Leaving black rock city

This account of a field experience is written in the form of a reverie, to match the conditions that gave rise to it. It emerges from my long-term study of the Burning Man festival, a massive countercultural communal celebration of aesthetic immediacy held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Marked by the suspension of ordinary commerce in favor of a gift economy, the spectacle culminates in the torching of an enormous effigy. This experimental ethnography follows in the symbolic interactionist tradition of an earlier tale told by Andrea Fontana.11Fontana, Andrea (2001), “Salt Fever: An Ethnographic Narrative in Four Sections,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 24: 147–163.“Urethral awakening dream.”