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Shakti Fest, 2015

As the sun crests over the arid desert of Joshua Tree, California, Chandan (Isaiah), a middle-aged white man in the attire of a Hindu priest, sits at a fire pit and leads the assembled crowd in reciting Vedic mantras. A large audience of participants responds with cries of “svāhā!” to each of the hundreds of Sanskrit invocations that he recites as he offers oblations into the fire. There is palpable excitement in the air; the homa (fire sacrifice) invokes an auspicious beginning of Shakti Fest, a five-day yoga and kīrtan (devotional music) festival. Homas are ancient Vedic rites traditionally performed by Indian Hindu brahman priests for auspicious occasions. But here in the California desert, whites define, create, and administrate the Hindu rituals at Shakti Fest; participants may be serious, dedicated practitioners of Hindu rituals, but they identify as “spiritual, but not religious.”

Several days prior and one hundred yards away, the temple is silent in the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, the home of the Institute of Mentalphysics¹ and for this weekend, the sacred geography of Shakti Fest. Over the course of the upcoming festival weekend, the temple will bustle with thousands attending lectures, workshops, and yoga classes with some of the leading yogis and kīrtan artists in the United States. But this morning, the sacred geometrical architecture of the temple reverberates with a more subtle and calm energy as the famed yoga teacher Eli Gordon intones in a soft lilting voice and invites a small group of dedicated yogis to enter the “waters of consciousness” with a series of deep breaths. He begins this full-day intensive yoga workshop by drawing participants into the heart space that he is creating, weaving together an aura of sacrality with ideas drawn from multiple religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Sufism, and Native American religions. His poetic spiritual tapestries create a narrative that reveals humanity and the earth in crisis: there is a problem with modernity and a dire need for a solution. Like many others before him, he articulates the need in terms of a recovery project: ancient wisdom has been lost, and it needs to be found and revitalized. In his words,

[Albert] Einstein said very beautifully, “The ancient people seem to have understood something very important that we have lost.” And the answer is not of course to go back to the way things were thousands of years ago because that would deny all of what’s happened since. This evolutionary wave is coming together which is so beautifully evident here in the desert. All these practices and different tribal members and colors of the rainbow creating a new way. There are certain principles which are so important. And of course, nothing is more important than the Mother, the Earth.²

In these few sentences, he weaves together an admiration for science, but also the mourning of the loss of premodern knowledge, a demand for a new evolution, an affirmation of creating a bricolage of practices and people for spiritual innovation, a celebration of the unification of tribes, and a demand for the centrality of ecology. These are the ideals; yoga is the method.

•••

Burning Man Work Party, Summer 2016

After an hour-long drive wearing my tattered, paint-smeared, get-ready-to-work overalls, I carried my light and somewhat unscathed toolbox through the driveway gate at the Sunland property. In my other hand, I had a cooler, filled with frozen homemade green juice I had pressed for day five of my juice fast. Standing in the courtyard, to my right, was the Blind Mistress, a two-story vision of an art car built out of an old RV, currently languishing in various states of disarray. Looking back, I stood at the precipice between two worlds. For the past five years, I had been inculcated into the world of yogic transformational festivals. I had arrived at this French Quarter Village work party in Los Angeles prepared to learn about the grandfather of these festivals, Burning Man. But instead of continuity, there was difference, which I noted as the cigarettes lit up after the hearty work crew rewarded themselves with a midday meal of loaded pizzas and beers. I longed for all of it, but instead I sipped my green juice—eyes wide open. The collected crew of about ten Burning Man veterans laughed and told stories of life and Burns past. Immediately, I felt at home in this tightly knit and intimately connected established community. When the jokes and stories became marked with silences, it was time to get back to work. I climbed into one of the top-floor sleeping compartments of the Blind Mistress, which was oven hot in the afternoon sun, and I began to wire the outlets.

That morning, when I had first walked in, I had set down my toolbox and cooler of green juice. My presence in the early morning somewhat surprised Sloane and Michael, who were already hard at work. I was a stranger and felt a bit like an intruder, but I explained I was here to help and introduced myself. They exchanged a glance that conveyed a semblance of, “Who is going to take this one?” Sloane stopped what he was doing, looked at me, and said, “What can you do?” I said something like, “I’m fairly handy. I am smart, and I can learn things. I can paint, but I don’t do electrical.” He paused for a beat and said, “Well—do you want to learn electrical? Because I need an assistant.” I learned electrical from Sloane all that day and every weekend for the next month. By the end, I could pull and run wire, wire an outlet with attached switch or stand alone, and climb a twenty-foot ladder safely without being nervous.

From the outset, Sloane was very concerned with teaching me to learn for myself. He would show me and then let me do it. When I was done, I would ask him to check my work, and he would ask: “Do I need to? How do you feel about it? Does it need to be checked?” Several weeks later, on the playa³ during build week of my first Burning Man (the week before the gates open), I was struggling to throw a heavy cable fifteen feet in the air to him. I tried and failed, repeatedly. A friend walked by, saw my struggle, and threw the cable up to him for me. Sloane laughed, thanked him, and then dropped the cable back down to me, telling him, “I want her to learn to do it.” I kept throwing the cable, and eventually, he caught it. While we worked, I learned the basics of how to throw a cable and how to do electrical wiring, but I also learned to recognize that my mental frame had set limitations for my own potential when I had said, “I don’t do electrical.” At one point during our working banter, Sloane said, “I can’t even tell you how many women I have done this for,” meaning that he felt he had empowered these women to accomplish tasks they hadn’t thought they could do. We might imagine Sloane, over his twenty-year career as a Burner, as an enabler of personal transformation. Burning Man is filled with leaders like him, who actively open avenues for others to exceed their existing sense of self.

