Religious exoticism is a white-dominant field, as are its modes of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, minstrelsy, and “playing Indian.”72 It is dependent on the logics of white possessivism, as argued by the Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her writing about the settler colonial context of Australia. There, she argues, “signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape.”73 From the appropriation of Native lands to the institution of slavery, white people have been recognized within the law as “property-owning subjects.” Whiteness itself became property, signifying the capacity to possess.74 At the national level, what George Lipsitz calls the “possessive investment in whiteness” has been institutionalized through colonization, slavery, urban redlining, de facto school segregation, and mass incarceration.75 One might imagine that religious exoticism’s identification with nonwhite religious and cultural forms would result in a rejection of the possessive investment in whiteness. But is there not a similar logic of white possessivism that informs what Deborah Root describes as “cannibal culture,” a culture that loves until it devours its lover: black widows in white skins?
Utopian visions of religious exoticism are defined by a particular notion about the other. In its most idyllic form, the other is romanticized as an untouched essence—timeless, pure, and uncorrupted by modernity. The utopian vision of the other must be constructed as such in order to be conceived of as an oppositional solution to the existing order of things. If it were similarly corrupted and corruptible, then it would be no solution at all. It is in recognition of racialized oppression that religious exoticists seek to dissociate themselves from oppressor kinsmen and to adopt the lifeways of their victims. Arun Saldanha highlights Norman Mailer’s famed essay “The White Negro” to suggest that in their post–World War II existential crisis, the hippies turned to African American culture for alternative solutions; even the terms hippie, hip, and the more modern term hipster are derivatives of the Black slang term hep, meaning “with it” or “fashionable.”76 In this way, religious exoticism is in essence a project of white identity-making, defining the self through engagement with the other. This fundamental notion is one of the reasons the culture of exoticism tends to attract white youth.
Furthermore, religious exoticism’s perseverating focus on the purity, timelessness, and authenticity of the other necessarily dissociates it from the actual communities that practice the religious forms it adopts. Living Native Americans, Indians, or Asians, who are just as embroiled in the multiple systems of modernity, complicate and even render impotent the imagined idealization of these cultures and religions. The complex political realities of the struggles of contemporary Indians and Indigenous peoples, for example, sit in contradistinction to their imagined purity and detachment from modernity. This distance is required because religious exoticism is dependent on “the idealization of religious traditions as being primordial, mystical, and authentic; it aims at dramatizing an opposition to one’s own culture and religious background in order to reflect on, criticize, and reclaim the latter through a cultural detour. Religious exoticism is pragmatic and, paradoxically, self-referential. Thus, exotic religious resources are constructed and disseminated on the terms of those who appropriate them.”77 The practitioner of religious exoticism is rendered an introspective dreamer, imagining an alternative, utopian world.
The result is that when confronted with these white self-referential utopian ideals, many people of color feel unrecognized and falsely stereotyped and thus disengage from religious exoticism. Some may not suffer the existential crisis that leads to a “restlessness” and the subsequent “search for the exotic,”78 likely because many identify within networked religious and cultural communities. For others, put simply, white begets white; that is to say that the optics of a majority-white party serves as a deterrent. This invokes the familiar recognition of the socially demarcated spaces of white property and racialized exclusions that have dominated US history, where the lack of people of color in attendance signals a white-only space. These factors, combined with the financial and vocational surplus necessary to engage in these distant and expensive multiday (sometimes multiweek) “serious leisure”79 events, constitute significant barricades for would-be nonwhite participants.
However, it is important to remember that in spaces like Burning Man and LIB, just over 20 percent of the participants are nonwhite; this is not an insignificant population (around 14,000 and 5,000 participants, respectively). Furthermore, as these festivals become even more popular and recognized, it appears that they are becoming more diverse. For example, in the 2013–17 Summary Report of the Black Rock City Census, the percentage of white/Caucasian (non-Hispanic) census respondents decreased approximately one percentage point each year, from 82.9 percent in 2013 to 77.1 percent in 2017. In contrast, the transformational festivals that celebrate bhakti yoga and postural yoga continue to be over 90 percent white. One reason for this departure may be that the general populace is increasingly attracted to festivals like Burning Man and LIB for the parties, the music, and the art, not to mention the social cachet acquired by attending. In contrast, participants attracted to festivals like Wanderlust and Bhakti and Shakti Fests are explicitly interested in the practice of Indic religious and cultural forms. These figures suggestively lend support to my argument that the greater the index of religious exoticism within a given population, the whiter that population is likely to be. White Utopias celebrates the thriving devotion to progressive consciousness expressed in these spiritual communities, but it also argues that the logic of white possessivism lies at their very heart.
THE FIELD(S)
Transformational Festivals
Festivals create imagined utopian worlds. They are a “pragmatic and fantastic space in which to dream and to try another world into being.”80 In the United States, the 1960s countercultural generation became networked through massive public festivals that united the different (and oppositional) factions of the counterculture through the collective shared experience of fun, music, and often drugs. In the political upheaval of the time, festivals were largely depoliticized events aimed at revealing the common purpose of the counterculture through shared experience. Although the Yippies attempted to politicize Woodstock,81 festivals primarily signified a time to simply be together in solidarity (as in the famed 1969 Be-In festival in San Francisco) and, importantly, to be made visible in public spaces together. It is impossible to measure the empowerment and motivation that countercultural activists gained from the images of Woodstock showing 460,000 people spreading expansively over the rural hills of upstate New York. The overwhelming attendance at the festival generated the feeling of a massive movement underfoot, a nation at the cusp of revolution.
Internationally, festival culture also gained traction in Europe and the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, with massive collectives gathering at “musical mega events,”82 often with utopian underpinnings. In his historical account of the pop festival, media and cultural studies scholar George McKay writes, “Woodstock (1969, USA), Glastonbury (since 1970, UK), and Nimbin (1973, Australia) are early event markers that point us to the utopian desire of the festival, to the way in which that temporary heightened space-time has the fundamental purpose of envisioning and crafting another, better world.”83 Since the 1960s, festival culture in the United States has continued and expanded, but it has also entered the mainstream. No longer solely a product of the counterculture, the largest festivals in the twenty-first century are music festivals. These festivals appear to be popular with diverse audiences, drawing from multiple aesthetic subcultures—there are country music festivals like Stagecoach, alternative music festivals like Lollapalooza, and EDM festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival. By making the pilgrimage to one of these massive music events, attendees identify with the subculture and its aesthetics.
Festivals as a genre of