General Photos and Videos
The video to the right was part of an article that appeared in Politico. The article exemplifies the process that I am following through the Burning Man phenomenon: how do ritual systems come into being, and why are they such powerful engines for generating culture?
This is definitely not one of Larry Harvey’s better interviews, but the series of interviews and the article itself does demonstrate how fertile Burning Man has become. I am particularly intrigued by the implied links to technological innovation. This harkens, in my mind, back to the Cathedrals of Medieval Europe, and to the temple ruins of Gobekli Tepe.
Experience, is the word that moves beneath the surface of every discussion in the video, and it is the same word that resurfaces with such regularity whenever Burning Man is talked about. But what experience? Discussions about experience tend to quickly lapse into incoherency.
But could we be witnessing something along the lines of William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, or something closer to Nietzche’s Satyr Procession into the “paradox at the heart of existence”? Granted, both interpretations may have a slight ring of the academically dated, but have Post-Modernism and Social Constructionism interpretations really added anything of value to the discussion of why humans go through so much trouble and effort to participate in these kinds of events? Surely it is becoming increasingly apparent that these socio-political interpretations reflect far more the agendas of activist “scholars”, while shedding little to no real knowledge upon the human condition; which is after all the real purpose of the humanities. Do we need new interpretive models for understanding human behavior as we move deeper into the 21st century?
