student body being comprised of 85 percent non-Anglo-European minorities, at games and graduations, audiences sing songs of Highlander pride and don blue and yellow Scottish tartans. This imagined Scottish Highland is actually the ancestral land of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples, and UCR is a result of Rupert (Cahuilla) and Jeannette (Eastern Cherokee) Costo’s founding vision. I respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original caretakers of the land, water, and air where I live and work. I am also writing as a white faculty member with a degree in the History of Religions and a research specialty in Hinduism, itself a colonial construction. Like the study of Native traditions, the study of Hinduism is rife with contested debates over representation that cannot be extricated from racial power dynamics exacerbated by colonial histories.
I am deeply beholden to UCR as the place where the perspectives of my students and colleagues led me to provincialize myself and my field of study. I am hesitant to name those who challenged my thinking on race and ethnicity in the United States lest I not live up to their high standards, but Daisy Vargas, Josh Little, Leven Kali, Anthea Kraut, Sarita See, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Jennifer Najera, Michele Raheja, and Dylan Rodriguez each shifted my perspective. Their seeds, even if they didn’t know they planted them, altered my perspective and reformulated the ways in which I had been trained to frame the study of religion in the United States. Jonathan Walton once explained that his time at UCR was like earning a second doctorate. Amen. I have been privileged to be supported in such an environment and to learn from and be challenged by students and colleagues alike.
I also recognize my privilege in that this is a post-tenure, second book. This positionality enabled me to research academically marginalized topics outside of the sanction of traditional forms of religion. As one funder exclaimed to me after I presented an early report on my research, “I didn’t realize we were paying people to go camping!” Routinely, at least some members of scholarly audiences laughed at my informants and dismissed their practices as New Age silliness. My positionality, including my whiteness, enabled me to feel (mostly) confident in enduring these slights and admonishments. In completing this book, I remain convinced that these populations are more important than the traditionalists realize and that they are actively reshaping our conception of religion in modernity.
This was an expensive book, as it necessitating my keeping up (even in a limited way) with the transformational festival circuit. Considerable funding enabled me to access these networks in difficult but possible ways. This research was supported by grants from UCR’s Academic Senate Committee on Research, UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS), a Hellman Fellowship, and a Religion in Diaspora and Global Affairs (RIDAGA) Humanities Studio Award sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Henry Luce Foundation. Two writing retreats, sponsored by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) Mid-Career Research Initiative and the Inequities in Health Faculty Commons group, respectively, both funded by CIS, bookended the bulk of my writing. I am grateful to Dana Simmons and Tanya Nieri for facilitating my participation. I thank both CIS’s and UCR’s administrative staff, particularly Diana Marroquin, for her undying patience and expertise in executing the financial administration that made this book possible.
I thank conference audiences who responded to portions of this work at the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, South Asian Studies Association Conference, the Race and Yoga Research Working Group at UC Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison South Asia Conference, and the Society for Pilgrimage Studies Conference. Early presentations of this research at Indiana University and at UCR’s Department of Dance colloquium completely transformed the trajectory of my research and my guiding questions, and to these critical audiences I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. I also benefited greatly from the excellent questions asked during my presentations of this research at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) in Singapore; the University of Otago in New Zealand; Middlebury College; California State University, Bakersfield; the University Club in Claremont, California; the Religious Studies department at UCR; the Burning Man and Transformational Event Cultures Symposium at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and Yogascapes 2.0 at Kyoto University. I am extraordinarily grateful to Bernardo Brown, Ben Schonthal, E. Burke Rochford, Michael Burroughs, Donna Bernard, Melissa Wilcox, Francois Gauthier, Graham St. John, and Patrick McCartney for their generous invitations to present my research.
With such extensive, multiple, and variegated field sites, this project never would have come to fruition without the dedication and skills of several outstanding research assistants. Jen Aubrecht, Gloria Williams, Larissa Arambula, Jason Cardenas, and Cristina Rosetti were outstanding companions in the field, and their insights and experiences greatly enhanced my own perspective. I am deeply indebted to Anna Beck for her help with transcriptions. She also took an interview on her own that proved exceptionally valuable. I am grateful to Deepak Sarma, Anya Foxen, James Edmonds, Nathan McGovern, Jen Sandler, and Jonas Huffer, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their critical insights in reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I thank Eric Schmidt, Austin Lim, and the editorial board at the University of California Press for their astute suggestions and practical guidance in making this a more legible book. I am also indebted to Dominique Debucquoy-Dodley at Burning Man Project, Karina Mackenzie at Wanderlust, my proofreader Kirsten Janene-Nelson, photographer Scott London, and photo editor Aimée-Linh McCartney for their assistance in the final stages of production.
This book is also entirely dependent on the charity and kindness of my informants in the field. Countless unnamed participants gave me the gift of their time and opened their hearts to intimate conversations with a stranger. Some passed through this ephemeral field and seemingly evaporated into the ether. Some became dear friends. I thank all of the festival producers, yoga teachers, kīrtan musicians, and workshop leaders who devote their time and energy to creating rejuvenating environments for weary travelers. In particular, I am grateful to Sridhar Silberfein, Shiva Rea, MC Yogi, DJ Drez, Ana Forrest, Hemalayaa, Brenda Patoine, and Lorin Roche for fitting our interviews into their demanding schedules. Marian Goodell, Cameron Shayne, Mark Whitwell, Elena Brower, Saul David Raye, Aditi Devi Ma, Michael Brian Baker, Rob Sidon, Maura Malini Hoffman, Prajna Vieira, David Estes, and Seane Corn were also generous in conversation. I thank the participants who used the festival spaces to expose the tenderest parts of their souls, revealing their vulnerable and raw interiors to others. I am deeply grateful, in particular, to Split, Lucifer, Noa, Honoria, Clive, Doug, Dane, Nick, Pixel, Christian, Stone, Meow Meow, Chakra, Buddha, Topanga, Atreyu, Chance, Dao, Luke, Franklin, Wombat, Windflower, Jeremiah, Loco, Bootleg, Dancing Bob, Grace, GunPowder, Firemonk, Foxsicle, Blaine, John, Cafune, Devon, Peter, Chenoya, Tynacity, Chef Dave, Golden Rose, Megan Miller, Megs Rutigliano, Steven Raspa, Josh Lease, Molly Rose, Stuart Mangrum, Caveat Magister, and all the folks in the French Quarter Village, Comfy Cozy Voodoo Lounge, Savage Island, Camp Mystic, and Anahasana Village, and many others for showing me the variety of amazing ways to Burn, the meaning of chosen family, and how to be builders and bakers, movers and shakers. Thank you all.
Lastly, this book has demanded considerable time away from home, and for weathering that, I thank my children, Jonas and Zoe. They have grown up with festival stories in their lives, and through this they have learned to see the world as a place of possibility for adventure, exploration, and wonder. None of this would have been possible without my mother and their father, who managed in my absence everything from my children’s first day of first grade to their first day of college. Thank you. Most of all, I am deeply indebted to all of my conversation partners as I worked through my complicated feelings about this research, in particular, my friends and colleagues Sarah Pike, Shreena Gandhi Christa Kuberry, Anya Foxen, Andrea Jain, Christopher Chapple, Michael Alexander, and most deeply, Matthew King, Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Keith MacGregor, Ingrid Jacobson, Lucas Carmichael, and Jen Sandler. Many of these people weathered this storm and sometimes felt each lash of rain as I did—often before I had taken adequate time to process it. I am in awe of your empathy and generosity. Any and all inadequacies in the forthcoming pages are entirely my own.
Author Note
White Utopias was finalized for publication in June 2020 during
