to my argument that the greater the index of religious exoticism within a given population, the whiter that population is likely to be. White Utopias celebrates the thriving devotion to progressive consciousness expressed in these spiritual communities, but it also argues that the logic of white possessivism lies at their very heart.
THE FIELD(S)
Transformational Festivals
Festivals create imagined utopian worlds. They are a “pragmatic and fantastic space in which to dream and to try another world into being.”80 In the United States, the 1960s countercultural generation became networked through massive public festivals that united the different (and oppositional) factions of the counterculture through the collective shared experience of fun, music, and often drugs. In the political upheaval of the time, festivals were largely depoliticized events aimed at revealing the common purpose of the counterculture through shared experience. Although the Yippies attempted to politicize Woodstock,81 festivals primarily signified a time to simply be together in solidarity (as in the famed 1969 Be-In festival in San Francisco) and, importantly, to be made visible in public spaces together. It is impossible to measure the empowerment and motivation that countercultural activists gained from the images of Woodstock showing 460,000 people spreading expansively over the rural hills of upstate New York. The overwhelming attendance at the festival generated the feeling of a massive movement underfoot, a nation at the cusp of revolution.
Internationally, festival culture also gained traction in Europe and the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, with massive collectives gathering at “musical mega events,”82 often with utopian underpinnings. In his historical account of the pop festival, media and cultural studies scholar George McKay writes, “Woodstock (1969, USA), Glastonbury (since 1970, UK), and Nimbin (1973, Australia) are early event markers that point us to the utopian desire of the festival, to the way in which that temporary heightened space-time has the fundamental purpose of envisioning and crafting another, better world.”83 Since the 1960s, festival culture in the United States has continued and expanded, but it has also entered the mainstream. No longer solely a product of the counterculture, the largest festivals in the twenty-first century are music festivals. These festivals appear to be popular with diverse audiences, drawing from multiple aesthetic subcultures—there are country music festivals like Stagecoach, alternative music festivals like Lollapalooza, and EDM festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival. By making the pilgrimage to one of these massive music events, attendees identify with the subculture and its aesthetics.
Festivals as a genre of collective action have also become important for particular identity groups. Andy Bennett and Ian Woodward have shown that “a critical function of the festival is to allow a collective representation, a collective celebration and, in many cases, a collective outpouring of a commonly articulated form of socio-cultural identity.”84 In urban environments, ethnic, cultural, and religious festivals are a developing means by which minority communities assert their social influence. Festivals increase the community’s public visibility and demand representation as they transform urban streets, neighborhoods, and districts. City officials regard public festivals as both an opportunity to garner political favor by publicly supporting minority communities residing in their districts and potentially dangerous events that need to be contained and controlled. Festivals of this sort can also be read as control mechanisms administered by the state, which compartmentalize and contain potential sites of social unrest by allowing for tokenized representation in cultural festivals while denying its more concrete forms. As Bennett and Woodward explain, “In a world where notions of culture are becoming increasingly fragmented, the contemporary festival has developed in response to processes of cultural pluralization, mobility, and globalization, while also communicating something meaningful about identity, community, locality and belonging.”85 Festivals are spaces of community and identity production; as urban environments become increasingly diverse, public festivals are increasing, with identity communities vying for visibility, public representation, and in some cases, social dominance.
Transformational festivals are neither music festivals nor a demand for political representation in a multicultural, cosmopolitan society. They are spaces of identity construction through exploration of alternative lifeways and spiritual experiences. Although they are founded on “forms of consumptive engagement [that] are potentially exploitative and based on modes of cultural appropriation,” they are simultaneously “motivated by curiosity and a genuine yearning for engagements with alterity.”86 They form one important institutional nexus in the networks of SBNR populations.87 To describe such nexus points, Hugh Urban employs the notion of “hyphal knots,” meaning key intersections that sustain and circulate nutrients through an ecosystem.88 In New Age spirituality, these hyphal knots have been health food stores, underground newspapers, New Age bookstores, and more recently, yoga studios, meditation centers, and social media platforms. In what follows, I demonstrate that for today’s generations, transformational festivals are another hyphal knot, where spiritual knowledge is shared and community connections are forged and solidified. These hyphal knots nourish and sustain SBNR ideals, and they are enlivened in community and strengthened in the assertion of an ideological commons.
The famed French sociologist Emile Durkheim views festivals functionally, as social mechanisms that unite a community around a collectively identified totem and bind its members to each other in the celebratory emotional affect of “collective effervescence.”89 Following Durkheim’s reasoning, Roger Caillois argues that festivals transgress the boundaries of mundane reality, opening a space wherein participants become renewed and reemerge prepared, recharged, and ready to reenter society with a zest for everyday life.90 In this view, the festival is a venting system wherein individuals momentarily break from stasis, and that rupture enables them to return and reinstate the very stasis from which they initially sought reprieve.
In the Renaissance period, the festival was a public-facing social parody, an opportunity for the commons to come together and joust at their beleaguered status only to have it reconfirmed at the close of the festival. The festival broke the monotony of the mundane and inverted social circumstances, with paroxysmal revelry. Caillois and Mikhail Bakhtin argue that the festival event makes mockery and parody of the established social order—of church, of politics, of social hierarchies—in bacchanalian irreverence. Effigies of popes and presidents were hanged and burned, and fake priests flung excrement and urine at the crowd in a parody of incense distribution.91 They were opportunities for wild hedonistic indulgences, for excess, which stood in stark contrast to the scarcities of daily living. In Caillois’s and Bakhtin’s analyses, the festival was not a space of social revolution, in fact, it was its antithesis; it was a space that reified existing hierarchies because it supplied a venting mechanism that controlled social outrage.
However, Caillois argues that as the twentieth century proceeded, liberal democracies had ushered in the fusion of the sacred and profane, thereby creating a continuous intermediary zone that is neither sacred nor profane, one that obliterates the potential rupture of the festival.92 Instead, he argues, with the death of premodern festivals, war had become the socially rejuvenating force that the festival once had been. In modernity, the potential for rupture has been eradicated, and the festival has become the mere simulation; it has been replaced with vacation.93 The literary critic and scholar Allon White argues that carnivals, the calendrical rituals emblematic of the European social body, were intentionally suppressed between the seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries in efforts to give rise to urban modernity and bourgeois individualism. White argues that the carnivalesque did not simply disappear but rather became diffused “throughout the whole social order of bourgeois life.” He writes, “The result was a fantasy bricolage, unanchored in ritual and therefore set adrift from its firm location in the body, in calendar time, and ritual place. Dispersed across the territories of art, fantasy, and style, in flux, no longer bound by the strict timetable of the ritual year, these carnivalesque fragments have formed unstable discursive compounds, sometimes disruptive, sometimes therapeutic, within the very constitution
