side job in 2018 and 2019.
Because of the extensive time and money required to maintain this ethnographic research, I divided my field research into overlapping stages: from 2011 to 2016, I focused on Bhakti and Shakti Fests; from 2014 to 2016, I attended LIB; from 2014 to 2017, I attended Wanderlust festivals; and from 2016 to 2019, I attended Burning Man. My peak year in the field was 2014, during which I attended LIB, four Wanderlust festivals (in Oahu, Los Angeles, Squaw Valley, and Mont Tremblant), and both Bhakti and Shakti Fests. However, my time commitment exponentially increased beyond that level when I became a part of the leadership team of the French Quarter Village at Burning Man in 2018. Throughout the entire period of research (2011–2019), I kept abreast of new developments in and reactions to each of these transformational festivals and maintained relationships in each field. I discuss in more detail the intricacies of conducting ethnographic work in these ephemeral, multisited fields and the reception of my research among my informants in appendix 2, mostly for ethnographically interested readers.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
How are we to evaluate the ways in which the religious exoticism inherent in spirituality is simultaneously a genuine engagement with alterity, a radically transformative method, and an often exploitative form of cultural appropriation? To this, I answer that it is a complex both/and situation. There is no easy answer here. White Utopias grounds this research question sociologically by problematizing religious exoticism and white claims of authority over nonwhite cultural and religious forms juxtaposed against participants’ very real experiences of transformation and spiritual evolution resulting from inspirational engagements with alterity. Chapter 1 charts how religious exoticism draws from Indic religious practices and ideas and Indigenous religions, based in problematic imagined and historical divisions between self and other, modern and primitive, civilized and savage. Chapter 2 focuses explicitly on contemporary yoga, demonstrating how the dominant majority of white yoga teachers parse questions of authenticity. In so doing, I invite readers into a microscopic view of the strategies of building authority in the context of cultural appropriation.
At the midway point of the book, the narrative pivots on a particularly salient comment an informant made during our interview at Lightning in a Bottle in 2015. When I asked Niko, an African American DJ, a general question about his impressions of the festival crowd, he immediately began speaking about race. He viewed the religious exoticism of the largely white population as a first step in the gradual evolutionary journey of white people. Many festival participants also believe they are participating in human evolution and spiritual awakening, but Niko’s comment suggested that white explorations into alterity can puncture white hegemony and even initiate a politics of friendship based in the recognition of shared humanity.
The second half of the book explores this potential evolution through accounts of personal transformation occurring in transformational festivals. Chapter 3 focuses on the intentional denaturalization of the conventional self through the adoption of ascetical practices. Chapter 4 focuses on unexpected self-transformations catalyzed by encounters with wonder in mystical experiences. Chapter 5 investigates the most common theme that was iterated time and again by my interlocutors across these fields: the expression of affective feelings of freedom. This chapter reveals how these feelings of freedom are not only expressions of release from everyday systems of bondage but are also fostered through empathic human connection generated by the festival. In conclusion, I explain why the commitment to personal transformation generates an ideological commons within festivals while also forming a gated commons that tends to reify ethnic and class boundaries. Ironically, the proclivity toward homogeneity augments affective feelings of freedom and the ubiquitous feeling that participants have “come home.” It also fosters feelings of solidarity and supports the feeling of having found one’s “tribe.” While this may be productive for the largely white population of participants, it also erects boundaries that deter racialized others from participating. In this way, what follows explains why their visions of radical alternative utopias remain, at the present, predominantly White Utopias.
1
Romanticizing the Premodern
The Confluence of Indic and Indigenous Spiritualities
Opening Kali fire ceremony with Sundari Lakshmi
Thursday, May 25, 2014
Shakti Fest, Joshua Tree, California1
Sundari Lakshmi was in the center, her long, natural hair pulled into a low ponytail. She wore a black sari and a microphone headpiece. She was soft-spoken. She was probably forty-five years old, a Caucasian woman. Her Sanskrit seemed fairly good, though there were times when she accentuated the wrong syllables as she read aloud and defined the hundred names of Kali. To her righthand side, she had a large binder with all of the materials for the pūjā, which she read from throughout the hour-long ceremony. She was accompanied by three other younger women, whom she called “priestesses.” One of these women seemed to be functioning as her assistant, and she seemed more confident than the others because of her Sanskrit and bodily composure. She was also traditionally dressed, wearing a gold brocade sawar-kamiz. She had a long blonde braid that fell to her waist and wore red bangles and ankle bracelets (payals). She seemed to be dressed as a proper, married Indian woman. The other two women appeared to be novices, and Sundari Lakshmi guided them on how to hold their pūjā articles and their hands, what to do with ritual objects, and so on. There was also a man affiliated with the pūjā. He was young, white, and somewhat short, with thickly calloused feet and disheveled hair.
The pūjā was instructive and geared toward novices. Sanskrit was used but then explained in English. At the start, only thirty people or so were there to participate, but by the end it was more like sixty or seventy. The pūjā was somewhat traditional, with mantras to Kali, the recitation of her hundred names, and offerings of fire, sandalwood, flowers, clarified butter (ghi), and water. Sundari Lakshmi ritually bathed both the self and the goddess in metaphor as she poured offerings into the sacrificial fire. The structure of the fire sacrifice embodied Tantra-reminiscent elements in that practitioners ritually transformed themselves into Kali. After the pouring of oblations into the fire and the ritual transformation of practitioners’ bodies into Kali, we were told to choose partners. With our partners, we were instructed in a ritual blessing of the other’s body as a living embodiment of Kali. The partnering ritual was intimate, as is frequently expected at Shakti Fest, where participants are actively engaged in therapeutic spiritual work. My partner was a slender, young white woman who wore loose-fitting harem pants, a white T-shirt, and no rings or jewelry. She resonated with a calm and peaceful energy. We were instructed to invoke Kali mantras, and we dutifully repeated the Sanskrit and then followed the instruction to bless each part of the other’s body with our hands. Our bodies were knee to knee as we sat cross-legged in lotus posture. First, we were instructed to bless the head, then the throat, heart, eyes, ears, nose, lips, teeth, neck, the nape of neck, back, arms, shoulders, sides, and the “progenitor area.” This was the term Sundari Lakshmi used instead of calling the genitals by name. Neither of us touched the other’s genitals, but I did glance next to us at a male-female older couple who seemed to share an intimate relationship, and I saw him place his fingertips squarely on either side of her vulva. There was some giggling in the crowd, especially when we were asked to touch each other’s teeth. At one point, Sundari Lakshmi exhorted, “Get intimate! You need it. Sometimes we do this pūjā sitting in each other’s laps!” At this, everyone laughed. Afterward, we were instructed to “close out” our experience with each other and return our attention to the fire while Sundari Lakshmi concluded the pūjā with a communal meditation and closing mantras.
This ritual was performed and practiced at Shakti Fest by white ritual officiants who embodied the ethos of Hindu traditions while drawing on Vedic and Tantric sources. White yogis and spiritual seekers comprised the majority of participants who followed Sundari Lakshmi’s instructions to perform the ritual dedicated to the
