Among the many modern secular contexts where scholars have applied Turner's concept, Burning Man, the annual temporary community built in Nevada's Black Rock Desert since the early 1990s, is one of the most frequently cited, since organizers and participants routinely describe its intended effect in language closely tracking Turner's theory, even without naming it directly.
Burning Man's structure maps closely onto the liminal conditions the main entry describes as generating communitas: participants leave ordinary social structure behind by traveling to a remote temporary site, adopt shared and often deliberately transformed self-presentation, operate under a gift economy suspending ordinary market relations, and are subject to a "decommodification" principle removing money and status from most interaction, producing precisely the leveling and unmediated fellowship spontaneous communitas describes. Scholars observing participants have noted that attendees frequently report the kind of intense, transient, meaningful connection with strangers Turner's original subjects reported, and have framed the event's deliberately impermanent structure, built and dismantled annually, as a strategy for preserving spontaneous communitas against the routinization into "normative communitas" the main entry notes tends to compromise the original quality once a group tries to make an experience permanent.
The case also illustrates the critical objections the main entry raises: some participants have noted that apparent leveling coexists with real economic stratification, since the resources required to attend are unevenly distributed, and that the event's growing scale has generated the kind of contested meanings Eade and Sallnow's critique of pilgrimage-as-harmony predicts.