LITMIR.BIZ

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religious.” The religion scholars Catherine Albanese and Courtney Bender have named metaphysical religion as that which draws on long-standing traditions of New Thought, Swedenborgianism, Christian Science, Spiritualism, magic, science, and the occult. Albanese suggests that it stands for “an American religious mentality” that focuses on a preoccupation of mind, a predisposition toward the ancient cosmological theory of correspondence between worlds (as carried out in the esoteric tradition of the West), thinking of the mind and its correspondences in terms of movement and energy, and a yearning for salvation understood as solace, comfort, therapy, and healing.³⁵ Bender argues that metaphysical religion privileges experience and mysticism and operates through “entangled” networks in an institutional field, in “cultures that catch people in relations to each other.”³⁶ This book envisions transformational festivals as one form of institution wherein SBNR communities congeal and reproduce their common ideologies. It demonstrates how transformational festivals create temporary utopias that invite participants into the celebration of eclectic, bricolage forms of spirituality.

      However, I also see a divide in metaphysical religion that has not been thoroughly investigated. One end of the spectrum relies heavily on Christian principles, doctrine, and practice. It is in some sense a creative improvisation in the key of Protestant Christianity as much as it attempts to be “post-Protestant.”³⁷ At the other end of the spectrum are those who turn away from institutional Abrahamic traditions (in the United States, mostly Christianity and Catholicism, but also, to some extent, Judaism) and toward practical tools adopted from non-Abrahamic religions (usually Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indigenous religions, and occasionally Sufism, Kabbalah, and Western esotericism). This subsection of the SBNR population adopts religious exoticism to produce mystical experiences, awakenings of consciousness, and spiritual growth through meditation, yoga, chanting, visualization, dreaming, psychedelics (medicine), and ascetic practices.

      Scholars have frequently argued that SBNR populations are defined by unimpeded individual choice that emerges as a result of freedom from religious institutions.³⁸ Such theories support the notion that today’s SBNR populations are creating self-designed bricolage spiritual conglomerations that are personally tailored to their individual preferences. The most famous example of this is Robert Bellah’s 1985 account of a woman named Sheila, who described her faith as listening “to my own little voice” and framed her personalized spirituality as “Sheilaism.”³⁹ Bellah, like many sociologists of religion at the time, saw the increase in SBNR populations as a signal for the declining importance of religion in modernity. Many bemoaned the individualism of millions of Sheilas and feared that SBNR populations would not create strong communities. In contrast, White Utopias argues that that there is much unrecognized soteriological continuity in these fields and that transformational festivals and yoga classes are two examples of underrecognized institutional communities wherein collective ideals are reproduced and disseminated.

      Furthermore, religious exoticism also reveals a historical continuity in the particular cultural ideas and discourses it circulates. In the New Age bookstores of my youth, I found translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead alongside Ram Dass’s Be Here Now⁴⁰ and translations of the Dao de Ching, shelved next to Motherpeace tarot cards, statues of Egyptian deities, Native American smudge sticks, and Pagan ritual manuals. This amalgamation was congealed in the religious explorations of the Transcendentalists in the 1840s, renewed at the turn of the twentieth century, revived by the counterculture of the 1960s, and sold in the New Age bookstores of the 1990s—and today, nearly the exact same set of texts and ephemera of religious exoticism continue to inform the spirituality of transformational festivals.

      My research uncovers the reasons why Indigenous and Indic religious traditions come to be formulated together as ready materials and instrumentalized in the construction of personalized spiritualities. I also demonstrate the remarkable continuity in SBNR communities and focus on several ways in which that continuity is reproduced. Altglas writes that “the claims of religious freedom made by ‘spiritual seekers’ are in conformity with a collective discourse, which is encouraged and shaped by their teachers.”⁴¹ My research builds on this premise, showing how ideals are codified and repeated in the alternative institutional spaces of yoga classes and workshops in transformational festivals. Chapters 2 and 5 demonstrate how yoga teachers reiterate and reinforce communally supported ideals, sermonizing to somatically receptive audiences during their festival yoga classes. The level of ideological continuity between classes with differently branded teachers and among the intellectually diverse SBNR populations in attendance reveals an underlying ideological commons that binds participants together.

      In this way, transformational festivals have the potential to successfully do resistance work by bringing like-minded people together into a commons. Silvia Federici positions the commons as a point of resistance, “like the grass in the cracks of the urban pavement, challenging the hegemony of capital and the state and affirming our interdependence and capacity for cooperation. . . . The politics of the commons are today the expression of this alternative world.”⁴² Federici uses the notion of the commons in the Marxist sense of collective property, as an economic alternative to capitalism: “Lodged halfway between the ‘public’ and the ‘private,’ but irreducible to either category, the idea of the commons expresses a broader conception of property, referring to social goods—lands, territories, forests, meadows, and streams, or communicative spaces—that a community, not the state or any individual, collectively owns, manages, and controls.”⁴³ The idea of the commons as neither public nor private matches the liminal space of the transformational festival, as does the notion of creating an alternative world.

      Contemporary transformational festivals are an attempt to bring together a community of people united in shared values of alternative ways of being. Burning Man has its 10 Principles; Lightning in a Bottle has its 6 Ways of LIB. At Burning Man, there is an explicitly different social and economic utopia that the organizers and participants seek to establish; it relies on a gift economy (Gifting), and is founded on Radical Self-Reliance and enriched by Radical Self-Expression. At Bhakti and Shakti Fests, focus is on bhakti (devotion) and yoga. At Wanderlust festivals, there is a focus on health, vegetarianism, connection with others, personal feelings of harmony, peak experiences, eco-consciousness and environmentalism, spiritual exploration, and personal development. In general, these are spaces that I identify as ideological commons, where people come together to share their convictions and critiques with like-minded others.

      At both LIB and Burning Man, there are numerous practical and instructional workshops about how to build alternative economies and social networks, whereas at the more explicitly yogic festivals, there are few concrete initiatives aimed at revisioning society. Instead, in these environments, yogis come together to do their “inner work,” and they are convinced that their personal transformation will change the world. Their goal is not to directly activate social change through pragmatic forms but rather to lead loving and conscious lives and to spread that vibration through personal connections, by spreading yoga and bhakti and by becoming living examples of more evolved ways of being—changing the world one person and one connection at a time. Celebrants exuberantly come together to share ideas and connectivity with like-minded people who unite in their collective critiques of the status quo and their attraction to imagining other ways of being. In this sense, they run the risk of becoming what Federici calls a “gated commons,” a utopia “joined by exclusive interests separating them from others.”⁴⁴ Forebodingly, and as we will see in the next section, the danger with “gated commons,” Federici warns, is that they “may even deepen racial and intra-class divisions.”⁴⁵

      WHITENESS AND WHITE POSSESSIVISM

      Each of the transformational festivals in this study is distinct in mission and ethos, but in each case most participants are white. Drawing on my visual perception during my field research in these environments, I observed that the more yoga that festivals incorporated, the whiter they tended to be. According to the 2017 Black Rock City Census, 77.1 percent of Burning Man participants identified as white/Caucasian (non-Hispanic);⁴⁶ Lightning in a Bottle has a similar demographic representation. Yoga practice, in general, tends to be even whiter, with approximately 85 percent of American yogis identifying as Caucasian.⁴⁷

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