) What are the processes of identification, transformation and re-appropriation which take place or exist in liminal spaces?"

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