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Yoga Traveling

Bodily Practice in Transcultural Perspective

  • Book
  • © 2013

Overview

Editors:
  1. Beatrix Hauser

    1. Institut für Kultur-, Literatur- und, Musikwissenschaften, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

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  • Presents contributions by well-known scholars in the field of modern yoga studies as well as several new authors from a broad range of disciplines (social anthropology, sociology, psychology, history of religions, education)
  • Investigates social phenomena related to yoga as cases in point to consider the transcultural flow of ideas, not following just one path, direction, or logic
  • Explores yoga as a situated practice, shaped in distinctive ways against the backdrop of both global forces and local imaginings of India and its traditions
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Introduction: Transcultural Yoga(s). Analyzing a Traveling Subject

    • Beatrix Hauser
    Pages 1-34

  3. Reframing Yoga in the History of the Twentieth Century

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 35-35
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    2. Transnational Exchange and the Genesis of Modern Postural Yoga

      • Mark Singleton
      Pages 37-56

    3. Magic and Yoga: The Role of Subcultures in Transcultural Exchange

      • Suzanne Newcombe
      Pages 57-79

    4. The Impact of Kundalini Yoga on Concepts and Diagnostic Practice in Psychology and Psychotherapy

      • Liane Hofmann
      Pages 81-106

  4. Inconsistent Assessments: Meaning Production at the Local-Global Interface

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 107-107
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    2. Touching the Limits, Assessing Pain: On Language Performativity, Health, and Well-Being in Yoga Classes

      • Beatrix Hauser
      Pages 109-134

    3. The Useful Body: The Yogic Answer to Appearance Management in the Post-Fordist Workplace

      • Verena Schnäbele
      Pages 135-153

    4. The Introduction of Yoga in German Schools: A Case Study

      • Suzanne Augenstein
      Pages 155-172
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Keywords

About this book

This book focuses on yoga’s transcultural dissemination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course of this process, the term “yoga” has been associated with various distinctive blends of mental and physical exercises performed in order to achieve some sort of improvement, whether understood in terms of esotericism, fitness, self-actualization, body aesthetics, or health care. The essays in this volume explore some of the turning points in yoga’s historico-spatial evolution and their relevance to its current appeal. The authors focus on central motivations, sites, and agents in the spread of posture-based yoga as well as on its successive (re-)interpretation and diversification, addressing questions such as: Why has yoga taken its various forms? How do time and place influence its meanings, social roles, and associated experiences? How does the transfer into new settings affect the ways in which yogic practice has been conceptualized as a system, and on what basis is it still identified as (Indian) yoga? The initial section of the volume concentrates on the re-evaluation of yoga in Indian and Western settings in the first half of the twentieth century. The following chapters link global discourses to particular local settings and explore meaning production at the micro-social level, taking Germany as the focal site. The final part of the book focuses on yoga advertising and consumption across national, social, and discursive boundaries, taking a closer look at transnational and deterritorialized yoga markets, as well as at various classes of mobile yoga practitioners.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Institut für Kultur-, Literatur- und, Musikwissenschaften, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Beatrix Hauser

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