White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia
far beyond that of any other Indic text.110 As a result, this study privileges this text above others when analyzing and interpreting how yoga teachers translate Indic philosophical discourses for their students. This methodological decision is not an attempt to justify the elevation of the Yoga Sūtras but rather an effort to trace yoga teachers’ discourses to the primary interpretive frames that inform them.
In addition to references to religious scriptures, there are other markers that attempt to define yoga performed at transformational festivals as spiritual. Some yoga classes incorporate guided meditations, partner-based spiritual exercises, rituals, prayers, and ecstatic dance accompanied by devotional music. At Bhakti and Shakti Fests, devotional music (kīrtan) accompanies nearly all of the yoga classes, drawing on the strengths of the assembled kīrtan musicians at the festivals. It is also commonplace to see yogis marking their yoga mats with talismans, mālās (prayer beads), Native American ceremonial pipes, chakra wands, crystals, and other sacred objects. Some write their intentions and affirmations on pieces of paper and slip them under the mat as they practice, invoking the twenty-first century iteration of the New Thought notion that repeating affirmations attracts “harmonizing vibrations” and eventually makes them become reality.111 Stepping on someone’s yoga mat with outdoor shoes is a faux pas that warrants an apology for the defilement of their designated sacred space. The body-length rectangle of the yoga mat draws boundaries between the sacred and the profane and sanctifies the practice on the yoga mat as distinct and “special,”112 set apart from actions that occur outside of the mat.
Methodologically, focusing on the practice of yoga was particularly revealing because teachers espoused their spiritual values in lengthy lectures during postural practice. The yoga class provided a means of drawing practitioners into a receptive state wherein teachers could then influence them to adopt a distinct set of values or practices. Yoga classes are an exercise in acquiescence and social (group) influence on individual behavior. Students are told to move their bodies in particular ways, and they are praised for the skill with which they mimetically model the teacher. This builds a relation of receptivity on the part of the student that is bodily, psychological, and somatic. In shaping the body and mind to the teacher’s demands, students become mentally and physically supple. Through group yoga practice, they are conditioned to be receptive to a teacher’s philosophical interventions.
Exercise-oriented yoga studio spaces are wary of this reality and often restrict what yoga teachers can say outside of directions related to bodily postures. Usually, yoga teachers are under advisement (or contract) not to cross boundaries into religion or philosophy. But in the yogic spaces of transformational festivals, yoga teachers use the opportunity to attract students by espousing their distinctive modes and philosophies. During our interview, Bija Rivers explained: “A festival class is not the city yoga class. The boundaries are expanded so people are more open—like in terms of Bhakti Fest—people are more open to the interior aspects—and in particular, what is bhakti? It is unusual for a spiritual tradition to really highlight that, and I think it is really helpful for the yoga tradition, which seems to be, in the mainstream reflections, propelled by people who are curious and get into yoga for physical reasons.”113 Yoga classes are a site of reproduction, wherein the values and practices of SBNR communities are generated and sustained. Attention to these sites of reproduction provides answers to the enduring question of how social values are produced and reproduced in the absence of overt and explicit directives.
As I discuss in chapter 5, my research suggests that these sites of value reproduction/production are surprisingly consistent in their messaging. The core tenets of this ideological commons are iterated in myriad ways, in a variety of vernaculars. But despite their diffusion and transience, the messages promoted and received at transformational festivals and during yoga practice construct institutions of spirituality that bind practitioners in ways that are recognizable and remarkably constant. These consistencies of message are what form an ideological field of continuity. Within these ideological affinities, this ephemeral yet connected anthropological field emerges.
Between 2011 and 2019, I attended twenty-three festivals over a total of approximately 129 days. I have sorted, transcribed, and coded my audio recordings from approximately ninety-seven interviews, fifty-six spiritual workshops and lectures, and sixty-two yoga classes. I also attended related events, such as kīrtan gatherings in local yoga studios, yoga classes, Burner meetups, and social gatherings. In most of these environments, I was both a participant and an observer. I participated in kīrtan, workshops, guided meditations, and yoga classes. I had my astrological chart read, and I danced, made new friends, and in time, ran into familiar faces and developed lasting friendships. Sometimes I sat in the back of these spaces, recorded, and took notes. In 2015, I was part of the sevā (selfless service) team at Shakti Fest and worked several volunteer shifts. In 2017, faced with the retirement of the existing leadership team, I stepped into a leadership role for the French Quarter Black Rock Bakery at Burning Man.114 This role taught me a tremendous amount about the backstage and production aspects of these experiential spaces, and became a year-round side job in 2018 and 2019.
Because of the extensive time and money required to maintain this ethnographic research, I divided my field research into overlapping stages: from 2011 to 2016, I focused on Bhakti and Shakti Fests; from 2014 to 2016, I attended LIB; from 2014 to 2017, I attended Wanderlust festivals; and from 2016 to 2019, I attended Burning Man. My peak year in the field was 2014, during which I attended LIB, four Wanderlust festivals (in Oahu, Los Angeles, Squaw Valley, and Mont Tremblant), and both Bhakti and Shakti Fests. However, my time commitment exponentially increased beyond that level when I became a part of the leadership team of the French Quarter Village at Burning Man in 2018. Throughout the entire period of research (2011–2019), I kept abreast of new developments in and reactions to each of these transformational festivals and maintained relationships in each field. I discuss in more detail the intricacies of conducting ethnographic work in these ephemeral, multisited fields and the reception of my research among my informants in appendix 2, mostly for ethnographically interested readers.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
How are we to evaluate the ways in which the religious exoticism inherent in spirituality is simultaneously a genuine engagement with alterity, a radically transformative method, and an often exploitative form of cultural appropriation? To this, I answer that it is a complex both/and situation. There is no easy answer here. White Utopias grounds this research question sociologically by problematizing religious exoticism and white claims of authority over nonwhite cultural and religious forms juxtaposed against participants’ very real experiences of transformation and spiritual evolution resulting from inspirational engagements with alterity. Chapter 1 charts how religious exoticism draws from Indic religious practices and ideas and Indigenous religions, based in problematic imagined and historical divisions between self and other, modern and primitive, civilized and savage. Chapter 2 focuses explicitly on contemporary yoga, demonstrating how the dominant majority of white yoga teachers parse questions of authenticity. In so doing, I invite readers into a microscopic view of the strategies of building authority in the context of cultural appropriation.
At the midway point of the book, the narrative pivots on a particularly salient comment an informant made during our interview at Lightning in a Bottle in 2015. When I asked Niko, an African American DJ, a general question about his impressions of the festival crowd, he immediately began speaking about race. He viewed the religious exoticism of the largely white population as a first step in the gradual evolutionary journey of white people. Many festival participants also believe they are participating in human evolution and spiritual awakening, but Niko’s comment suggested that white explorations into alterity can puncture white hegemony and even initiate a politics of friendship based in the recognition of shared humanity.
The second half of the book explores this potential evolution through accounts of personal transformation occurring in transformational festivals. Chapter 3 focuses on the intentional denaturalization of the conventional self through the adoption of ascetical practices. Chapter 4 focuses on unexpected self-transformations catalyzed by encounters with wonder in mystical experiences. Chapter 5 investigates the most common theme that was iterated time and again by my interlocutors across these fields: the expression of affective feelings of freedom.