favor of a romanticized imaginary, creating indices more malleable and controllable than their flesh-and-blood referents.
White Utopias argues that the commonplace ideals and practices of religious exoticism are directly related to the overwhelming whiteness of alternative spiritual communities. Although she does not directly address this white majority, Altglas argues that religious exoticism is dependent on feelings of entitlement. She writes that “exotic representations and discourses are overwhelmingly elaborated by the observer, not the observed (Todorov 1993, 264). This presupposes the entitlement and the power to do so (Figueira 1994, 2). . . . Practicing yoga or meditation, joining Native Americans in a sweat lodge, studying Kabbalah while expressing disdain for Judaism . . . are all contemporary practices that unavoidably presuppose a sense of entitlement.”31 As will be discussed in a forthcoming section, this entitlement aligns easily with neocolonial logics of white possessivism.
SPIRITUAL, BUT NOT RELIGIOUS
Twenty-seven percent of the US population identifies as “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) according to a 2017 Pew Research study, and that figure is growing exponentially.32 A similar study, also conducted by the Pew Research Center, identified that just under 20 percent of the US population responds with “none” when questioned about their institutional religious affiliation, and of those, 37 percent identify as SBNR.33 However, and somewhat surprisingly, only a small percentage of those who respond with “none” identify as nonreligious or antireligious. Instead, a large majority of them say that they believe in God (68 percent) and feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58 percent), and a significant percentage of them say that they pray every day (21 percent).34 There is growth in SBNR populations across the various demographic groups in the United States, but the most accelerated growth and the highest numbers emerge from white women who are college educated and vote Democrat. It is no wonder then that American yogis also tend to identify as SBNR, as many of them fall into this very demographic.
There is a broad diversity to the beliefs and practices of people who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” The religion scholars Catherine Albanese and Courtney Bender have named metaphysical religion as that which draws on long-standing traditions of New Thought, Swedenborgianism, Christian Science, Spiritualism, magic, science, and the occult. Albanese suggests that it stands for “an American religious mentality” that focuses on a preoccupation of mind, a predisposition toward the ancient cosmological theory of correspondence between worlds (as carried out in the esoteric tradition of the West), thinking of the mind and its correspondences in terms of movement and energy, and a yearning for salvation understood as solace, comfort, therapy, and healing.35 Bender argues that metaphysical religion privileges experience and mysticism and operates through “entangled” networks in an institutional field, in “cultures that catch people in relations to each other.”36 This book envisions transformational festivals as one form of institution wherein SBNR communities congeal and reproduce their common ideologies. It demonstrates how transformational festivals create temporary utopias that invite participants into the celebration of eclectic, bricolage forms of spirituality.
However, I also see a divide in metaphysical religion that has not been thoroughly investigated. One end of the spectrum relies heavily on Christian principles, doctrine, and practice. It is in some sense a creative improvisation in the key of Protestant Christianity as much as it attempts to be “post-Protestant.”37 At the other end of the spectrum are those who turn away from institutional Abrahamic traditions (in the United States, mostly Christianity and Catholicism, but also, to some extent, Judaism) and toward practical tools adopted from non-Abrahamic religions (usually Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indigenous religions, and occasionally Sufism, Kabbalah, and Western esotericism). This subsection of the SBNR population adopts religious exoticism to produce mystical experiences, awakenings of consciousness, and spiritual growth through meditation, yoga, chanting, visualization, dreaming, psychedelics (medicine), and ascetic practices.
Scholars have frequently argued that SBNR populations are defined by unimpeded individual choice that emerges as a result of freedom from religious institutions.38 Such theories support the notion that today’s SBNR populations are creating self-designed bricolage spiritual conglomerations that are personally tailored to their individual preferences. The most famous example of this is Robert Bellah’s 1985 account of a woman named Sheila, who described her faith as listening “to my own little voice” and framed her personalized spirituality as “Sheilaism.”39 Bellah, like many sociologists of religion at the time, saw the increase in SBNR populations as a signal for the declining importance of religion in modernity. Many bemoaned the individualism of millions of Sheilas and feared that SBNR populations would not create strong communities. In contrast, White Utopias argues that that there is much unrecognized soteriological continuity in these fields and that transformational festivals and yoga classes are two examples of underrecognized institutional communities wherein collective ideals are reproduced and disseminated.
Furthermore, religious exoticism also reveals a historical continuity in the particular cultural ideas and discourses it circulates. In the New Age bookstores of my youth, I found translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead alongside Ram Dass’s Be Here Now40 and translations of the Dao de Ching, shelved next to Motherpeace tarot cards, statues of Egyptian deities, Native American smudge sticks, and Pagan ritual manuals. This amalgamation was congealed in the religious explorations of the Transcendentalists in the 1840s, renewed at the turn of the twentieth century, revived by the counterculture of the 1960s, and sold in the New Age bookstores of the 1990s—and today, nearly the exact same set of texts and ephemera of religious exoticism continue to inform the spirituality of transformational festivals.
My research uncovers the reasons why Indigenous and Indic religious traditions come to be formulated together as ready materials and instrumentalized in the construction of personalized spiritualities. I also demonstrate the remarkable continuity in SBNR communities and focus on several ways in which that continuity is reproduced. Altglas writes that “the claims of religious freedom made by ‘spiritual seekers’ are in conformity with a collective discourse, which is encouraged and shaped by their teachers.”41 My research builds on this premise, showing how ideals are codified and repeated in the alternative institutional spaces of yoga classes and workshops in transformational festivals. Chapters 2 and 5 demonstrate how yoga teachers reiterate and reinforce communally supported ideals, sermonizing to somatically receptive audiences during their festival yoga classes. The level of ideological continuity between classes with differently branded teachers and among the intellectually diverse SBNR populations in attendance reveals an underlying ideological commons that binds participants together.
In this way, transformational festivals have the potential to successfully do resistance work by bringing like-minded people together into a commons. Silvia Federici positions the commons as a point of resistance, “like the grass in the cracks of the urban pavement, challenging the hegemony of capital and the state and affirming our interdependence and capacity for cooperation. . . . The politics of the commons are today the expression of this alternative world.”42 Federici uses the notion of the commons in the Marxist sense of collective property, as an economic alternative to capitalism: “Lodged halfway between the ‘public’ and the ‘private,’ but irreducible to either category, the idea of the commons expresses a broader conception of property, referring to social goods—lands, territories, forests, meadows, and streams, or communicative spaces—that a community, not the state or any individual, collectively owns, manages, and controls.”43 The idea of the commons as neither public nor private matches the liminal space of the transformational festival, as does the notion of creating an alternative world.
Contemporary transformational festivals are an attempt to bring together a community of people united in shared values of alternative ways of being. Burning Man has its 10 Principles; Lightning in a Bottle has its 6 Ways of LIB. At Burning Man, there is an explicitly different social and economic utopia that the organizers and participants
