agree that yoga, like every other social product, be seen as syncretic from the outset, containing “a multiplicity of definitions and interpretations.” The arrival of yoga in the West in the modern period, starting in the mid- to century, was the result of a complicated transnational journey. Scholars of yoga now largely agree that this journey was the combined product of inventive and retrospective reconstruction of a so-called “classical” yogic tradition of India by modern Indian pioneers, along with key dialogical exchanges between these Indians and crucial Western interlocutors. Beginning in the nineteenth century, yoga was “deconstructed and reconstructed both within and beyond South Asia, leading to the emergence of a new transnational tradition.” Contemporary yoga is constituted by “heterogenous systems that developed as a consequence of encounters between Indian yoga reformers engaged with modern thought, [and] Europeans and Americans interested in topics ranging from metaphysics to fitness,” during an increasingly modern and globalized nineteenth century. Various intellectual modernizers, both Indian and Western, were interested establishing yoga’s legitimacy in the West as a philosophical, contemplative and ethical tradition of ancient provenance. Swami Vivekanada is one of the key figures credited with this feat. Following his famous address to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, Vivekananda gave a series of lectures in the US, offering a modern, rationalist, ascetic and contemplative interpretation of yogic spirituality. Using a selective reading of Patanjali’s Yogasutras which reified the text as central to the study and practice of yoga, Vivekanada constructed an essentialized, monolithic and ostensibly “authentic” version of yoga’s “classical” history that today constitutes its most predominant narrative: “From the time it was discovered, more than four thousand years ago, Yoga was perfectly delineated, formulated and preached in India.” late-
subjects can become “governors of their own selves.” Regular attendance at postural yoga classes signify the self-control and self-mastery of the disciplined neoliberal subject. The financial incentives offered at most yoga studios for continuous attendance hail the committed practicioner who brings herself to the practice with regularity and self-discipline. Many yogic practicioners are encouraged by the system of the class-series or multi-class-pass to monitor how many times in a given week or month they have “been to yoga.” To commit seriously to postural yoga practice is to work steadily and cumulatively, perhaps over many years, on the details of precision and alignment that allow one’s body eventually to enter increasingly more easefully and correctly into and out of postures, or allow one’s breath to flow more easily, or allow one’s mind to come to rest more naturally. Every asana (pose) “is a challenge that sometimes has to be practiced intensively until you finally master it.” Even (or perhaps especially) when understood in the most mundane and worldly terms and shorn of the more ascetic implications of spiritual transcendence, these aims all require disciplined, regular practice, habituation and forms of mental and corporeal self-mastery. In this sense, “the conceptualizations of selfhood that are produced within yoga converge with neoliberal constructions of selfhood, and these discourses are therefore mutually reinforcing and constantly reproduced.” Yogic norms of self-mastery and self-discipline may also assist the subject in dealing with the conflicting demands placed on her by the neoliberal regime. Many Foucauldians have noted that the body becomes a crucial site of contradictory impulses toward both consumption and self-restraint in neoliberal regimes of biopolitical self-governance. For instance, Julie Guthman aptly notes: “neoliberal governmentality produces contradictory impulses such that the neoliberal subject is emotionally compelled to participate in society as both out-of- control consumer and self-controlled subject.” Neoliberalism and its attendant forms of consumer
which the body is experienced as part of postural practice may refigure one’s way of relating to one’s own body, producing relationships that are characterized by acceptance and rather than by self-critique and endless aspiration toward externally-imposed aesthetic standards: “The more the body is ‘explored’ and thereby mapped, the more detailed the inner body awareness becomes.” As a result of this increased awareness, “adapting to social norms of beauty recedes to the background gradually while the communicative exchange between consciousness and the body is experienced as being more important. This establishes an opposition to discourses of aesthetics,” encouraging a “counter-discourse [in which] the body…is increasingly defined through its ‘inner’ functionality.” Meanwhile, “the attentional skills and nonordinary uses of the body that one acquires through yoga practice can be said to counteract detached and inflexible modes of experiencing,” empowering its practicioners both existentially and socially by producing the trust and solidarity required for the establishment of communities and collective action. Meanwhile, some Western teachers critique contemporary reinterpretations of the yogic tradition as replete with individually-modifiable “choices” for the consumer, often noting that the ethos of the pre-modern yogic tradition (at least as currently imagined in the West) was in fact rigorous, physically demanding, exacting, and forceful, requiring great physical stamina, capacity for exertion, and complete submission to the teacher’s instructions. This is demonstrated by the fact that the Sanskrit term hatha-yoga in fact translates to “violent” or “forceful exertion.” Stories are routinely told of legendarily authoritarian Indian teachers like Iyengar and Jois who were famous for their punitive and forceful teaching styles, sometimes employing forms of corporal discipline, such as aggressive physical adjustments designed to force students into particular postures, and even slapping and shouting at students. By invoking a more pre-modern form of practice putatively less wedded to the ethos of individual choice