For example, in the yogic field, white yogic practitioners may align and identify with Indic cultures and traditions as a critique of Western modernity, but as they do, they also flood the yoga market and, more broadly, the New Age market. White yogis not only learn and practice yoga but also become representatives, entrepreneurs, and spokespeople because of their greater access to social capital. As a result, Indian yogis, and Indigenous and Asian spiritual leaders more broadly, are overwhelmed in the cacophony of dominant white voices, or silenced entirely. What began as an act of imagined solidarity becomes yet another tool for their oppression. Debates, often nonproductive ones, ensue regarding cultural appropriation, intellectual and cultural property, intellectual commons, conversion and its impossibility, and so on.
White Utopias focuses explicitly on these dynamics through the practice of yoga in transformational festivals. But here, in this first chapter, I broaden the lens to analyze religious exoticism more generally, and its impact in defining the intellectual fields of those who identify as spiritual but not religious. I argue that religious exoticism entails the turn toward alterity primarily as a critique of one’s own positionality—a search for something else, something beyond the familiar. Alterity—that is to say, racialized others and their cultural forms—becomes a tool instrumentalized to further self-critique and self-transformation. Religious exoticism engages with a variety of forms of alterity, the sole requirements of which are that they are disidentified with the self and the home culture. For this reason, Indigenous and Indic cultural forms become indexed with alterity, set outside and in contradistinction to Western modernity. Equated as such under the logics of white possessivism, they are easily hybridized and interchanged in the practices of religious exoticism.
THE SPIRITUAL BRICOLAGE OF TRANSFORMATIONAL FESTIVALS
Opportunities for spiritual growth vary widely between different transformational festivals. Each of the festivals discussed herein incorporates yoga into a variety of religious traditions, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantra, and Indigenous religions. Transformational festivals seamlessly transition between these traditions. In some cases, they are segmented into autonomous workshops and classes on subjects such as Buddhist meditation, Tibetan singing bowls, creating your own maṇḍala, Ayahuasca, and Native American ceremony. In other cases, however, instructors blend these traditions together within a singular workshop or class, for example when a yoga teacher splices Buddhist, Tantric, and Native American ideas into one yoga class. Echoing this, some vendors sell products focused particularly on the wares of one tradition (e.g., a shop selling Hindu murtis [religious figurines]), while others offer products that amalgamate a variety of Indigenous and Indic religious traditions (e.g., Hindu, Buddhist, Indigenous, and consciousness wares). From an aerial view, transformational festivals are broadly eclectic, exhibiting a variety of practices, worldviews, and products drawn from Indigenous and Indic religious traditions. The aesthetic of festival fashion also embraces Indigenous and Indic motifs blended with expressions of the mystical and magical—from body jewelry to “tribal” body paint, feathered headpieces, bindis, and gopi9 skirts.
With a few exceptions related to their more ritualistic and mystical forms, Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and, in particular, Islam) are notably absent. Also absent are appropriations of African and African American religious and cultural forms. This is an interesting anomaly particular to the field of religion; in the cultural mainstream, for instance, white appropriations of Black aesthetic, arts, and cultural forms have been particularly ubiquitous.10 This lack of engagement may signify that the religious exoticism of these subcultures is deeply, if unconsciously, intertwined with legacies of anti-Black racism, as many scholars have argued.11 It may also signify that appropriations of Black culture are viewed as taboo (politically incorrect) in these predominantly politically liberal communities, while Indic and Indigenous traditions are understood to be more available for white consumption. It may also be the notion that African Americans are the primary referent of racialized others in the United States and thus cannot fully fulfill the allure of the exotic. Such speculations open fields of potential research but are largely beyond the intended scope of this project.
Predictably, the relationship between transformational festivals and religion is complex. The majority of interlocutors I interviewed identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). At Burning Man, the only event that hosts a community census and publishes it publicly, 46.4 percent of participants identified as SBNR (24.3 percent identified as atheist, and 15.2 percent identified as agnostic, while only 5.5 percent identified as religious).12 Events at Burning Man exhibit the most overt rejection of religion; even with the 2017 theme of Radical Ritual, events engaging the parody of religion outnumbered formal religious services advertised on the playa13 three to one. Most participants view LIB and Burning Man as intentional, consciousness-raising, and transformational festivals. They host the highest number of workshops and events focused on religion, meditation, and other spiritual techniques, but the percentage of such offerings in relation to the massive size and scale of these events renders the impact less influential. Bhakti and Shakti Fests are the most overtly devotional, with the most concentrated emphasis on ritual and the majority of events focused on the Hindu ideal of bhakti (devotion). Wanderlust festivals are situated as transformational events, and the practice of yoga as a method of reenchantment, a kind of “secular church.”
In general, among many participants there is a sense that religions have a pure and beautiful essence and have created practical and efficacious tools with which to access that essence. However, they also feel that religions have become institutionalized, political, and corrupt. As Devanand (Joshua) explained during our early morning interview at Bhakti Fest:
There are so many different approaches because there are so many different people and types, and what is attractive to one person is definitely not attractive to another. But love, truth, compassion, kindness, generosity, these are all attractive to every human being. And those are all what’s at the core of most major religions, and all of these things that they were founded on, these kinds of principles, but then [they] gradually became corrupted systems of control. . . . Once people have power, they’re like, “We want to keep this power, so we’ve got to control rather than allow its expansion and a flow of consciousness and allow people to believe that they can choose their own life.” And that is where they started to separate that there’s God out there, over here somewhere among the clouds, and we have to obey, which is quite the opposite of what we are.14
Many of my SBNR informants echoed this sentiment, and as a result, the majority had deliberately turned away from institutionalized forms of religion. At Bhakti Fest, Kara explained to me:
Well, being raised in a Pentecostal, charismatic environment in Indiana in the 1960s and ’70s, . . . it was like, . . . “We don’t do that. It’s against my religion.” . . . I have more of an aversion to Jesus than a love for him. . . . I hated church, though I felt really deeply moved by so many things, you know, music, art, or love. . . . It’s taken me a long time to remember how to pray. It’s like—how do you pray? Who am I praying to? What am I asking for? And to me, it just comes back to gratitude. As long as I feel gratitude, then that’s all. So, I say my religion—I have the religion of common sense.15
In addition to having this personalized sense of spiritual communion, the majority of these SBNR participants employed theological universalism as a means to conflate and obfuscate differences between traditions. Even if they practiced a particular religious form, still they maintained that there are any number of possible paths to God, self-realization, and enlightenment. During our interview at Bhakti Fest, Susan explained,
It does not matter whether you are singing God’s name in Qawwali or Sanskrit or in Hindi or what have you. Do you think God cares? Just ask him. No. . .