The Burner, the Default, and the Communicative Ethnographer: adapting ethnographic personae at Burning Man

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the heuristic practice of bifurcating the narrator in Chamber Theatre adaptations of literature offers the performance ethnographer a strategy for identifying narrative tensions in ethnographic writing. I review arguments establishing the literary fictional nature of ethnographic writing and the subsequent use of metafiction by scholars to address the concerns brought about by “the crisis of representation.” I identify invention, convention, and recognition as narrative perspectives at Burning Man that are useful to performance ethnographers navigating the tension between chaos and legibility.