Perhaps those most superficially involved in today’s transformational festivals might regard time spent at Wanderlust or Burning Man as merely a vacation. But the majority of my interlocuters viewed transformational festivals as forms of spiritual pilgrimage. They likely would have agreed with Zahir, an African American “spiritual bodyguard,” who explained during our interview at Bhakti Fest: “Burning Man, I call it a North American pilgrimage, so it is a very spiritual level place. A lot of people look at it as just the drugs and this and that, but it is actually a really spiritual experience, and that is why people are drawn to it. Every culture, person, needs to go on pilgrimage, you see. It’s our birthright. People all over the globe, pilgrims, go to Burning Man, here [Bhakti Fest], lots of places.”99 Such a view represents the dominant perspective, while those who are even more invested aim to create more permanent revolutionary utopias, spaces for self-expression, freedom, and community based in their critique of late-capitalist modernity.
The most dedicated in these environments urge that the principles and practices learned in the festival must be carried into society to become a part of the practice of everyday life. Burning Man Project prefers to dissociate the event from the idea of a temporary festival; and many Burners aim to live according to Burning Man values (10 Principles) year-round.100 Yoga is also a lived value-system, and is often exported in forms that resemble proselytization.101 For many at Bhakti and Shakti Fests, the festival is an expression of a deep-seated religious commitment, an opportunity to come together in ecstatic celebration of the divine with a community of fellow bhaktas (devotees).102 Some of the most dedicated participants become yoga teachers, kīrtan artists, community leaders, or festival employees, wholly engrossing themselves in actualizing their utopia (and critiquing the existing system [topia]) in creative ways. Some within the transformational festival scene have used the social relationships built through festivals as networks from which to develop permanent communities.103
Yoga
The field of transformational festivals is multiple and varied. In approaching Bhakti and Shakti Fests, Wanderlust, and LIB, I focused particularly on yoga as a point of entry. Yoga has become a central practice among SBNR populations, and yoga classes provide a clear view into the soteriological ideals of these communities. Of the festivals I studied, Burning Man accentuates yoga the least, and in that sense, it is somewhat of an outlier to the overt focus on yoga as a point of entry into SBNR populations in this study. Still, yoga ranked among the top ten activities listed in the official program books at each festival (see figures 1–5). At Bhakti and Shakti Fests, yoga ranked as the primary activity. At Wanderlust, it ranked second, bested by athletic activities, like running, hiking, and surfing. At LIB, yoga also ranked second, bested by live music. At Burning Man, yoga ranked ninth, superseded by events such as parties, bar/alcohol related events, sexuality workshops, dances, food-distribution events, games, crafting events, and live music. One can certainly attend any of these festivals, Burning Man in particular, and avoid the practice of yoga entirely. Other transformational festivals that are in some ways derivative of Burning Man (such as Symbiosis, Lucidity, Envision, Oregon Eclipse, Earthdance, Global Eclipse, and Faerieworlds) may not focus on yoga, but every one of these festivals includes it. Even at Burning Man, yoga is on the rise. In November 2018, I spoke with Burning Man CEO, Marian Goodell, who lamented that so many of the camp placement applications in recent years cited yoga (and tea service) as their primary interactive communal offerings.104
1. Top ten offerings at Shakti Fest, 2012.
2. Top ten offerings at Bhakti Fest, 2013.
3. Top ten offerings at Wanderlust, Oahu, HI, 2014.
4. Top ten offerings at Lightning in a Bottle, 2016.
5. Top ten offerings at Burning Man, 2017.
White Utopias spotlights yoga as a primary means to access the ontological and soteriological values of SBNR populations. Yoga is also useful in that it reveals the nuances of religious exoticism as predominantly white populations engage with a South Asian cultural, and often religious, practice. Still, I am under no illusion that yoga is a singular expression. The term yoga has many different referents, as it always has. Often translated from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “yoke” or “union,” it can also simply mean “path” in popular Hindi parlance. Like any path, it can take the traveler to many different territories. The fact that one is on a path does not define where one ends up. It is the direction of the path that determines the destination. Foregrounding this colloquial definition perhaps makes it easier to reckon with the extraordinary diversity in contemporary yoga practice.
There are distinctive features to yoga in the United States today that signify seismic shifts from its lengthier and more diverse tradition in South Asia. Coordinated sequences of postures have become central, and the notion that yoga should be practiced because it is good for bodily health has become widely accepted. What has become popular practice in the United States is a “virtual hegemony of a small number of posture-oriented systems in the recent global transmission of yoga, [which] has reinforced a relatively narrow and monochromatic vision of what yoga is and does, especially when viewed against the wide spectrum of practices presented in pre-modern texts.”105 These are particular developments that stem from a host of social and historical conditions that have been widely discussed by scholars of modern postural yoga.106
The yogis in this study emerge from a variety of yoga classes, studios, and teacher trainings. However, the very fact that they are participating in transformational festivals means that they are at least nominally interested in the notions of spiritual transformation or raising consciousness. Isolating this intersection between physical and metaphysical aims immediately eliminates the majority of yoga practitioners in the United States, who attend yoga classes online, in their gyms, at Pilates studios, and in physically oriented yoga franchises like CorePower Yoga.107 There may be some overlap, however. At Shakti Fest, I was once situated behind a man in a yoga class who had a CorePower Yoga tattoo on his right shoulder. Still, it does mean that at this particular juncture in their spiritual journeys or yoga practice, these practitioners are looking for something more.
As will be discussed in detail in the pages that follow, yoga classes offered at transformational festivals, despite the diversity of yogic lineages represented, tend to be more focused on incorporating spiritual or metaphysical concerns. Discourses of this particular strain of yoga, what we might delimit as “soteriological” yoga,108 attempt to draw yogis into the broader philosophical tradition and extend their interest in the practice beyond its physical effects. The yoga mat is repositioned as a space of self-inquiry and connection to divinity, a sacred space wherein the individual sanctifies a space of introspection through a daily practice. Many of these practitioners are also exposed to Indic yoga traditions through travels to devotional centers in Asia and the reading of Indic scriptures. Usually, this involves exposure to “a small canon of texts, which includes the Bhagavadgītā, Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the Haṭhapradīpikā and some Upaniṣads,”109 which are incorporated into yoga teacher training programs. In particular, Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras has been elevated to the position of a canonical urtext for many contemporary yogis, as it is referenced and taught in yoga