Friday, September 23, 2011

Books on Demand: Burning Man Festival Book


Books on Demand now includes a listing for the forthcoming book version of my MA thesis on Burning Man Festival. Please take a look at the page, and consider posting it on your Facebook profile and Twitter if to promote research in Burning Man studies and religion and pop culture.

Burning Man Festival: A Life Enhancing, Post-Christendom, "Middle Way"


flap text of the book

Burning Man Festival is an intentional community and alternative cultural event involving 50,000 people that meet annually in the desert of Nevada. Scholarly analysis of the festival tends to interpret it through Victor Turner’s framework of liminality and ritual. While this perspective sheds valuable light on understanding the event, other theoretical frameworks are helpful, including the “homeless mind” and secondary institutions thesis of Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner used to explain the 1960s counterculture, updated by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead to include the turn to the self now involving life-enhancing secondary institutions. Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone also presents promising interpretive options for understanding this event. From these perspectives, Burning Man may be understood as an alternative cultural event that functions as a secondary institution and new spiritual outlet in rejection of mainstream institutions and religion.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
ISBN 978-3-8454-7517-2, paperback, 88 Pages

The book is also available via Amazon.com.

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