Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man

2002/06/01 by Robert V. Kozinets · 1,218 citations
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Art #Art History and Market Analysis #Art history #Business #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Consumer research #History #Media, Gender, and Advertising #Psychology #Sociology

paper · doi:10.1086/339919

published in Journal of Consumer Research 29(1), 20-38 (Oxford University Press)

openalex publication_date 2002/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02

Abstract

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. Copyright 2002 by the University of Chicago.

Citations

• River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter
• The Critical Imagination: Emancipatory Interests in Consumer Research
• Possessions and the Extended Self
• 13 "DOES CULTURAL CAPITAL STRUCTURE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION?" (1998)
• Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers
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