Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

The Baggage Check dome in 2009. My friend and I
slept in the rental truck on the far right.

Penn Gillette is an outspoken atheist, but in his book God, No he speaks highly of the time that the guests at his party all sang “Kumbaya” together. God might not exist, but “Kumbaya” is real. My atheist “Kumbaya” moment happened at Burning Man this year. At Camp Baggage Check, we performed a welcome ceremony that I had invented for us. It was a little dorky, but it went over well.

Here’s how I introduced the ceremony to the camp, as we were gathered in a circle in our central dome. “Camp Baggage Check is a place that we set apart. Here we come together intentionally, and we behave differently toward each other from how we would in the everyday world. One way that we designate this space as a special is by sharing a welcome ceremony together. For this ceremony, we use three things that humans have used in community-building ceremonies for a hundred thousand years: shared vocalization, shared music, and shared gesture.”

During the ceremony, each camp mate in turn says, “Hi, my name is BLANK,” and then the other forty people in the circle chant in unison, “Welcome home, BLANK!” The chant has a simple melody, just enough to count as music. We included arm gestures, first throwing the arms wide open and then pantomiming a hug. For laughs, I call that the “astral hug." This simple ritual is a far cry from singing and dancing all night around a fire like our ancestors did, but it has vocals, music, and motion. Some researchers say that we evolved particular mental adaptations that help us use these shared activities for group bonding, and I think they’re right.

This year was the first time we did the ceremony with the melody and the astral hug, and I was worried that my campmates would find it too dorky. Frankly, it sounds pretty dorky. But it went over well. People respond warmly to everyone else in the camp chanting a welcome for them. Now we're talking about adding a brief ceremony to do each evening before our shared dinner. It will be an original Burning Man version of saying grace before a meal.

Link

Singing Changes Your Brain, by Stacy Horn, 2013