The transformational festival as a subversive toolbox for a transformed tourism: lessons from Burning Man for a COVID-19 world

Abstract

Examining transformational festivals can offer conceptual resources for a transformation of tourism into a more responsible and sustainable practice. By thinking together two usually distinct scholarly treatments of “transformation”—those of transformational tourism and those of transformational festivals—the COVID-19 pandemic can itself also be treated as a spatiotemporal threshold for the transformation of the travel industry. This approach can also help deconstruct the mechanisms that sustain deleterious aspects of tourism’s guest-host divide. As borders reopen and mobility and recreation recommences, the capacity of transformational festivals—both within and beyond their highly porous time-spaces– to transform their participants offer lessons for the blurring, if not the outright obliteration of the demarcation between guests and hosts. The creative and pro-social responses of members of one such transformational festival culture—Burning Man– to this and past crises are presented as examples for how values such as participation and civic responsibility may help people overcome shared conditions of hardship, and support more sustainable tourism practices in the post-COVID-19 world. Such subversive inter-subjective inversions may bring the recognition, in-itself, and production, for-itself, of a shared humanity of co-creators and participants in not just ephemeral, but accretive transformational social and environmental projects.

摘要

研究非传统节日能够为旅游产业转变为更有社会责任、可持续发展提供概念性思路。通过同时考量两种截然不同的关于”非传统”的学术讨论（即非传统旅游与非传统节日）, 新冠状病毒自身可作为旅游产业转型的时空阈值。这种方法有助于解构旅游主客体间分歧带来的持续负面影响机制。随着边界的重新开放, 以及新一轮的娱乐活动与旅游者流动的再次兴起, 非传统节日的承载力（即从时空范围内外调控参与者的能力）, 能够为削弱而非彻底消除主客之间的界限提供经验教训。我们以具有创新性、亲社会行为特征的非传统节日文化的代表活动——火人节作为案例, 分析在过去及当前危机中, 公民参与和公民责任等价值观如何帮助人们克服共同的困境, 以及旅游产业如何在全球性新冠状病毒危机中实现可持续发展。这种颠覆性主体间转化将会引发共同创造者和参与者对于共享型人性认知的形成、生产与发展, 其影响不仅在暂时性的, 而且在增值性的非传统社会与环境项目中得以体现。

Keywords:

• Transformational tourism
• transformational festivals
• COVID-19
• Burning Man
• liminality
• communitas

关键词:

• 非传统旅游
• 非传统节日
• 新冠状病毒
• 火人节
• 阈值
• 共同体

Disclosure statement

The author has created art and facilitated Burning Man regional events on a volunteer basis.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Rowen

Ian Rowen is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Geography and Urban Planning at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A Fulbright Scholar (2013–2014), he has written about regional politics, social movements, and tourism for publications including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Journal of Asian Studies, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Asian Anthropology, Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology, the BBC, and The Guardian. Prior to earning a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, he worked as a tour guide, translator, and journalist in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere.