Social Sutra: Yoga, identity, and health in New York’s changing neighborhoods

Abstract

Taking note of the rapid, visible expansion of yoga studios in American cities, this article explores the role of yoga as a social determinant of urban health and yoga’s entanglements with race and class identities. Who are the interpreters of yoga in America, and how has yoga, based on a premise of psychosomatic wholeness, paradoxically served as a prism for refracting social difference? Answers to these questions hold significant implications for the culture of health observed in cities today and possibilities for wellness. Through narrative inquiry, my argument centers on three identities that embody the role of yoga in health: the yoga teacher as healer, the yoga student as seeker of spiritually informed mind-body wellness, and the modern yoga practitioner as consumer of a physically focused, commercialized yoga.A recombination of the identities involved in yoga – healer, seeker, and consumer – can recover the possibilities for yoga to contribute to improved urban health across race and class.

CrossFit: Fitness cult or reinventive institution?

“…Like elite athletes, many fitness practitioners take on a particular identity that captures their chosen fitness regime. Like Markula’s aerobicising women (1995) or Biswas’s (2012) yogis, most CrossFitters regard their exercise regime not only as what they do, but also as who they are. Evidence of the incorporation of CrossFit as an integral identity marker is abundantly clear in the monographs by Belger (2012), Murphy (2012) and Herz (2014).…”

The politics of tending to the body: Women doing yoga in Genoa (Italy)

“…By privatising social and political concerns, neoliberalism protects entrenched social structures (Jain, 2020: 13-14). On yoga and neoliberalism, see also Biswas (2012), Godrej (2017), Kern (2012), andRosen (2019). 8.…”

Yoga’s Impact on Personal and Community Development: A Study of Karmayogi Wellness in Pokhara

“…The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali emphasizes the holistic approach to personal and community development through its eight limbs or steps to enlightenment, known as ashtanga yoga. He argues, they are ethical restraints, such as non-violence, truthfulness, and non-stealing; behavioral observations, such as cleanliness, contentment, and self-inquiry; asana, the practice of specific physical postures; pranayama, the measured control of breath; pratyahara, sensual detachment; dharana and dhyana, concentration, and meditation; and finally, samadhi, the realization of universal spiritual consciousness (Biswas, 2012). As outlined in the Sutra, the practice involves ethical restraints (yama), behavioral observations (niyama), specific physical postures (asana), measured control of breath (pranayama), sensual detachment (pratyahara), concentration and meditation (dharana and dhyana), and ultimately the realization of universal spiritual consciousness (samadhi).…”