so forth. This is what ceremony does. . . . Colonization is real, and it happened to every human being. The entire globe was secularized. . . . And so some people are searching for those ways on how to connect with the sacred.70
The Red Lightning Tribe took a year off from Burning Man in 2018. Red Bear (John St. Dennis), one of the Red Lightning camp leaders, told me during our interview, “It would be very politically incorrect to bring Red Lightning back.”71 But in 2019, it did come back, albeit under a new name—Red Lightning: Blue Thunder.
Despite its external critics, many Burners love the opportunities for communal ritual, education, movement, and spiritual exploration that are offered in Burning Man camps like Red Lightning and Anahasana Village (focused on Tantra and yoga). Chapters 3 and 4 discuss, and even celebrate, the transformational spiritual experiences that explorations with alterity can catalyze. Engagement with ceremony, ritual, yoga, and meditation are all means by which SBNR communities attempt to heal themselves and to alleviate their feelings of disconnection and isolation. There is significant and measurable positive personal transformation that can emerge from spiritual explorations in transformational festivals. However, the story of these SBNR communities is fraught, and while there are many who are serious, religious exoticism easily devolves into cavalier forms of play when it is disseminated and commodified by the masses. The hubris of whiteness, with its presumption of entitlement and possession, enables this smooth transition from serious study to playful (mis)representation.
For example, material culture has been at the center of the visually centric debates on cultural appropriation involving box braids, bindis, and Native headdresses. In recent years, wearing Native American headdresses to festivals has become a popular fashion statement for some whites. This is part of a larger fashion trend that celebrates “tribal” cultures through dress, face paint, and body art. This co-option of tribal material culture is a form of exploitation and costuming that cheapens and undermines Indigenous identities. Transformational festivals abound with superficial adoptions of the material cultures of racialized others. At Burning Man and LIB, I encountered each day at least one Native war bonnet used as a fashion accessory, despite the fact that both festivals have issued public statements condemning the practice (see figure 8). Native headdresses have become a touchstone signifying cultural appropriation as violence against already disenfranchised Native populations. Whites wearing headdresses is often singled out because it is one of the most obviously offensive practices in a much more ambiguous and philosophically complex field.
For example, in 2015, on the very same booklet page that LIB highlighted “The Village”—an assemblage of teepees and a yurt wherein village life (and the following year, Indigenous knowledge) would be celebrated (see figure 9)—it included the following statement:
Cultural Appropriation: Appreciation or Disrespect?
Sporting a headdress, or other imitation accessories, that were not received through cultural rights with permission and the understanding that comes with it, means being a walking representative of 500+ years of colonialism and racism. LIB embraces raw, creative, and authentic self-expression. But by embracing the current tribal trends you aren’t asserting yourself as an individual, you are situating yourself comfortably amongst a culture of power that continues to oppress Native peoples.72
Though their condemnatory statement against the headdress is unambiguous, paradoxically, their celebration of the teepee in The Village also seems to embrace “the current tribal trends.” Their philosophical argument seems to draw a distinction between disrespectful costuming and the appreciation of Native lifeways. In this view, intent matters. The turn to Indigenous cultural and religious forms symbolizes a turn toward alternative relations between self and sociality. In so doing, organizers and participants form a spiritual subculture that envisions itself as a tribe. Part of the reason that transformational festival cultures attract these particular forms of self-expression through tribal attire stems from participants’ attempts to set themselves apart with social distinction, to situate themselves as a part of a community, as members of a tribe. The Indigenous symbolism of The Village creates the affective feeling of community and tribe, but extended fully, it also ambivalently supports white possession and performance of Native identities.
8. Woman in Native headdress, Burning Man Temple, 2016 (photo by author; photo edits by Aimée-Linh McCartney).
The cultivation and communal reiteration of this shared notion of “tribe” is founded on an agreed-upon mythic past, a critique of the present, and a projected vision of a utopian future. In an interview, Arthur compared Bhakti Fest to other festivals and concluded with a sense that he had found his “tribe,” meaning other like-minded people who shared his values and ethics: “This one [Bhakti Fest] is just coming home. This is my tribe. Like, we’re my tribe.”73 As this is iterated and reiterated in the festival, it serves to distinguish the festival community as a utopian space, distinct from the external world.74 Michel Maffesoli’s work on postmodern tribalism suggests that tribalism is a process of reenchantment of the world, in which the fundamental feature of tribalism is a “shared sensibility or emotion.”75 In Festival Fire’s 2017–18 schedule of transformational festivals, festivals such as Lucidity, Earthdance, Unifer, Project Earth, and Elements all called participants to join their “tribe,” to participate in “tribal revival,” and to come together in “tribal” and “tribal consciousness” gatherings.76
9. The Village at Lightning in a Bottle, 2014 (photo by author).
The notion of the tribe mirrors one of the fundamental purposes of religion, which is to locate people in time and space and to foster a sense of shared communal identity. Certainly, Native and Indigenous peoples in settler colonial nations do not own the language of tribe; the term was used biblically to refer to the tribes of Israel, in a variety of African contexts, and even in contemporary Christian new religious movements. However, when SBNR communities refer to themselves as a tribe, the Native American context often provides the substantive referent. Problematically, the material and visual practices that accompany this self-identification often recreate essentialized notions of tribal identity, whether in the overt form of donning headdresses or in the more subtle forms of wearing long feather earrings and tribal body paint.77
In the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, groups identified as “tribes” as a way to set their collectives against mainstream white culture and the communal distinctions of mainstream religious identity.78 When the Human Be-In was first announced on the cover of the San Francisco Oracle, the title read: “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” The Human Be-In is one of the most important antecedents to today’s transformational festivals. When the Human Be-In was held on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, twenty to thirty thousand people showed up to hear from spiritually eclectic leaders, including Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Baba Ram Dass (who still went by Richard Alpert at the time), and Alan Watts, and to listen to popular music of the day, such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, among others. The event was a unique combination of popular music and psychedelic culture, interlaced with the alternative worldviews of Asian religions, which were reframed, interpreted, and distributed by white American men. Researcher and author Helen Swick Perry wrote, “Afterwards I knew there was an actual day, January 14, 1967, on which I was initiated into this new society, this new religion, as surely as if I had been initiated into the Ghost-Dance Religion of the American Indians.”79 The gathering was framed as a gathering of tribes and centralized Asian religious practices, without actual Native American or Asian American representation.
Similarly, more than twenty thousand people attended the first Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes (aka the Rainbow Tribe, Rainbow Family, the Rainbow
