holder, and authorized teacher who has lived and practiced her sādhana (spiritual practice) with adepts in Nepal, India, and Tibet. Her practice focuses on the embodiment of the divine feminine in Shakta Tantric lineages; she is serious about her study and her religious practice. According to her website, she is highly educated and has complemented her academic study with decades of practitioner-generated knowledge and numerous traditional Tantric “empowerments and transmissions.” Her biography claims that she is an “authorized teacher” based in this knowledge, and she can be found in yoga studios, festivals, and widely on the Internet offering teachings, rituals, pūjās, retreats, and online courses.
The example of Sundari Lakshmi introduces a commonplace pattern of embodied white possessivism, and the focus of this chapter will be to unfurl its complexities. In this representational politics, whites not only explore, learn about, and share in cultural and religious forms of racialized others, but also go one step further to embody, possess, extract, and redistribute that alterity as a form of social capital. Their access to alterity, deemed exotic, marks them with distinction in white society. It also identifies them as members of a “tribe”—a tribe defined by an affinity for religious exoticism, comprised of spiritual seekers who have also chosen to identify with radical others as a form of critique of their own culture, society, and ancestral heritage. In Deepak Sarma’s words, they imagine that they “can transform from the oppressor to the oppressed, from the colonizer to the colonized. Surely such an imagined transformation is only available to those who are privileged in the first place.”2 Sarma frames the white convert as engaged in either “mimicry or mockery” of Hindu traditions, but this dichotomy belies the ways in which initial acts of mimesis can develop into sincerely held identities. Particularly in the religious field, religious exoticism can be an initial step in a gradual process of self-transformation emerging from engagement with radically different cultures, customs, philosophies, and lifeways. The trouble lies not in the exploration and learning but in the representation, in the white possessivist logics that further economic exploitation and cultural erasure of people of color.
Many scholars have written similar critiques about the politics and ethics of cultural borrowing and appropriation.3 The Dakota scholar Philip Deloria writes about the history of whites “playing Indian,” performing the other in an attempt to cultivate their authentic selves.4 Laura Donaldson denounces “white shame-ans,” whites who appropriate, represent, and exploit Native religion as a form of fetish.5 Deborah Root writes of “cannibal culture,” linking together the commodification of difference and white consumption.6 But few have analyzed cultural appropriation through the study of religion, which raises particularly perplexing questions about the spectrum between spiritual tourism, cultural appropriation, and conversion.
In what follows, I employ some of the lessons learned from Indigenous studies to think through the appropriative practices of religious exoticism in transformational festivals. In these spaces, many whites adopt and perform aspects of “exotic” cultures and religions as instruments to further their spiritual growth and exploration. In so doing, some even cultivate new selves, as in the example of Sundari Lakshmi. These practitioners participate in religious exoticism as a means to cultivate self-distinction.7 As Graham St. John has argued, “The essential alterity signified by Amerindians, and the Natives of other regions, speaks of the primitivism that has tactically assisted, and continues to assist, Western desires for completeness and ideologies of progress. It also speaks of the practice of cultural appropriation through which a fantasized and projected otherness is adopted and purposed in the cause of establishing countermodernities, practices that have indeed generated a range of critiques from those exposing dubious claims to authority and indigeneity, ‘fakelore,’ ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ a ‘salvage paradigm,’ ‘postmodern neocolonialism,’ and entrepreneurial expropriation and commodification.”8 Religious exoticism is not necessarily problematic in its “desire for completeness” or cultural exploration; rather, the issue lies in its “dubious claims to authority and indigeneity.”
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
