Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from an obscure bohemian San Francisco solstice celebration into the world's largest intentional community, anchored by annual burns on a playa in Nevada's Black Rock country. Participants embrace an ethos that radically challenges mainstream culture through Black Rock City's yearly (re)formation, negotiation, immolation, and deconstruction. Voicing curiosity, as humanists, in who we are, what we do, and why we do it, we examine rituals associated with this transitory yet international‐scale event. Such happenings imply a human need to seek clarity, dwell in close confines, and engage with a utopian desire for concerted communal participation. Yet, there exist historical‐cultural paradoxes associated with Burning Man, including steep entry barriers that reinforce an elite homogeneous population no longer representative of Burning Man's distinctive California roots.

By applying Bourdieu's ideas of habitus and doxa, this paper explores how Burning Man participants negotiate ideological and pragmatic limitations in transforming a vast desert landscape into an urban physical and social space. The ephemeral city serves as a model for radical self-expression with an internal society that creates an engaging participatory experience among differing and sometimes conflicting social institutions. Black Rock City LLC, committed to democratically and collaboratively engaging with festival participants in the production of space, demonstrates a realistic possibility for successful negotiation of pragmatics and ideologies while still allowing ample room to foster freedom and community. In examining these dynamic negotiations and their resultant influences on the physical landscape through varied lenses, this article suggests how Black Rock City might be a portable adaptation for other spaces of insurgency.