Judith Schossböck — Identity & Transformation in Regional Burning Man Communities: Contrasting the Chinese Case

This paper describes the production of locality in the context of a global(ized) cultural phenomenon: the regional variants of Burning Man from a comparative perspective. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with community-leads in different responsibilities of regional Burning Man events in Europe and Asia (specifically the Chinese region), regional characteristics will be described with view to three events in China: Dragon Burn, Nanjing Decompression and Burner fundraising events in Shanghai. The author describes the expression of a local culture with view to self-identification and the transformational experience as self-reported by community-leads and compares and contrasts these findings to the European case. Results showcase the transformative potential for the individual embedded in the specific locality and social morphology of the Chinese regional community.