The above video was taken on my first trip to Burning Man in 2010.
Burning Man is a curious social/cultural phenomenon. At the end of my JS888 series on The American Great Awakenings, I will be recording a presentation on Burning Man.
How might Burning Man be related to my conception of Technoanarchism? This will make a fascinating exploration which will include materials from my academic sites:
Society for music,Ritual, and the Ecstatic Experience (https://www.smree.org/)
and my Travel Blog
Professor Poole's Travel (http://profpooleifp.blogspot.com/).
Below is part of an entry to my Travel Blog on a Burning Man Regional. Here I began developing another aspect of my cultural model dealing with social differentiation, creativity, and the Ecstatic Experience.
Alchemy 2013
Emergent themes that I am exploring through my participation in the "Transformational" festival culture. NOTE: This not at all an academic article. It's just the seed thinking for a number of possible articles not to mention some semi-metaphysical musings and rambling thrown in. Theme #1: Creativity in relation to organization and labor. Creativity is, inherently within its unfolding processes, self-organizing. The organizing aspects are integral and emerge from within the creative process itself. Cultures are primarily self-sustaining not through the emergence of organizational social structures, nor by designated divisions of "work" and labor, but by the creative process that brings both organization and labor into being. With the manifestation of organization and labor, sustainability is made feasible as an inevitable by-product of the creative process. The implication of this idea is simply that culture, and with it human society, are dependent foremost on creativity; labor and organization are by-products. If creativity dries up, culture and society will dry up with it as an inevitable consequence. Certainly survival, at base, requires hierarchy and division of labor. It is required among other species and it is likewise for humans. That's true. But it is cultural adaptation that has been driving the evolutionary engine for humans now for millennium- as much, or more so, than survival. Creativity and ritual are cultural endeavors far more than survival endeavors. We might call it "accelerated adaptation", or 'self-directed adaptation", but certainly we are adapting to our own created circumstances, our own cultural environment as much as to the environmental circumstances our distant ancestors adapted to. Theme #2: Emergent Ritual as experiential intensification in relation to labor and organization Ritual, in the case of Burning Man and its regionals, Fire Rituals (the Man), and the Rites of Passage, or death rituals (the Temple), seems to "ignite", in certain peoples, the creative process. And that process seems to in turn generate culture. What might be the relationships between creativity, ritual, and culture, in terms of labor and self-organization?
The rest of the post is here: