Seeker, Surfer, Yogi: The Progressive Religious Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Place in Encinitas, California

摘要: This essay examines Encinitas, California, as a case study for understanding how cultural pluralism based in religious experimentation has come to define the area’s overall civic imagination. Over years, yoga enthusiasts and surfers flocked area, their lifestyle practices acquired sanctity of belief. The uses three controversies—discussions over competition at popular surf spot, debate meaning legality public artwork, controversy school district curriculum—to show city’s expansive imaginary shaped debates about access space. Taken together, these incidents convey cosmopolitan imagination harnessed alternative beliefs California dream that was increasingly characterized by an exclusionary neoliberal economy privileged bourgeois consumption culturally appropriative branding.