[instead] with appropriators’ social capital, which leaves them better positioned than their Indigenous counterparts to reap financial reward.”60 In these analyses, whites flood the spiritual market with their neo-Native pseudoreligion and make-believe shamanism, claiming authenticity to the point that one Onondaga leader argued, “Non-Indians have become so used to all this hype on the part of imposters and liars that when a real Indian spiritual leader tries to offer them useful advice, he is rejected. He isn’t Indian enough for all these non-Indian experts on Indian religion.”61 It is a dark irony that love can result in such antipathy; it must be a suffocating love indeed, one deeply intertwined with the fraught ideals of “racial fantasy.”62 For there is no question that the New Agers who immerse themselves in and even embody Native American religions love Native culture. These are whites who sympathize with the religions of racialized others and attempt to act in solidarity through imitation. But as Philip Jenkins explains, “The more white people sympathize with Indians and try to show solidarity with them, the more they do so through forms of imitation that are seen as insensitive profanation rather than sincere flattery.”63 While whites may see imitation as the most sincere form of flattery, many Indigenous activists reject their presumptions of authenticity.
While the discussions of spirituality and yoga have not yet become as vitriolic, there are threads that resemble patterns of what Eric Lott so aptly terms “love and theft” in his seminal study of blackface minstrelsy.64 The debates over cultural appropriation raging on the Internet show no signs of abating; they have also captured the attention of select scholars.65 Cultural property and intellectual rights have become an increasingly litigious affair. In the field of yoga, classes have been cancelled in protest of the neocolonialism of whites teaching yoga,66 websites are dedicated to the project of “decolonizing yoga,”67 yoga teachers have tried to patent postures and postural sequences,68 yoga is being revived in India as a form of Hindu nationalism,69 and whites dominate the public representations of yoga in the United States (and increasingly across the globe) to the exclusion and erasure of Indian voices.70
Historically, cultural encounter, whether by trade or warfare, often involves the exchange of cultural forms; many of these moments of cultural exchange occur outside of the context of whiteness. But the notion of cultural appropriation focuses attention on individual white actors and their representative claims of nonwhite cultural and religious forms. Cultural appropriation is an individualized expression of an overarching institutionalized system that expresses white access and ownership. The African American scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates explains: “When you’re white in this country [the United States], you’re taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have a right to everything. . . . You’re conditioned this way. It’s not because your hair is a texture or your skin is light. It’s the fact that the laws and the culture tell you this. You have a right to go where you want to go, do what you want to do, be however—and people just got to accommodate themselves to you.”71
Religious exoticism is a white-dominant field, as are its modes of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, minstrelsy, and “playing Indian.”72 It is dependent on the logics of white possessivism, as argued by the Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her writing about the settler colonial context of Australia. There, she argues, “signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape.”73 From the appropriation of Native lands to the institution of slavery, white people have been recognized within the law as “property-owning subjects.” Whiteness itself became property, signifying the capacity to possess.74 At the national level, what George Lipsitz calls the “possessive investment in whiteness” has been institutionalized through colonization, slavery, urban redlining, de facto school segregation, and mass incarceration.75 One might imagine that religious exoticism’s identification with nonwhite religious and cultural forms would result in a rejection of the possessive investment in whiteness. But is there not a similar logic of white possessivism that informs what Deborah Root describes as “cannibal culture,” a culture that loves until it devours its lover: black widows in white skins?
Utopian visions of religious exoticism are defined by a particular notion about the other. In its most idyllic form, the other is romanticized as an untouched essence—timeless, pure, and uncorrupted by modernity. The utopian vision of the other must be constructed as such in order to be conceived of as an oppositional solution to the existing order of things. If it were similarly corrupted and corruptible, then it would be no solution at all. It is in recognition of racialized oppression that religious exoticists seek to dissociate themselves from oppressor kinsmen and to adopt the lifeways of their victims. Arun Saldanha highlights Norman Mailer’s famed essay “The White Negro” to suggest that in their post–World War II existential crisis, the hippies turned to African American culture for alternative solutions; even the terms hippie, hip, and the more modern term hipster are derivatives of the Black slang term hep, meaning “with it” or “fashionable.”76 In this way, religious exoticism is in essence a project of white identity-making, defining the self through engagement with the other. This fundamental notion is one of the reasons the culture of exoticism tends to attract white youth.
Furthermore, religious exoticism’s perseverating focus on the purity, timelessness, and authenticity of the other necessarily dissociates it from the actual communities that practice the religious forms it adopts. Living Native Americans, Indians, or Asians, who are just as embroiled in the multiple systems of modernity, complicate and even render impotent the imagined idealization of these cultures and religions. The complex political realities of the struggles of contemporary Indians and Indigenous peoples, for example, sit in contradistinction to their imagined purity and detachment from modernity. This distance is required because religious exoticism is dependent on “the idealization of religious traditions as being primordial, mystical, and authentic; it aims at dramatizing an opposition to one’s own culture and religious background in order to reflect on, criticize, and reclaim the latter through a cultural detour. Religious exoticism is pragmatic and, paradoxically, self-referential. Thus, exotic religious resources are constructed and disseminated on the terms of those who appropriate them.”77 The practitioner of religious exoticism is rendered an introspective dreamer, imagining an alternative, utopian world.
The result is that when confronted with these white self-referential utopian ideals, many people of color feel unrecognized and falsely stereotyped and thus disengage from religious exoticism. Some may not suffer the existential crisis that leads to a “restlessness” and the subsequent “search for the exotic,”78 likely because many identify within networked religious and cultural communities. For others, put simply, white begets white; that is to say that the optics of a majority-white party serves as a deterrent. This invokes the familiar recognition of the socially demarcated spaces of white property and racialized exclusions that have dominated US history, where the lack of people of color in attendance signals a white-only space. These factors, combined with the financial and vocational surplus necessary to engage in these distant and expensive multiday (sometimes multiweek) “serious leisure”79 events, constitute significant barricades for would-be nonwhite participants.
However, it is important to remember that in spaces like Burning Man and LIB, just over 20 percent of the participants are nonwhite; this is not an insignificant population (around 14,000 and 5,000 participants, respectively). Furthermore, as these festivals become even more popular and recognized, it appears that they are becoming more diverse. For example, in the 2013–17 Summary Report of the Black Rock City Census, the percentage of white/Caucasian (non-Hispanic) census respondents decreased approximately one percentage point each year, from 82.9 percent in 2013 to 77.1 percent in 2017. In contrast, the transformational festivals that celebrate bhakti yoga and postural yoga continue to be over 90 percent white. One reason for this departure may be that the general populace is increasingly attracted to festivals like Burning Man and LIB for the parties, the music, and the art, not to mention the social cachet acquired by attending. In contrast, participants attracted to festivals like Wanderlust and Bhakti and Shakti Fests are explicitly interested in the practice of Indic religious
