"Folks in the Washington D.C. area who are New Agers or looking for Shaman teachings are not yuppies"
Snorks, I don't know if you know how the term yuppie came about. YUPpie=Young Upwardly mobile Professional. The Young part was true at the time the phrase was invented, mid 80s. So now it means Baby Boomer generation, mostly ex hippies or people once on the fringe of the hippie movement (but who usually no longer are.) In the US, that rarely meant working class, mostly meant upper middle class.
It's pretty obvious this bunch, like most Nuagers, has at least a little money. She does pay to pray ceremonies. Very few exploiters are based in rural Mississippi or Harlem or East Los Angeles. They're in Sedona or Jackson Hole or Beverly Hills. Or the suburbs of DC, which is one of the most expensive places to live in the US.
So, yes, if they have money to live in DC...and to spend on pay to pray ceremonies....most of them are Yuppies.
"They come at it from a secular point of view (theraputic) and transform it into something spiritual. I think from this way of learning spiritual things, it becames easy to include Native teachings as well.
There are no boundaries as such. Most people are 'universalists' in that they combine many trads into one. 'Folkish' or 'tribal' understandings are alien to them. "Folkish" means boundaries and what is mine is mine, and not yours. The idea that it may belong to a specific group is an alien one."
I think you may have a point. People from a strongly religious family background often have an easier time getting what we say than those who aren't. After all, most Christians. Jews, Muslims, etc, understand that Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc traditions belong to people OF those faiths, not differing ones.
And like you point out, these are all whites in that photo. There's more than a little bit of White Privilege in the claim that "we can do whatever we want, we have the right."
