THE PRIVATIZATION OF RELIGION AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

This essay addresses an apparent disjuncture between the author's fieldwork observations on the one hand, and existing scholarship relating to kundalini yoga and the 3HO on the other hand. The author sets aside questions about 3HO and Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere as furnishing a normative history, leadership, and institutions. Instead, the author makes central first-hand perceptions and understandings of those who practice and/or teach kundalini yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. Based on his fieldwork into the kundalini yoga community in Calgary between January 2011 and April 2013, the author documents how those who practice and/or teach kundalini yoga appeal to a remarkably broad range of authoritative sources to support and to articulate their world views and their religious/spiritual sensibilities. The author argues that those who practice or teach kundalini yoga in Calgary present themselves as modern, autonomous subjects in a pre-modern religious universe. Should this thesis gain traction, it offers an alternative conceptual resource for getting past the seemingly ubiquitous Punjabi/gora, Sikh/non-Sikh, traditional (sanatan)/new movement binaries that have permeated earlier scholarship on kundalini yoga and the 3HO.

Notes

1 In late 2010, Michael Stoeber contacted me about putting together a panel on kundalini yoga and the 3HO for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress) in Fredericton, New Brunswick in May 2011. Michael Stoeber brought Nicola Mooney into that project. The three of us constituted a small panel on Diaspora Sikhism: Exploring the Sikh Dharma/3HO. Since then, the three of us, along with Verne Dusenbery, Philip Deslippe, Shanti Kaur Khalsa, and Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa collaborated on a special issue of Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 8/3 (2012) on 3HO/Kundalini Yoga. This paper has grown out of these and related projects.

2 Yogi Bhajan established the practice of ending kriyas with this ballad.

3 Krishna Kaur recently held a workshop in Okotoks, a small city just south of Calgary in March 2013.

4 3HO has long been present in Mexico and continues to expand into Latin and South America. (See Kalhon 2012). It also finds a following in the Caribbean and in Africa. Additionally, at least one person currently in the local teacher training cohort in Canmore is of First Nations descent. These trends call into question use of ‘gora’ to describe in general terms the 3HO.

5 Drawing on the work of Eileen Barker, the criteria for NRMs are: (i) bound to be small in their early days, (ii) contain atypical representations of the wider populace, (iii) first-generation members choose the NRM and are not born into it, (iv) the founder is likely a charismatic leader, (v) focus on new belief systems, (vi) firm social boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and (vii) faced with external hostility by the wider community.

6 I have chosen to use yogin in its nominal stem form, rather than the masculine yogi or feminine yogini, to preserve gender neutrality. The yogins of my fieldwork, however, were overwhelming female, normally outnumbering males nearly 15:1.

7 The phrase ‘as taught by Yogi Bhajan’ should be assumed in all references to kundalini yoga in this paper.

8 Only 15 members of the early kundalini community are known to the author and his informants prior to the advent of biannual teacher training in 2010. For an overview of the history and development of the 3HO/kundalini community in Calgary, see Hawley (2012).

9 Or its’ other more subjective, but equally pervasive, incarnation: ‘I'm not religious, I'm spiritual.’

10 The content of this section of the present paper has been taken from here.

11 A critically important clarification is needed here: just as ‘the Enlightenment’ was not a unified movement with a single trajectory, these binaries are neither unproblematic nor uncontested during or since ‘the Enlightenment'. However, the heuristic and political capital of these binaries enjoyed considerable normative, political, and cultural leverage, particularly in the business of empire building, colonial management, and European cultural hegemony.

12 Here, I take ‘text’ to include any narrative that can be told conveyed through written word, oral transmission, through signs, or other representations.

13 Clearly, there is an acceptance of the mystic east and an Orientalist allure at work here.

14 Here, I am referring to members of the general public who attend kundalini classes on a ‘drop-in’ basis.

15 All of these cases come from teacher trainees, either in person on one of the kundalini teacher training Facebook groups. I suspect similar appeals would be expressed by ‘drop-in’ yogins. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity for sustained contact and one-on-one interaction with drop-in students.

16 That is, it is not recorded in the suttas.

17 In such circumstances, I often heard Sat Dharam Kaur, the lead teacher of the IKYTT programme in Canmore, say such things as, ‘Well, the way I was taught … ', or ‘Guru Charan or Krishna Kaur once told me … '

18 This works out to the year 2012 or 2013.

19 This disposition concerning personal identity is by no means limited to ‘the West’. Rather, I use it here to draw attention to the idea that it is the normative assumption at work in both the general (i.e. Calgary, and more broadly Canada and North America) and specific (i.e. particular sites of fieldwork) cultural contexts of the present study.

20 This is not to say that these forms are represented by distinct groups, or that one form is necessarily historically prior to another. Rather, they are ways of interpreting personal identity that may conflict with one another, and moreover, may well be part of the dispositional constitution of a single group or even individual.

21 Dusenbery, ‘Panjabi Sikhs and Gora Sikhs,’ 337–338.

22 Conversely, there are undoubtedly cultural groups, movements, and indeed entire societies beyond the Punjab whose normative dispositions about personal identity are closer to that Dusenbery describes than to European narratives about the autonomy and free-agency of the person.