The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White Mark C. Childs (bio) Carolyn L. White The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020 xvi + 262 pages, 75 black-and-white figures, 6 tables ISBN: 9780826361332, $75.00 HB ISBN: 9780826363930, $34.95 PB ISBN: 9780826361349, $75.00 EB The boundaries of disciplines and professions are evolving cultural constructs.1 Author Carolyn White—the Mamie Kleberg Chair in Historic Preservation, director of the Historic Preservation Program, and director of the Anthropology Research Museum at the University of Nevada—explicitly positions her own work within the ongoing construction of disciplines in The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City. Following anthropologist James Deetz’s view of “the fields of archaeology, history, and cultural anthropology as pursuing the same object,”2 White participated in and studied the “mundane” aspects of the place called Black Rock City, the annual encampment of the Burning Man Festival in northern Nevada, each year from 2008 to 2016 (23). The framing of the book may be of particular interest to readers of Buildings & Landscapes, as three main themes weave throughout it: documenting daily life, attention to temporality, and reconsidering practices of archaeology. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the framework for White’s research. In chapter 1, White situates her work in a review of the emergence of the practices of contemporary archaeology as well as the history and literature of Burning Man. She focuses primarily upon “how people live on a daily basis in the city and how the mundane character of daily life takes place in this temporary place” (31). Chapter 2 describes her theoretical grounding. To structure her documentation and interpretation of the site, White uses Lefebvrian tripartite space (conceived–perceived–lived), de Certeau’s strategies and tactics, Bataille’s framework on the social expenditure of wealth (the accursed share), De Landa’s meshwork, and Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth and striated space.3 There is a danger of overcomplication from such a conceptual toolkit, but White uses these concepts to clearly organize and ground her observations as she gives us the gritty details of building, inhabiting, and de-constructing the encampment. Chapters 3 through 8 follow a narrative arc from construction, to occupation, to decamping. Much of this work could inform the practical parts of a travel guide; however, its directness causes these chapters to read somewhat like a checklist. Construction of the Man starts the event (the Man is a multistory wooden effigy at the center point of the urban form, and the hub of the event). “In cooperation with the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], the central point of the city, the location where the Man will stand, is pinpointed. . . . The Golden Spike ceremony formally kicks off the build cycle of Burning Man” (57). White documents the construction, inhabitation, and deconstruction practices not only of the Man but also of showers and greywater systems, furniture and food, community and private spaces, fuel and garbage systems, but even these “mundane” practices have extraordinary aspects. For example, the exceptional efforts the Burning Man community makes to limit and remediate MOOP (“matter out of place,” or litter) are interwoven throughout these everyday practices. Materials such as glitter are banned; greywater is evaporated rather than poured out to avoid contaminating the playa; surfaces are built and removed to allow fires. After Exodus (people leaving the city), a highly planned clean-up takes place in three phases—teardown, playa restoration, and inspection. Burning Man is a short-lived annual encampment whose parts are being decommissioned even as others are being constructed and inhabited. The same is true of all settlements on different time scales, but other festival grounds, markets, camps of seasonally migrating peoples, and pilgrimage sites share Burning Man’s chronological pattern. Some of the earliest known settlements, the fourth-millennium BCE Trypillia megasites in Ukraine, also may have been seasonally occupied.4 As White notes, Black Rock City “is a place where the rhythm of daily life is accelerated and where all archaeologists might imagine the role that...