Making Sacred Space

This article presents data gleaned from ethnographic research in transformative events, with particular attention to those that incorporate yoga practice as an important educational site for the inscription and dissemination of “spiritual” values and as a pivotal site for testimonials of spiritual “transformation.” It draws from nearly a decade of research and practice in yoga environments in a wide variety of transformative events, including Bhakti and Shakti Fests (held in the high desert of Joshua Tree in Southern California), Wanderlust yoga festivals (global festivals in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and multiple regions of the United States), Lightning in a Bottle (held in central California), and Burning Man (held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada). This research focuses particularly on the innovative ways that practitioners materialize and ritualize sacred spaces that represent their eclectic and personalized spiritual understandings and beliefs. In their imagined transition from institutional religion to transformational spirituality, yogic practitioners seek to develop alternative forms of devotional materiality that reflect and express their new metaphysical values. In creating sacred space in festivals—through building altars and spaces for spiritual and yogic practices (including the ubiquitous yoga mat)—practitioners use material culture agentively to re-enchant what many believe to be a disenchanted world. These efforts to re-enchant the self and its surroundings can be understood as an impulse to create counter-modernities that challenge the current order of things by simultaneously returning to ancient wisdom and envisioning new futures.