Review: White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals, by Amanda J. Lucia

Abstract

The early 2020s have already fostered reckonings with the institutionalized legacies of colonialist practices. Conference presenters dutifully acknowledge land ownership to indigenous peoples. Social media users circulate abolitionist readings and lectures. Organizational personnel investigate diversity and equity complaints. In these ways, progressives have started grappling with entrenched white supremacy, misogyny, and class warfare. Will these changes deepen, given conservative backlash and growing socioeconomic inequalities?White Utopias presciently anticipates this tumultuous moment with its study of the gatherings of “spiritual, but not religious” white yoga enthusiasts. As Amanda Lucia explains, these privileged persons gather at yoga retreats as a respite from the overwork of consuming careers and the ennui of anomic communities. Bonding over spiritual practices and values drawn from Indic and indigenous cultures, they find personal meaning through perfecting their bodies. Through their blissed-out communion in spatially and racially segregated settings, these yoga enthusiasts reproduce earlier, white colonialist acts of domination, extraction, and racial valuation.Using participant observation and interviews with participants, Lucia explores the exclusionary spaces created and dominated by whites. Starting in 2011, she conducted 129 days of field research at festivals and events at remote destinations, from New Zealand to India to the Nevada Black Rock Desert. These included five Bhakti Fests, five Shakti Fests, six Wanderlusts, three Lightning in a Bottles, and four Burning Mans, as well as fifty-two days of “ethnocultural” festivals, including Kumbh Mela in India. Lucia focuses on yogic activities at such sites, arguing that these endeavors hamper more expansive possibilities, such as collective social change. The religious studies professor immerses readers in spaces hosted by white yoga gurus who cater to the affluent, as well as events that draw a wider socio-economic cross-section. In observing these events in their natural environs, she reveals participants’ experiences, both emotional and physical. The latter include bodily horrors (such as Lucia’s allergic reaction to the alkaline desert and a disfiguring sty acquired during travel) that mar the idylls of moneyed, ascetic devotion. Lucia also captures the affective wonder of collective effervescence, as well as anguished confessionals of wounding exclusion, such as one experienced by a Black friend and his wife attempting to enjoy a performance at Burning Man.In portraying how people can wield spirituality as divisive rather than unifying forces, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of what is lost when groups invest their transformational energies into activities that not all persons can access. By depicting the cost of centuries of colonialism reproduced in contemporary times, Lucia’s criticisms bridge territories for practitioners and scholars to consider how more inclusionary spiritual communities could emerge.This book’s critical perspective on whiteness, spirituality, and festivals should appeal to a variety of readers, including advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as general readers. Its approach of “studying up” such jet-setting community-seekers adds to existing studies of white elites and their milieus by sociologists Brooke Harrington (2020), Rachel Sherman (2019), and Shamus Khan (2012). Qualitative researchers will appreciate the text’s excerpts from field notes and quotes from interlocuters, all evidence of the sweat of a seasoned ethnographer. That said, a curious sense of ahistoricity does crop up at times. For instance, the book characterizes organizers’ efforts to distinguish Burning Man from conventional festivals as “recent”—these concerns actually surfaced as early as the 1990s, as documented in my own research (2009). Tensions over whose interests are being supported have deeper roots than conveyed by such descriptions, and nostalgia only obscures that fact.Such details aside, Lucia’s research points to possible futures in which transcendence does not involve erasing nonwhite cultures or glossing over existing power imbalances. Her cautionary analyses highlight how transcendence requires reimagining existing institutions in ways that promote authentic liberation and everyday connection. Recent events have underscored this need for dramatically different organizational approaches. For instance, the pandemic’s throttling of mass in-person gatherings—as well as the tragic consequences of premature celebrations evident in the second wave of deaths and illness engulfing India as of 2021—underscore how interconnected societies and individuals are. Clearly, meditative retreats and transgressive festivals offer limited interventions into resolving world issues of climate change and inequality.Realizations that segregated self-care and communion prolong inequalities have started to permeate wider awareness, particularly as inadequate pandemic responses by governments ensure continued unequal status quos. Individual and group actions can recognize, or deny, collective interdependence, with consequences for all. To that end, the Burning Man organization made the financially challenging, but socially responsible, decision to cancel its 2021 face-to-face gathering of more than 80,000 campers. For some, these times might elicit rethinking of how to engage in spiritual practices and the societal consequences of these.