Seeker, Surfer, Yogi: The Progressive Religious Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Place in Encinitas, California

Abstract

This essay examines Encinitas, California, as a case study for understanding how a cultural pluralism based in religious experimentation has come to define the area’s overall civic imagination. Over the years, as yoga enthusiasts and surfers flocked to the area, their lifestyle practices acquired the sanctity of religious belief. The essay uses three controversies—discussions over a competition at a popular surf spot, a debate over the meaning and legality of a public artwork, and a controversy over a public school district yoga curriculum—to show how the city’s expansive religious imaginary shaped debates about access to public space. Taken together, these incidents convey how a cosmopolitan religious imagination harnessed alternative beliefs and practices to a California dream that was increasingly characterized by an exclusionary neoliberal economy of privileged bourgeois consumption and culturally appropriative branding.