Burning man's cult of flesh1: Embodied play(a) and the affect of physio-emotive residue on ritual patternings (the how we make is why we be2 of The Temple)

My goal is to examine the Burning Man event as a site and process of ritualized, embodied play in order to establish an academic frame in which to describe and analyze the lived, emotional experience of participation-as-event in/at Burning Man's physical and cultural environment. The participatory physical and cultural environment inscribes itself on participants in exponentially varied, emotionally visceral and personally meaningful ways. The flesh of the event, the formal conditions of structure and the subjective senses, are mutually necessary for the creation of the conditions under which experiential discernment as play occurs. I will show that uncovering the emotive returns of Burning Man as a ritual, liminal space is best undertaken using the theoretical framework of embodied play. Play is a productive lens with which look at the Burning Man event because it treats processes of inter-action as moving negotiations that fold-in/fold-out along the edges of perceptive and proprioceptive reality. I will fold my analysis out of the unfolding Turnerian liminoid Temple-event, the most harmoniously rich example of perceptive emotion in one physical space on the playa. I will show, through example and digression and the spaces in-between, that the depth of feeling and range of expression capable to us as humans is locked in the body of play (or the play of body). We must be careful in our scholarly craft that dichotomies are not set against one another (Turner 1986) but into play with one another. After all, if how we play is why we be, then the articulation of function is the art of my work. How does The Temple function as a ritual play of embodied space? How does Burning Man function as a ritual space of embodied play? These are the questions I will answer in the following pages.;1Davis 2005. 2Digressive sub-textual structurality for the proprioceptive scholar (engage participation by feeling free to click on the impulsively seductive hyperlinked text selections).