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by crassus2 4314 days ago
It feels in violation of the spirit of the event to have paid help in your camp, but otherwise Burning Man is for everybody.
1 comments

Radical inclusion includes people with paid help.
Referred to as "Sherpas"!
I wonder if they picked that name ironically. Sherpas are probably best known for being porters and guides for Mt. Everest, a mountain that many in the mountaineering community consider to be, now, a playground for the rich.
Because I never get tired of this fun fact: the Sherpa people have a great tradition of building new homes as a community whenever a marriage occurs, as Sherpa families generally are quite large and live together until such marriages occur. This is generally a pretty intense process, since the culture has a huge emphasis on household deities and that kind of thing [^1], so houses (and land in general) is a big deal.

I'm not saying that being a professional mountain climber isn't super impressive, I'm just saying that if there was only one thing we could steal from their culture I wish it was less about making it easier to reach high elevations and more about building things together that last decades.

[^1]: I don't mean to be dismissive, I just don't know that much about their religious beliefs.

But it's not especially in keeping with Radical Self-Reliance or Participation.