Collective Identity on the Counterculture Festival: Burning Man Case Study

Burning Man festival, which takes place in the Black Rock desert in Nevada State, has been created as an event with unique principles of organization and representation of particular concept. The members of the festival express themselves in different spheres from music performances to creation of incredible costumes. The collective identity of members marked both by its organizers and the ten principles of event. Burning Man is, primary, its people which have a strong understanding of their social mission and collective identity. They are not just any passive consumers of modern festivals, but people of radically different sense of purpose, which use the festival as a cultural manifestation and try to change social preferences and norms and their everyday life. The purpose of this thesis consists in the research of the influence of the Burning Man on the western culture and finding traces of this influence. The problem of the work lies in changing the optics of researching countercultural societies, their analysis from the point of transformative potential. I try to illustrate and explain the collective identity of “burners” in the form which declared by the members of the countercultural festival. The main research question is how does this counterculture influence on dominant western culture? The work consists of two chapters, the first is theoretical one and the second is practically oriented. Each chapter has its own tasks. Academic meaning of this thesis consists in complex research of theoretical materials of cultural and social researches and actual modern works dedicated to the festival. This research work connects theory with practice and examines empirical material and archives of Burning Man through the prism of combined methodology.