Yoga bodies, yoga minds: contextualising the health discourses and practices of modern postural yoga.

Abstract

This special issue of Anthropology and Medicine explores yoga’s recent, rapid, global expansion as a health and wellness practice. The global yoga industry is currently estimated to be worth 88 billion dollars annually, and to have some 300 million practitioners, mainly in India, but also in the United States and Europe where yoga consumption and revenue has roughly doubled in the past eight years (Zuckerman 2020). Today, yoga’s myriad forms offer practitioners a combination of postural work, breathing, and meditative techniques with the overall aim of improving health, strength, fitness, and a sense of wellbeing. Drawing on research in in India, Europe, North America, Canada, Japan, and online spaces, this special issue examines some of the contexts and localities where yoga is practiced, exploring who takes it up, what motivates them to do so, and how yoga is understood to influence health and wellbeing. The contributors to this special issue are scholars who participated in our panel on Yoga Bodies at the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Conference on Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: Re-creating Anthropology held at the University of Oxford in September 2018. The panel was concerned with exploring the diverse ways in which the biological, social and material converge in the creation of ‘yoga bodies’. While aspects of the body provided the starting point for each presentation, ideas about health, wellbeing or living a ‘good life’ emerged as a central thread across almost all of the papers. We therefore decided to develop the theme of health and wellbeing for this special issue. In this Introduction, we start by giving some historical background to understanding yoga’s current global popularity as a practice for health and wellbeing. Without attempting a comprehensive review, we select from the modern yoga scholarship aspects of this history that may be unfamiliar to non-specialist readers and may counter some current stereotypes: that yoga is an ancient Hindu or pre-Hindu practice with a linear unchanging history; that yoga is an essentially feminine practice of gentle stretching and relaxation; and that yoga is the product of the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. That there is some truth in these stereotypes may help explain yoga’s current myriad forms and some of the tensions between them. However, the recent scholarship complicates these views and establishes that yoga has a multilinear and transnational history (Alter 2004; Singleton 2010; Newcombe 2019). It shows that modern postural yoga emerged as a contemporary practice for health and wellbeing only within the ‘just-past of the present’, as Joseph Alter puts it – that is, over the past approximately 100-150 years – through the interactive effects of the international physical culture movement, Hindu nationalism, gender, naturopathy, and science (2004, xvi). Below we indicate some key themes in this complex, intriguing, and sometimes surprising story.