The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Endowment Fund in Humanities.
White Utopias
The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals
Amanda J. Lucia
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2020 by Amanda J. Lucia
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-520-37694-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-37695-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-97633-7 (ebook)
Manufactured in the United States of America
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother
This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Contents
1. Romanticizing the Premodern: The Confluence of Indic and Indigenous Spiritualities
Interlude: Cultural Possession and Whiteness
2. Anxieties over Authenticity: American Yoga and the Problem of Whiteness
Interlude: “White People Are on the Journey of Evolution”
3. Deconstructing the Self: At the Limits of Asceticism
Interlude: Sculpting Bodies and Minds
4. Wonder, Awe, and Peak Experiences: Approaching Mystical Territories
Interlude: Producing Wonder / Branding Freedom
5. The Cathartic Freedom of Transformational Festivals: Neoliberal Escapes and Entrapments
Appendix 1: @Instagram Data for Public Figures Cited
Illustrations
1. Top ten offerings at Shakti Fest, 2012
2. Top ten offerings at Bhakti Fest, 2013
3. Top ten offerings at Wanderlust, Oahu, HI, 2014
4. Top ten offerings at Lightning in a Bottle, 2016
5. Top ten offerings at Burning Man, 2017
6. Author portrait, Tea and Turbans tea ceremony, Burning Man, 2017
7. “From Your Culture to Ours” sign, Burning Man, 2017
8. Woman in Native headdress, Burning Man Temple, 2016
9. The Village at Lightning in a Bottle, 2014
10. Garage Mahal Ganesh Mobile, Burning Man, 2016
11. Communal altar at Bhakti Fest, 2014
12. Sunset yoga meditation, Lightning in a Bottle, 2016
13. Yogic discipline, Wanderlust, Stratton, VT, 2018
14. Nature church, Wanderlust, Squaw Valley, CA, 2019
15. Kīrtan artists at Prasada Festival, 2018
16. Jaguar at Shakti Fest, 2016
17. Dystopian tattoo, Bhakti Fest, 2013
18. Yoga retreat, Wanderlust, Mont Tremblant, 2018
19. Galaxia Temple burning, Burning Man, 2018
20. “HOME” sign, Lightning in a Bottle, 2016
Acknowledgments
It is somewhat ironic that I write this book from the University of California, Riverside, the home of the Highlanders, which imagines an invented and borrowed Scottish identity based on the idea that the city of Riverside is marginally higher above sea level than the neighboring city of Los Angeles. Despite our student body being comprised of 85 percent non-Anglo-European minorities, at games and graduations, audiences sing songs of Highlander pride and don blue and yellow Scottish tartans. This imagined Scottish Highland is actually the ancestral land of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples, and UCR is a result of Rupert (Cahuilla) and Jeannette (Eastern Cherokee) Costo’s founding vision. I respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original caretakers of the land, water, and air where I live and work. I am also writing as a white faculty member with a degree in the History of Religions and a research specialty in Hinduism, itself a colonial construction. Like the study of Native traditions, the study of Hinduism is rife with contested debates over representation that cannot be extricated from racial power dynamics exacerbated by colonial histories.
I am deeply beholden to UCR as the place where the perspectives of my students and colleagues led me to provincialize myself and my field of study. I am hesitant to name those who challenged my thinking on race and ethnicity in the United States lest I not live up to their high standards, but Daisy Vargas, Josh Little, Leven Kali, Anthea Kraut, Sarita See, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Jennifer Najera, Michele Raheja, and Dylan Rodriguez each shifted my perspective. Their