| Titel: | Re-orienting yoga: Transnational flows from an Indian center |
|---|---|
| Autor: | Strauss, S |
| Mediengruppe: | --- |
| Herausgeber: | --- |
| Zeitschrift: | --- |
| Jahr: | 1997 |
| Band: | --- |
| Heft: | --- |
| Seiten: | 343 |
| Sprache: | englisch |
| Abstract: | How has the set of ideas and practices known as yoga moved from its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent to become a globally recognized bodily idiom, perpetuated by a translocal community of practice? In this dissertation, I focus on the development of yoga as both ideology and practice since its introduction by Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Columbian Exposition's Parliament of the World's Religions. Yoga has been understood to have an exchange value predicated on perceived (and essentialized) scarcity of resources: spiritual lack in the West, material lack in India. To keep my arguments manageable, I address primarily the yoga teachings of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India. Using many different kinds of data--ethnographic observations and interviews, photography, archival documents, and contemporary media--I move back and forth along the varied pathways linking Rishikesh with other locales around the world. The purpose behind presenting this research on yoga ideologies and practices from 1893 to 1993 is to demonstrate the relationship between the transnational dissemination of yoga and the changing roles of health and freedom in the ongoing project of modernity. I begin with the mythological and recent history of Rishikesh, showing how this local history intersects with both the wider history of yoga in this century and the specific life histories of Swamis Vivekananda and Sivananda. Next, Vivekananda and Sivananda's ideological and organizational legacies are viewed in relation to Indian nationalism and independence. Moving into the present, I describe yoga practice in Rishikesh as well as methodological problems inherent in doing multi-local ethnography in the transnational community of yoga practice, focusing on urban India as well as Germany and the United States. The globalization of yoga leads to an analysis of the media's constitution of yoga as a desirable health practice. Returning finally to the question of how yoga has come to resonate with the needs and experiences of people across many different cultural and national contexts, I reflect on the methodological shifts necessitated by such a diffuse body of data. |