Religion Dispatches - Burning Man: Fear of an Alternative Pagan Social Order

Steve Matthews, an evangelical "cult and new religious movement and investigative journalist" with The Worldview Center, has written an essay on Burning Man Festival for SCP Journal. The first of two installments is out in the current edition of the journal, and in light of my past research and writing on this alternative cultural event, and that this week Burners gather from across the country and around the world, I wrote an essay in Religion Dispatches critiquing Matthews' analysis. In my essay I offer the view that Burning Man functions much like a Rorschach test in that individuals see in the cultural phenomenon either their highest aspirations, or their deepest fears. For Burners, it is the former, and for many evangelicals it is the latter, as revealed by Matthews' essay title "Burning Man: Preview to an Alternative Pagan Social Order."

After reading the first installment of Matthews' essay, reading another form of this essay on The Worldview Center website, and listening to his two radio interviews on the topic on the Frank Pastore and Janet Parshall radio programs, I provide my critique of his analysis, which as he told me recently by phone, is the "most fair and balanced treatment of Burning Man" in print. As the reader will see, I beg to differ, as I take issue with several instances of Matthews' analysis, including his understanding of Burning Man participant demographics, the theoretical lens that undergirds his approach, and his misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Paganism.

Matthews' analysis is common within evangelicalism, not only in terms of an understanding of Burning Man, but also the fears associated with Paganism and the New Spirituality in general. This dovetails with the analysis of Jason C. Bivins in his book Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2008). In this volume Bivins describes evangelicalism as involving "a form of religious social criticism produced and sustained in evangelical engagements with pop culture." In his view, this results in 'political orientations [that] are shaped and spread by pop cultural narratives of fear and horror."

Interested readers can find my essay at Religion Dispatches here.

Graham St. John: Technomad and Global Raving Countercultures

While I was conducting research for my M.A. thesis on Burning Man Festival, one of the more helpful sources was the Australian scholar, Graham St. John who did research on a similar countercultural festival called ConFest. Graham has continued his research over the last several years and has focused on rave culture. Below is an announcement concerning his new book on the topic, Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox, 2009).

"Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures is the most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and 'vibe-tribes' of the 1990s and beyond. Like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, St John's book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I've read in some time."

- Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

Book description:

A cultural history of global electronic dance music countercultures, Technomad explores the pleasurable and activist trajectories of post-rave culture. The book documents an emerging network of techno-tribes, exploring their pleasure principles and cultural politics. Attending to sound system culture, electro-humanitarianism, secret sonic societies, teknivals and other gatherings, intentional parties, revitalisation movements and counter-colonial interventions, Technomad investigates how the dance party has been harnessed for transgressive and progressive ends - for manifold freedoms. Seeking freedom from moral prohibitions and standards, pleasure in rebellion, refuge from sexual and gender prejudice, exile from oppression, rupturing aesthetic boundaries, re-enchanting the world, reclaiming space, fighting for "the right to party," and responding to a host of critical concerns, electronic dance music cultures are multivalent sites of resistance.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic, netographic and documentary research, Technomad details the post-rave trajectory through various local sites and global scenes, with each chapter attending to unique developments in the techno counterculture: e.g. Spiral Tribe, teknivals, psytrance, Burning Man, Reclaim the Streets, Earthdream. The book offers an original, nuanced theory of resistance to assist understanding of these developments. This cultural history of hitherto uncharted territory will be of interest to students of cultural, performance, music, media, and new social movement studies, along with enthusiasts of dance culture and popular politics.

Contents

1. Introduction: The Rave-olution?

2. Sound System Exodus: Tekno-Anarchy in the UK and Beyond

3. Secret Sonic Societies and Other Renegades of Sound

4. New Tribal Gathering: Vibe-Tribes and Mega-Raves

5. The Technoccult, Psytrance and the Millennium

6. Rebel Sounds and Dance Activism: Rave and the Carnival of Protest

7. Outback Vibes: Dancing Up Country

8. Hardcore, You Know the Score

Symbolic Countercultures, Rituals of Opposition, and Inverted Beings

As I finally finish working through my bibliographical materials for my thesis and remaining project papers, one of the books I finished last night is J. Milton Yinger's Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down (New York: The Freee Press, 1982). In his chapter on symbolic countercultures he includes discussion on rituals of opposition and how these serve or function as countercultures. In this section he discusses the belief in "inverted beings" among the Lugbara in what is now known as Uganda. He states that these beings "behaved in ways 'the opposite of the ways expected of normal socialized persons in Lugbara society today.'"

He then moves to another example in modern society in regards to witches. I will include two relevant paragraphs for consideration by Christians, not only in historical reflection on the past, but also with relevance to the contemporary pluralistic and post-Christian West:

"Modern societies, perhaps no less in need of images of 'inverted beings,' create them out of 'witches' and other deviants who are seen as living inverted values. In the the late medieval and early modern period a purely negative image of witches emerged. Witchcraft was no longer seen simply as a supernatural technology, now malevolent, now beneficial, for dealing with day-by-day problems. Profound changes in the social order - expressed both in expanding opportunities and in a declining sense of a coherent moral universe - left both the leaders and the populace at large with great anxiety. Witchcraft came to be seen, as Ben-Yahuda observes, as an independent 'anti-religion,' a blend of sorcery and heresy. In Europe by the fifteenth century, 'The stories and myth of witches can be regarded as the exact qualitative opposite of what was supposed to be the true faith, Christianity.'

"However much the image of witches distorts reality, it can operate as a powerful symbol of feared and hated forces loose in an uncertain world. Contemporary malevolent witches, if I can stretch the meaning of the term somewhat, are not generally seen as possessed of supernatural power; but they are seen as inverted beings of enormous and mysterious influence, dedicated to the overthrow of the social order. The 'witchcraft trials' promoted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, for example, developed a powerful symbolism of a threatening counterculture. The United States was entering a bewildering time. In possession of weapons of incredible destructiveness, it faced the fact that a cultural adversary (as much as or more than a geopolitical adversary) had also created such weapons. The world was changing in many ways at unprecedented speed. Scarcely able to draw the line against such massive and impersonal changes as were occurring, some felt the need to personalize them, to lodge their sources in individuals whom one might hope to constrain."

For those interested in a further exploration of this idea of the social construction of inverted beings or the "evil other" I'd recommend the work of folklorist Bill Ellis in his fine books Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University of Kentucky Press, 2000) and Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (University of Kentucky Press, 2004).

My point for critical reflection by evangelicals is to ask to what extent in a rapidly changing world wherein we have diminishing credibility, influence, and voice (thus resulting in our posture of defensiveness), are we unconsciously making inverted beings out of those in the new religions and world religions?