Thinking in Āsana: Movement and Philosophy in Viniyoga, Iyengar Yoga, and Ashtanga Yoga

establishing ‘creative networks’ and seeking to use community ‘tools to build collective solutions to social ills’ following the liberating experience of festival attendance (211). However, these noble aims are restricted by the racial homogeneity of the spaces in which they crystalise, and Lucia warns that any communities that arise from these spaces risk becoming ‘a gated commons, reifying rather than dissolving social boundaries’, with access by nonwhites implicitly restricted (212). Lucia succeeds in answering her central question of why SBNR communities are overwhelmingly white butWhite Utopias does far more than that. It is a thorough investigation of the intersection of neoliberalism, capitalist consumerism, exoticism and spirituality at the nexus of yoga practice. It gives a powerful picture of the potency of yoga practice, and of the transformational festivals that foster it. The book is important as an exploration of racialised power dynamics in the transformational festival scene but it also convincingly advocates for taking seriously practices and belief systems identified, and sometimes dismissed, as SBNR or ‘New Age,’ because of the importance they play in the lives of practitioners. The implications for further research are extensive: particularly, are these same dynamics borne out in yoga practised beyond the restrictive and literally ‘extra-ordinary’ context of the transformational festival? Most yoga is, after all, not practised in that saturnalian context, and such festivals are arguably unrepresentative of the experience of most practitioners. It is possible that it is the focus on the melting pot context of transformational festivals that fosters a unified impression of the category SBNR, as discussed above. In any case, Lucia’s work brings an important and timely perspective on the racialised power dynamics of SBNR communities to the study of contemporary yoga. Future research must take it into account.