White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia
approach. Yes, it’s Sanskrit. Yes, it’s a lot easier for me to pull my energy to the eye center if I’m focusing on my teacher’s face, which is a devotional aspect of it. And yet, is it necessary? No. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Catholic or Lutheran or Jewish or Sikh, it’s the same. It’s pulling you up, and it’s connecting to the divine. And all of the paths can get you there if practiced with diligence.16
In this soteriology, one can pick and choose the most effective tools across traditions because, in essence, they all lead to the same goal. This fundamental and widely pervasive belief has led SBNR practitioners to view religious forms as practical tools that can be extracted from the institutional mores and theological cosmologies of their parent traditions.
My interlocutors echo Altglas’s research on Kabbalah centers and modern Hindu gurus, wherein she found that “courses, commentaries of the scriptures and writings, and teacher’s interviews all associate religion with dogma, constraint, obedience, ‘mindless ritual,’ lack of consciousness, and lack of fulfillment.”17 Likewise, speaking of the New Age movement’s propensity toward religious exoticism, she articulates this same pragmatic approach to religion: “Above all, individuals seek practical methods for personal growth in a ‘lifelong religious learning,’ beyond religious particularities. . . . The imperative of self-improvement constitutes an incentive for not stagnating and endlessly trying new techniques that could hasten this improvement.”18
Esme, a young female participant at Shakti Fest, self-identified as a “quester” for this “lifelong religious learning” in the following terms: “We’re questers, spiritual questers. So we quest for a lot of different areas, and thus in that questing you expose yourself to a lot of different paths, a lot of different experiences, a lot of different thoughts. You know, just allow that which really works for you, and [adopt] the essence as it were. Find the commonality amongst all the paths.”19 Rather than stagnate within a fixed religious identity framed by dogma and institution, these questers search for practical tools that will lead them to pure and ancient essences that are believed to be untainted by the corruptions of modernity.
The result is that even among those who visibly practice meditation, postural yoga, Vedic rituals, or kīrtan, few self-identify within the particular religion from which these practices are extracted. As I have written elsewhere, this is commonplace among those who identify as SBNR, many of whom believe in God and routinely practice religion.20 Very few yogis attending transformational festivals claim to be Hindu or Buddhist, but 95 percent practice meditation, 94 percent practice āsana, 90 percent practice prāṇāyāma, 74 percent read yogic texts, 67 percent recite mantras, 64 percent sing kīrtans, 41 percent read Hindu scriptures, 38 percent read Buddhist scriptures, and 33 percent worship deities (pūjā).21
There are multiple reasons for this absence of religious self-identification: (1) alternative spirituality is a category established in opposition to religion and formal religious affiliation, which fosters an antiestablishment and anti-institutional constituency; (2) these practitioners are not exclusive to one religious tradition, and this exclusivity is a defining feature of religious belonging;22 and (3) white SBNR populations are excluded from some of the religions in question because the assumption of a particular ethnic identity is considered a qualification for belonging. This last point is critical; both Hinduism and Native American religious traditions are ethnoreligions, within which there are no standard avenues for formal conversion. Neither is traditionally a proselytizing religion, and both have a history of foregrounding secret rites transmitted through oral traditions along strict hierarchical systems. Both are exclusionary toward outsiders and have established regulatory systems to enact that exclusion (purity and pollution in the context of Hinduism, and earned hereditary knowledge in the context of Native American religions). In fact, their predominance in SBNR communities may have everything to do with their secrecy, because the history of metaphysical religion is deeply intertwined with the quest for esoteric knowledge. Wouter J. Hanegraaff traces the very idea of the birth of a New Age to “modern Theosophical speculation which, in turn, is dependent upon older traditions in Western esotericism.”23
Yoga, pūjās, kīrtan, and homas (Hindu fire sacrifices) blended seamlessly with Tai chi, Qi gong, Tibetan singing bowls, and mindfulness meditation at the transformational festivals I studied. Altars combined images of the Buddha and Shiva; Ganesha sat next to the Virgin Mary. They were often erected in beatific natural spaces, such as at the bases of trees and at the top of hills, and included feathers, pine cones, crystals, and sage. Rituals included not only Buddhist and Hindu religious practices but also South American crystal skulls, labyrinth-walking meditations, shaman-led visualizations, Maori storytelling, medicine wheel creation, and Native American drumming, singing, and prayers. This religious behavior extends beyond the boundaries of benevolent Orientalism24 to encapsulate a form of religious exoticism, one that employed a pragmatic approach by valorizing religious forms and practices that were viewed as both exotic and effective spiritual tools.
Wanderlust festivals celebrate a form of enchanted secularism that involves sublime experiences engaging with nature, personal introspection through yoga, and spiritual fulfillment in contact with community. In contrast, Bhakti and Shakti Fests cultivate explicitly religious experiences by drawing on the teachings of various Hindu-derived gurus, devotional yoga (bhakti), devotional music and chanting (kīrtan), mantra recitation, Vedic rituals, and postural yoga. They also include the most significant population of white practitioners who identify as Hindu bhaktas (devotees). Many of the core facilitators of this community are serious devotees and do not represent the “noncommittal”25 and superficial, “aesthetic” choices of the New Age,26 as is often described by scholarly critics. Rather, many were born into the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) or the Hare Krishnas (ISKCON), or born into families that were deeply committed to a particular form of Indic spirituality. For example, when I asked Jesse, a young male attendee, when he got involved in the guru-yoga scene, he told me that his grandmother had been on the board of the SRF in the 1940s.27 When I asked Gopal, a prominent kīrtan musician, when he became a Krishna bhakta, he told me that he and his bandmates were born into ISKCON families.28 Some have lived for decades in guru-led communities in the United States or in India, while others make annual pilgrimages to the subcontinent or otherwise divide their lives between East and West. Although these participants are mostly whites who adopt Indic cultural forms, including dress and bodily comportment, they complicate the stereotyped critique of noncommittal and aesthetically based spiritual tourism. Many of the core facilitators of this community are converts in all but name.
In opposition, Burning Man and LIB emphasize spiritual expression and exploration through the creation of transtraditional spiritual assemblages, or bricolage, rather than religious devotion to any one tradition or teacher. LIB hosts multiple learning environments wherein participants are exposed to workshops focused on everything from conscious business and entrepreneurial skills to permaculture and essential oils. There are opportunities to engage in chanting Hindu mantras, meditating with Tibetan singing bowls, and singing with members of the Native American Church (Peyote Religion). In 2016, the LIB Temple of Consciousness, which ran programming every hour for the entirety of the festival, focused explicitly on Indigenous knowledge; there were over forty different lectures and workshops related to Indigenous traditions and arts. In 2017, LIB festival organizers established a permanent space dedicated to learning about and supporting the spirituality and political activism of Native peoples.29
Wanderlust festivals in Great Lake Taupo, New Zealand, in Sunshine Coast, Australia, and in Oahu, Hawaii, opened and closed with ceremonies conducted by Maori, Australian aboriginals, and Hawaiians, respectively. Throughout each Wanderlust festival week, there were special lectures, guided walking tours, meditations, and rituals focused on Indigenous knowledge. These inclusions were the festivals’ attempts to raise consciousness of the fact that they occur on settler colonial lands with a fraught history of oppression of Indigenous people. For the initial welcome ceremony of Wanderlust in Great Lake Taupo, the festival’s organizers invited a large group of Maori leaders and performers to conduct a Pohiri ritual dramatizing the encounter between different tribes. To do so is a political recognition of the Maori history of New Zealand; indeed, to open a Wanderlust festival in New