systems of bondage but are also fostered through empathic human connection generated by the festival. In conclusion, I explain why the commitment to personal transformation generates an ideological commons within festivals while also forming a gated commons that tends to reify ethnic and class boundaries. Ironically, the proclivity toward homogeneity augments affective feelings of freedom and the ubiquitous feeling that participants have “come home.” It also fosters feelings of solidarity and supports the feeling of having found one’s “tribe.” While this may be productive for the largely white population of participants, it also erects boundaries that deter racialized others from participating. In this way, what follows explains why their visions of radical alternative utopias remain, at the present, predominantly White Utopias.
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Romanticizing the Premodern
The Confluence of Indic and Indigenous Spiritualities
Opening Kali fire ceremony with Sundari Lakshmi
Thursday, May 25, 2014
Shakti Fest, Joshua Tree, California1
Sundari Lakshmi was in the center, her long, natural hair pulled into a low ponytail. She wore a black sari and a microphone headpiece. She was soft-spoken. She was probably forty-five years old, a Caucasian woman. Her Sanskrit seemed fairly good, though there were times when she accentuated the wrong syllables as she read aloud and defined the hundred names of Kali. To her righthand side, she had a large binder with all of the materials for the pūjā, which she read from throughout the hour-long ceremony. She was accompanied by three other younger women, whom she called “priestesses.” One of these women seemed to be functioning as her assistant, and she seemed more confident than the others because of her Sanskrit and bodily composure. She was also traditionally dressed, wearing a gold brocade sawar-kamiz. She had a long blonde braid that fell to her waist and wore red bangles and ankle bracelets (payals). She seemed to be dressed as a proper, married Indian woman. The other two women appeared to be novices, and Sundari Lakshmi guided them on how to hold their pūjā articles and their hands, what to do with ritual objects, and so on. There was also a man affiliated with the pūjā. He was young, white, and somewhat short, with thickly calloused feet and disheveled hair.
The pūjā was instructive and geared toward novices. Sanskrit was used but then explained in English. At the start, only thirty people or so were there to participate, but by the end it was more like sixty or seventy. The pūjā was somewhat traditional, with mantras to Kali, the recitation of her hundred names, and offerings of fire, sandalwood, flowers, clarified butter (ghi), and water. Sundari Lakshmi ritually bathed both the self and the goddess in metaphor as she poured offerings into the sacrificial fire. The structure of the fire sacrifice embodied Tantra-reminiscent elements in that practitioners ritually transformed themselves into Kali. After the pouring of oblations into the fire and the ritual transformation of practitioners’ bodies into Kali, we were told to choose partners. With our partners, we were instructed in a ritual blessing of the other’s body as a living embodiment of Kali. The partnering ritual was intimate, as is frequently expected at Shakti Fest, where participants are actively engaged in therapeutic spiritual work. My partner was a slender, young white woman who wore loose-fitting harem pants, a white T-shirt, and no rings or jewelry. She resonated with a calm and peaceful energy. We were instructed to invoke Kali mantras, and we dutifully repeated the Sanskrit and then followed the instruction to bless each part of the other’s body with our hands. Our bodies were knee to knee as we sat cross-legged in lotus posture. First, we were instructed to bless the head, then the throat, heart, eyes, ears, nose, lips, teeth, neck, the nape of neck, back, arms, shoulders, sides, and the “progenitor area.” This was the term Sundari Lakshmi used instead of calling the genitals by name. Neither of us touched the other’s genitals, but I did glance next to us at a male-female older couple who seemed to share an intimate relationship, and I saw him place his fingertips squarely on either side of her vulva. There was some giggling in the crowd, especially when we were asked to touch each other’s teeth. At one point, Sundari Lakshmi exhorted, “Get intimate! You need it. Sometimes we do this pūjā sitting in each other’s laps!” At this, everyone laughed. Afterward, we were instructed to “close out” our experience with each other and return our attention to the fire while Sundari Lakshmi concluded the pūjā with a communal meditation and closing mantras.
This ritual was performed and practiced at Shakti Fest by white ritual officiants who embodied the ethos of Hindu traditions while drawing on Vedic and Tantric sources. White yogis and spiritual seekers comprised the majority of participants who followed Sundari Lakshmi’s instructions to perform the ritual dedicated to the Hindu goddess Kali. Lakshmi claims to be an initiated yogini, pūjāri (priest), lineage holder, and authorized teacher who has lived and practiced her sādhana (spiritual practice) with adepts in Nepal, India, and Tibet. Her practice focuses on the embodiment of the divine feminine in Shakta Tantric lineages; she is serious about her study and her religious practice. According to her website, she is highly educated and has complemented her academic study with decades of practitioner-generated knowledge and numerous traditional Tantric “empowerments and transmissions.” Her biography claims that she is an “authorized teacher” based in this knowledge, and she can be found in yoga studios, festivals, and widely on the Internet offering teachings, rituals, pūjās, retreats, and online courses.
The example of Sundari Lakshmi introduces a commonplace pattern of embodied white possessivism, and the focus of this chapter will be to unfurl its complexities. In this representational politics, whites not only explore, learn about, and share in cultural and religious forms of racialized others, but also go one step further to embody, possess, extract, and redistribute that alterity as a form of social capital. Their access to alterity, deemed exotic, marks them with distinction in white society. It also identifies them as members of a “tribe”—a tribe defined by an affinity for religious exoticism, comprised of spiritual seekers who have also chosen to identify with radical others as a form of critique of their own culture, society, and ancestral heritage. In Deepak Sarma’s words, they imagine that they “can transform from the oppressor to the oppressed, from the colonizer to the colonized. Surely such an imagined transformation is only available to those who are privileged in the first place.”2 Sarma frames the white convert as engaged in either “mimicry or mockery” of Hindu traditions, but this dichotomy belies the ways in which initial acts of mimesis can develop into sincerely held identities. Particularly in the religious field, religious exoticism can be an initial step in a gradual process of self-transformation emerging from engagement with radically different cultures, customs, philosophies, and lifeways. The trouble lies not in the exploration and learning but in the representation, in the white possessivist logics that further economic exploitation and cultural erasure of people of color.
Many scholars have written similar critiques about the politics and ethics of cultural borrowing and appropriation.3 The Dakota scholar Philip Deloria writes about the history of whites “playing Indian,” performing the other in an attempt to cultivate their authentic selves.4 Laura Donaldson denounces “white shame-ans,” whites who appropriate, represent, and exploit Native religion as a form of fetish.5 Deborah Root writes of “cannibal culture,” linking together the commodification of difference and white consumption.6 But few have analyzed cultural appropriation through the study of religion, which raises particularly perplexing questions about the spectrum between spiritual tourism, cultural appropriation, and conversion.
In what follows, I employ some of the lessons learned from Indigenous studies to think through the appropriative practices of religious exoticism in transformational festivals. In these spaces, many whites adopt and perform aspects of “exotic” cultures and religions as instruments to further their spiritual growth and exploration. In so doing, some even cultivate new selves, as in the example of Sundari Lakshmi. These practitioners participate in religious exoticism as a means to cultivate self-distinction.7 As Graham St. John has argued, “The essential alterity signified by Amerindians, and the Natives of other regions, speaks of the primitivism that has tactically assisted, and continues to assist, Western desires for completeness and ideologies of progress. It also speaks of the practice of cultural appropriation through which a fantasized