Burning Man is one of the West’s most important event-culture, which assembles over 70’000 participants in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for the duration of a week, and which has fostered related progeny worldwide. Shunning all definitions and attributes, BM’s gift-based economy is a bonanza of intense experiences that oscillate between transgressive and carnivalesque effervescence and intense personal experiences of interiority. Framed by the “Ten Principles”, BM is fueled by a truly ingenious and effective mix of technologies inherited from the counter-cultural tradition or invented in situ. Peopled in majority by “spiritual-not-religious” actors (but not only), BM is by no means an explicitly religious event, yet the religious dimensions are overwhelming. At the same time, BM is wholly unassimilable within the usual epistemologies of the sociology of religion and religious studies. How are we, then, to understand BM? The first part of this presentation will attempt to describe the event and pin down some general traits of its dynamics and structure. The second part raises the question of how we are to deal with BM in the study of religion? I argue that a pretty radically different perspective is needed, one that does not start by defining religion as a differentiated sphere but rather, in the wake of Marcel Mauss, one that understands religion to be fundamental and irreducible dimension of social phenomena considered as total social facts. From this angle, BM suddenly appears not as a marginal phenomenon with respect to “real religion”, but rather as a formidable example of and even standard for religion in our globalized, consumer societies.