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THE PRIVATIZATION OF RELIGION AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

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.