White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia
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 of bourgeois subjectivity.”94 White juxtaposes the death of the carnivalesque with the rise of hysteria, arguing that festivals’ celebration of the grotesque and the sexual was displaced from the social body to the individual psyche.
But many in late-capitalist, neoliberal societies are recognizing that holding the entirety of the social order within the individual psyche is exhausting, and for many, it is too much for the individual to bear. In fact, it can result in “hysteria,” or what modern psychologists would diagnose as anxiety and depression. Social connectivity is vital for humans, and it is increasingly difficult to sustain in our increasingly isolated and technologically saturated worlds. Recognizing this, creators of transformational festivals have sought innovative ways to bring communities together, to build a collective and unified social body despite current trends of geographical fragmentation and individualistic isolation.
Participants view transformational festivals as opportunities to rejuvenate themselves and to gather strength and sense of purpose in solidarity with community. Introducing his film series on these festivals, Jeet-Kei Leung explains, “Living in a materialist society where the highest value is the maximization of profit has left many feeling a void of meaning and spiritual depth in a world where we are reduced to consumers, customers, servants, and bosses.”95 For the builders and the visionaries, these events are an expression of a larger movement that represents an effort to fill this “void of meaning and spiritual depth.” These utopian movements engage with spirituality but also with different economies and socialities; they experiment with alternative ways of being. Leung mourns the disenchantment that modernity has fostered,96 and he believes transformational festivals begin the processes of reenchantment through the creation of a new commons collectively engaged in building a utopian vision for the future.
During my fieldwork, my interlocutors explained that transformational festivals granted them opportunities to “reset” and “recharge,” to “center” themselves, to “remember what’s important,” to get in touch with nature, to celebrate community, to explore beauty and wonder, and to “reconnect.” As such, they echoed Caillois’s claim that “it is by being reborn, by reinvigorating himself in this ever-present eternity, as in a fountain of youth with continuously running water, in which he has the chance to rejuvenate himself and to rediscover the plenitude and robustness of life, that the celebrant will be able to brave a new cycle of time.”97
For many, annual festivals, and more broadly the circuit of transformational festivals, serve as a series of touchstones through which participants cultivate overflowing joie de vivre. The famed yoga teacher Bija Rivers explained her penchant for the festival circuit in the following terms: “I am very committed to the path of realization. . . . I enjoy festivals because I enjoy being around people when they are good hearted . . . I need to be surrounded by, not an artifice of happiness, not an artifice of