Do avatars weep? Ritual and sacred space at virtual burning man

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2020, the organizers of Burning Man, a transformational festival that serves for many participants as a spiritual destination, decided to go virtual. Some ‘Burners’ dismissed a virtual festival as a ‘video game version’ of the event, while programmers and artists developed online venues that would facilitate transformation, a sense of community, and ritual activities, especially those around ‘The Temple,’ the spiritual heart of Burning Man. Based on twenty years of ethnographic research at Burning Man, this article will compare the event in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to the virtual version by focusing on central themes that speak to the effectiveness of online rituals in the time of Covid-19. Through a variety of embodied practices like making offerings, meditating, and dancing that elicited sensual memories and emotions linked to past experiences at Burning Man, participants effectively transposed the face-to-face event in a distant desert to intimate spaces in their homes.