•••

In the four years since that day, that old toolbox fell apart from overuse and I bought a bigger one—and an impact driver. I know more about propane mechanics than I ever thought that I would. I recently told an old friend that I was looking into buying a trailer. He laughed in surprise because a decade ago that idea never would have crossed my mind. Have I been transformed by transformational festivals? Certainly. There is a gallon of homemade green juice in my freezer, and I have a new toolbox. With that said, my decades-long practice of yoga has waned in the course of this fieldwork, as I have focused more explicitly on its global reformulation as a practice for supple bodied, affluent, white women. As a white woman, I moved freely through each of my field sites, and at the close of this research, I am painfully aware of that privilege and the ways in which it, for me, tarnishes the radical potential of these utopias.

There is an ocean of difference between these two transformational festival worlds, and this book does not intend to minimize that fact. But they are also held together by similar utopian visions and a shared commitment to personal and social transformation that is intentionally crafted in the reformulation of everyday practices and perspectives. Both are deeply embedded in much larger interlacing and overlapping networks comprised of organizations, events, literatures, and discourses that echo similar themes. Sloane drew on his experience in other transformational workshops to enable me to reframe and expand beyond what I imagined to be my limitations—for example, “I don’t do electrical.” Eli Gordon invited us (yoga practitioners) to imagine the world differently, to participate in an “evolutionary wave,” and to create a “new way.” But Eli Gordon’s vision of all of the “different tribal members and colors of the rainbow” coming together to be present in his Shakti Fest yoga class and to actualize that utopian vision doesn’t quite match reality. In fact, in the United States, these communities, whether they are made up of yoga practitioners, transformational festival participants, or those involved in metaphysical spirituality, are approximately 85 percent white. This book centralizes this demographic fact and questions why. Especially in a state like California, where whites comprise only 38.8 percent of the population,⁴ why do these particular spaces of spiritual seeking remain predominantly white?

White Utopias attempts to unravel this uncomfortable demographic reality in the pages that follow. I argue that while transformational festivals create fecund opportunities for spiritual growth, their dependence on religious exoticism serves as a deterrent to nonwhite potential participants. My ethnographic research reveals that in their critique of the existing status quo, participants turn to Indigenous and Indic⁵ religious forms because they imagine them to be expressions of alternative lifeways existing outside of modernity. This fundamental act of distancing and appropriation means that these movements tend to gravitate toward neoromantic forms that stem from nineteenth-century conceptions of the Anglo-European self as civilized and modern while relegating nonwhites to the primitive and premodern.

In his research on the viscosity, or the stickiness, of whiteness in countercultural spaces, Arun Saldanha writes, “It is a commonplace assumption that whites have for a long time been fascinated and transformed by drawing on other people’s cultures and landscapes. . . . Yet the fact that white appropriations of otherness were fueled by a conscious effort to transcend the constrains of white society—that European exoticism and primitivism, though intertwined with colonial subjugation, also tell of the self-critique and self-transformation of whites—has seldom been put at the center of theorization.”⁶ White Utopias is an attempt to put this exact notion at the center, engaging the uncomfortable juxtaposition between problematic religious exoticism and productive self-critique and self-transformation.

I argue that these populations identify with alterity to forge personal solutions to the struggles of modernity. They identify as “spiritual but not religious” and, as Christopher Driscoll and Monica Miller argue, aim to enact the “decentering or death of whiteness, with ‘spiritual’ signifying on the manufactured closeness to the ‘empirical other.’ ”⁷ In drawing closer to the “other,” they destabilize whiteness by rejecting systems of white supremacy in which they are enmeshed, but they do so from within safe spaces of white ethnic homogeneity. At festivals, they speak in self-affirming echo chambers imagined as evolutionary paths to enlightenment and rarely engage with ethnically diverse populations. Because people of color are rarely present as authorities teaching and sharing their own religious and cultural forms, white SBNR adopters and their representations end up reinforcing the logics of white possessivism despite their idealized attempts to decenter whiteness.

My research also reveals that the more yogic the field, the more it is focused on internal self-transformation as the primary agent of social change; as the famed yogi activist Seane Corn writes, “Our evolution is the revolution.”⁸ While some yogis follow Corn’s broader call for humanitarian activism, a much larger majority directs attention to personal evolution by engaging with ascetical and mystical modalities. In her analysis of women in the New Age, Karlyn Crowley questions, “Why angels and not activism?”⁹ In these fields, with a few notable exceptions, there is a similar focus on spiritual transformation over social engagement.¹⁰ The result is an affective experience of freedom and not the freedom work of building social and political solidarities with the “exotic” populations these communities so deeply admire.