ABSTRACT
Burning Man is a week-long event held every year in the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, Nevada. Burning Man is widely considered, by organizers, participants and media people participating within the event and commenting outside of it, to be about the creation of a primitive and sacred Utopian space. This space is alleged to epitomize the leading edge of twenty-first century-community but also to manifest the retro power and psychic energy inherent in the primitive. Burning Man is perhaps as much about sense of time as it is about any collective or cultural sense of the primitive. The ritual power of the primitive is particularly useful and interesting at Burning Man because it is juxtaposed so vividly and so consistently with the modern, the postmodern, the digital, the futuristic, the high tech. Holidays, festivals, wild parties, and other gatherings of many sorts might not be political movements the people can easily recognize as such, but they may be youtopian moments.
