Neo-Shamanistic consumption at the Burning Man Festival
“Ritual” and “spiritual” consumption of psychoactive substances appeared amidst the massification of what Charles Taylor named the “culture of authenticity and expressivity” following the advent of the consumer society in the last half of the XXth Century. The Burning Man Festival, held annually in Nevada, attracts a large variety of such “neo-shamanistic” uses. This will serve as an empirical base from which the following question may be examined: How is a socio-anthropological analytic to seize the potentially religious dimensions of such phenomena? After outlining the general context in which these praxes and problematic have emerged, this article develops an epistemological critique of the two leading hermeneutic families which hold opposing views on this issue, namely the essentialist and differentialist approaches. These, starting from individualist and holist bases respectively, are both unsatisfactory and reifying. After having argued these limitations and shown how these opposed viewpoints form a system, this article suggests a third analytic allowing for a comprehensive understanding of such praxes’ religious dimensions and underlying functional unity beyond their distinctly festive (hyper) or “spiritual seeking” (hypo) logics.