White Utopias attempts to unravel this uncomfortable demographic reality in the pages that follow. I argue that while transformational festivals create fecund opportunities for spiritual growth, their dependence on religious exoticism serves as a deterrent to nonwhite potential participants. My ethnographic research reveals that in their critique of the existing status quo, participants turn to Indigenous and Indic5 religious forms because they imagine them to be expressions of alternative lifeways existing outside of modernity. This fundamental act of distancing and appropriation means that these movements tend to gravitate toward neoromantic forms that stem from nineteenth-century conceptions of the Anglo-European self as civilized and modern while relegating nonwhites to the primitive and premodern.
In his research on the viscosity, or the stickiness, of whiteness in countercultural spaces, Arun Saldanha writes, “It is a commonplace assumption that whites have for a long time been fascinated and transformed by drawing on other people’s cultures and landscapes. . . . Yet the fact that white appropriations of otherness were fueled by a conscious effort to transcend the constrains of white society—that European exoticism and primitivism, though intertwined with colonial subjugation, also tell of the self-critique and self-transformation of whites—has seldom been put at the center of theorization.”6 White Utopias is an attempt to put this exact notion at the center, engaging the uncomfortable juxtaposition between problematic religious exoticism and productive self-critique and self-transformation.
I argue that these populations identify with alterity to forge personal solutions to the struggles of modernity. They identify as “spiritual but not religious” and, as Christopher Driscoll and Monica Miller argue, aim to enact the “decentering or death of whiteness, with ‘spiritual’ signifying on the manufactured closeness to the ‘empirical other.’ ”7 In drawing closer to the “other,” they destabilize whiteness by rejecting systems of white supremacy in which they are enmeshed, but they do so from within safe spaces of white ethnic homogeneity. At festivals, they speak in self-affirming echo chambers imagined as evolutionary paths to enlightenment and rarely engage with ethnically diverse populations. Because people of color are rarely present as authorities teaching and sharing their own religious and cultural forms, white SBNR adopters and their representations end up reinforcing the logics of white possessivism despite their idealized attempts to decenter whiteness.
My research also reveals that the more yogic the field, the more it is focused on internal self-transformation as the primary agent of social change; as the famed yogi activist Seane Corn writes, “Our evolution is the revolution.”8 While some yogis follow Corn’s broader call for humanitarian activism, a much larger majority directs attention to personal evolution by engaging with ascetical and mystical modalities. In her analysis of women in the New Age, Karlyn Crowley questions, “Why angels and not activism?”9 In these fields, with a few notable exceptions, there is a similar focus on spiritual transformation over social engagement.10 The result is an affective experience of freedom and not the freedom work of building social and political solidarities with the “exotic” populations these communities so deeply admire.
THE AVAILABLE EXOTIC / THE USABLE PRIMITIVE: PLAYING INDIAN
Long before the New Age dawned, Americans turned to religious others when dissatisfied with the dominant culture. As the historian Philip Jenkins explains, “The perennial American interest in Indians grows and shrinks in inverse proportion to satisfaction with mainstream society. . . . Throughout American history, romantic Indian images are most sought after in eras of alienation and crisis.”11 Americans have engaged with Indigenous and Indic cultural and religious forms in multifarious ways as a means to protest and reject Euro-American culture. By adopting exoticized practices of marginalized religious minorities, they have offered critiques of industrialization, consumerism, rationality, violence, sexual repression, and the devastation of nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, white women flocked to Swami Vivekananda to practice mediation and breathing exercises. Several decades later, South Asian swamis and yogis crisscrossed the United States, drawing large audiences as interested in their mystical personas as in their yogic techniques. Even at that time, whites quickly positioned themselves as representative authorities of yogic traditions. Oom the Omnipotent (Pierre Arnold Bernard from Leon, Iowa), for instance, built his Tantric utopia first in San Francisco and later in the sanctity and seclusion of rural upstate New York. Following the model of white appropriation of Native religions, whites have instrumentalized Indic religious forms to find direction and to craft an outlet for their critique of the existing status quo.12
In the wake of World War I, the bohemians of the 1920s flocked to the American Southwest and founded intellectual and artistic communities from which they critiqued assimilationist policies and Christian missionaries; some even argued for the supremacy of Native culture. World War II revealed the fragility and moral failings of European culture, and the subsequent destabilization of Europe called into question Euro-American claims to cultural superiority; subsequently, the 1940s saw a notable popularization of Native American traditions. Similarly, in the 1970s, massive public distrust in government fueled another turn toward Native American traditions. Philip Jenkins’s careful historical account of white engagements with Native American religions reveals that one of the primary errors of the 1960s counterculture was to assume that “all previous generations had shared the racist contempt of the early settlers, the dismissal of native religions as crude devil worship.”13 Instead, the 1960s exemplified only the twentieth century’s latest expression of a counterculture deeply informed by religious exoticism.
Once again, as a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the counterculture of the 1960s was partially constituted by the commonplace practice of modern Anglos “searching for primal authenticity.”14 Employing the modalities of religious exoticism, the leaders of the counterculture embraced symbols and practices extracted from Indic and Indigenous religions. While Frank Waters may have made “the Ganges flow into the Rio Grande” in his writings in the 1950s, as Jenkins suggests, the 1960s counterculture easily blended the Indic and Indigenous, creating a confluence (sangham) of distinct cultural rivers. Gary Snyder protested the war in Vietnam by identifying with Native religion and cursing the white man in the San Francisco Oracle, penning the famous lines:
As I kill the white man
the “American”
in me
And dance out the ghost dance:
To bring back America, the grass and the streams,
To trample your throat in your dreams.
This magic I work, this loving I give
That my children may flourish
And yours won’t live.15
The following year, the Beatles sat at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, which would lead George Harrison to take the māhāmantra16 of the Hare Krishnas to the number-twelve position on the UK singles chart in 1969 and again in the chorus of the major hit “My Sweet Lord” in 1976. Jimi Hendrix wanted the cover of his 1967 record Axis: Bold as Love to reflect his Cherokee heritage, but in an impactful miscommunication, David King, the commissioned cover designer for the Track Records label, misinterpreted his notion of “Indian” and found a mass-produced image of the Hindu deity Vishnu in a London shop and superimposed Hendrix’s face (alongside Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell) over the image. The resulting famous image of Jimi Hendrix in the omnipresent form of the incarnation of the Hindu god Krishna (virāt puruṣan viśvarupam) became one of the most iconic album covers in rock history.17 While centuries had passed since Columbus’s infamous error of mistaking Native Americans for Indians, 1960s counterculture blended and sometimes conflated the two seamlessly.
The turn to the exotic is the response of a population seeking a solution to feelings of malaise and dislocation derived from “feeling