Sounds like a fantastic study. I am actually getting ready to go to my first regional burn event in May. I wish you good luck!

Hi there,
I'm an Athro major and my first burn was last year.
I would suggest doing post burn interviews as well.
BM affected me more afterward than nessesarily during.
I can't get into it on a public board though.

Of course, there are many people there that don't get the whole concept of bm being a "community" and are only there to party and have sex. But overall, I think the overwhelming feeling throughout the community is acceptance in any and everyway. Being accepted plays a huge role in how a person relates to their community.


On a side note, during my senior year we had a symposium and a call for student papers. Well, one student did an entire "enthnographic" report on Burning Man. After her presentation it turned out that she hadn't even BEEN to BM. The teachers pretty much ripped her a new one.

there's been at least one paper already published with AAA via the society for the anthropolgy of consciousness.

The abstract of the paper is on the second page.

sacaaa.org/2003abstracts.doc

Also, there's been theme camps in the past that actually do statistics at burning man. If they were doing it again, that would be a great project to participate in, and you could sneak in your own data questions.

That sounds really cool. I've been kicking around the idea to try to do something similar maybe with an emphasis on intentional community, and how it has spread. I've been to PDF, a regional type event a few times, and hopefully will be able to make it to black rock city next year. Good luck and please post a link to what you end up with.

>i dont have much of a goal in mind other than data collection

Expect to hear lots of "No Spectators" rhetoric...

i met a man in goa this year who said his son was in the ph.d program at stanford and was writing about burning man. you might try poking around on the stanford website to find him.

also, a friend of mine from uchicago, tony d'andrea, wrote his thesis about nomadic counterculture in ibiza and goa, and it will soon be forthcoming from routledge. his website is: home.uchicago.edu/~afdandre/ . you'll probably find some of his work to be relevant.

-a