The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture (Steven T. Jones)

Abstract

Despite the advent of digital recording devices of every size and shape (read: camera phones), there have been not nearly enough attempts to adequately document in brilliant photography and text the electronic festival underground along the West Coast of North America.Though Burning Man is quite possibly one of the world's largest if not most significant gatherings of freak culture and various media abound that render spectacular its participants, there are few attempts to portray such electronicultures in a thoughtful and insightful form.The same can be said for documentation of similar festivals up and down the left coast, from Shambhala in BC to Faerie Worlds in Oregon and Harmony Festival in Northern California.With Tribal Revival, something of this archival mission has succeeded, with 200 pages of colour photography documenting several years of festival culture and expression from the West Coast, circa 2002 through 2009.Initiated by and featuring the exquisite photography of Kyer Wiltshire, Tribal Revival is split into three main sections, each introduced by an essay by the ever-intriguing Erik Davis, author of the seminal Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998) and a slew of other texts exploring alternative culture, music and technology.Davis opens the book by exploring what the festival means to its inhabitants: Festivals can be a wild time, but for many participants the festival is also a vital space of cultural invention.Within the environs of the gathering, half sacred and half imagined, another possible world appears.Despite the variety of festivals and clans, certain values come to the fore: community over consumerism, the power of the Reviews

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