Paper short abstract:

Multi-day festivals have become a common form of spiritual events during which, using Taylor’s terms, one’s “buffered” self is rendered more “porous” through various collective and embodied practices and rituals that constitute a mode of ethical self-fashioning and learning.

Paper long abstract:

Multi-day festivals have become a common form of spiritual events that bring together heterogeneous crowds of adherents to emergent religions, practitioners and aficionados of fringe knowledge, self-seekers, and many others. In the example of such spiritual festivals in Estonia, this paper approaches these events as embodied sites of ethical self-fashioning and learning. The festival grounds and different workshops organised during these events are aimed to constitute an imagined space of “trust,” “harmony,” “acceptance,” and “safety” where the participants can collectively engage in various mental and physical activities that enable them to “open up” to themselves, to others, and to the world. Gendered, mainly heteronormative body, is at the center of such activities and rituals, sometimes referred to as “processes,” that are essentially acts of embodied learning. These acts are generally performed in unison with other bodies, through synchronised movement and sound, dance, touch, or, at the very least, through purposeful eye-contact with others. Taylor’s distinction between the “buffered” and the “porous” self is useful for conceptualising the essence of these embodied “processes.” While the “modern buffered self” is characterised by a firm boundary between the mind and the body, as well as between the self and the other, the “porous self” is opened up to both inner and outer world. Rendering one’s “buffered” self a “porous” one is an act of ethical self-fashioning that is considered to lead to a more “authentic” way of coexistence and is sometimes also framed by festival participants in terms “magic” and “becoming a tribe.”