Desert Pilgrim

After the crisis of representation, alternative forms of research representation have appeared increasingly within the social sciences. This poem is based on consumer research fieldwork conducted in 1999 at the Burning Man project, a countercultural and antimarketing event that occurs annually near Gerlach, Nevada. Incorporating informant interview data, the poem is intended to reflexively capture some of the emotional intensity, creative, utopian and self-transformative possibilities of attending the event, and to simultaneously reflect upon the self-conscious tensions inherent in ethnographic fieldwork.