Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man

This ethnography explores the emancipatory dynamics of the Burning Man project, a one‐week‐long antimarket event. Practices used at Burning Man to distance consumers from the market include discourses supporting communality and disparaging market logics, alternative exchange practices, and positioni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of consumer research 2002-06, Vol.29 (1), p.20-38
Main Author: Kozinets, Robert V.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brands
Communities
Community
Community relations
Conceptualization
Consumer attitudes
Consumer economics
Consumer research
Consumers
Consumption
Corporations
Effigies
Ethnography
Festivals
Marketing
Performance art
Studies
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Summary:This ethnography explores the emancipatory dynamics of the Burning Man project, a one‐week‐long antimarket event. Practices used at Burning Man to distance consumers from the market include discourses supporting communality and disparaging market logics, alternative exchange practices, and positioning consumption as self‐expressive art. Findings reveal several communal practices that distance consumption from broader rhetorics of efficiency and rationality. Although Burning Man’s participants materially support the market, they successfully construct a temporary hypercommunity from which to practice divergent social logics. Escape from the market, if possible at all, must be conceived of as similarly temporary and local.
ISSN:0093-5301
1537-5277
DOI:10.1086/339919