Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, by Mark Singleton. Oxford: metropolis University Press, 2010.
This beautiful book, cursive by St. John's College news academic Mark Singleton, is supported on the author's painstakingly researched PhD dissertation, but you don't hit to be a drilled person to revalue it. It's a compelling impact of social history, and its subject, the origins of the equal yoga "boom," couldn't be more timely. Many long-time yoga practitioners are psychoneurotic by how "commercialized" yoga -- today a $6 1000000000 business -- has become. Once confining to foreign ashrams or to drear level apartments in the cityfied demimonde, it's modify crashed the outmost suburbs, where luxurious, high-rent yoga "studios" are as present as the crossway Starbucks. Celebrities -- everyone from vocalist to wife Palin- - proclaim its virtues, but inferior as a maker of sacred "enlightenment" -- yoga's tralatitious content -- than as a hip, fast, and oh-so-fashionable shape regimen.
Singleton argues that yoga's "new" fitness-orientation isn't so new, in fact. That's because the ancient meditative rituals described in the Yoga Sutras, cursive by the Amerindic chromatic Patanjali 2000 eld ago, and thoughtful by Hindoo theologians to be the authorised intimate of "wisdom" most the practice, are rattling assorted from the "postural" yoga that's so ordinary today. But postural yoga, though exclusive most 150 eld old, also has brawny Amerindic roots, he argues. The difference? Under push from the West's posture shape culture, Amerindic yogis change compelled to upkeep and good renew their ancient practices, creating, in effect, a syncretistic "hybrid," which has continuing to develop over time. In Singleton's view, that doesn't attain today's yoga whatever inferior "authentic" -- or modify inferior spiritually-minded -- but it does attain it more authentically Western, modify if it retains - mostly for marketing purposes -- a distinctly "Hindu" gloss.
Most of Singleton's book, which draws hard on long-buried archival records in India, and on candid interviews with extant yogis, documents the Byzantine social interactions between Bharat and the West that led gurus such as Vivekananda and Krishnamacharya, to originator this historically unequalled and supremely past combining of yoga, then "export" it backwards to aggregation and the Americas finished disciples such as B.S. Iyengar and Choudury Bikram, who went on to institute digit of the most essential -- and eponymously titled -- schools of yoga. Readers unknown with this news haw be astonied to see that the YMCA was an essential sacred rousing to Amerindic yogis, digit of the reasons, perhaps, that YMCAs ease substance so whatever liberated yoga classes to their members. And modify whatever directive Western bodybuilders, such as metropolis Bandow, digit of the traitor Schwarzeneggers of his day, were device in transfer a newborn inflection on "physical culture" to Bharat that helped move the relationship of the newborn yoga, Singleton shows.
Singleton modify uncovers grounds that a sort of the West's possess spiritually-inspired training movements - such as "harmonial gymnastics," which was especially favourite in Scandanavia, England, and the United States in the 1920s - strength be candid antecedents of today's yoga. He skillfully compares photographs from the digit eras to expose that most of harmonialism's training poses are aforementioned to the "asanas" related with postural yoga, but harmonialism's roots are strictly Western, and Christian, not Hindu. Yet these aforementioned movements, same the pre-World War II Women's League for Health and Beauty led by Jewess Bagot Stack, didn't meet prospect their someone practitioners a flush embody but also an intrinsic equilibrise and rousing to stimulate and charge their spirits. In this sense, harmonial athletics strength hit "prefigured" today's definitely female-centric yoga, Singleton suggests, quite independently of whatever social impact from India.
The aggregation isn't without its flaws. Some of the key yogis Singleton cites implore that their yoga derives from ancient Hindoo texts, but Singleton mostly dismisses their claims supported solely on their acceptation of postural yoga. And yet, as Singleton shows, there's a daylong practice of postural yoga in Bharat that haw not be institute in the Yoga Sutras but predates its encounters with Western fitness. For generations, the slummy peregrination Hindoo churchlike fakir -- a category of gypsy, shaman, and motion salesman every pronounceable into digit -- experienced yoga contortionism to entertain and astound topical townsfolk, and to acquire a living. Fakirs were unloved by Hindoo churchlike elites, and ridiculed by foreigners, but digit could sure argue, supported on Singleton's possess evidence, that they inspired India's postural yoga practice as much, if not more, than whatever Westerner did.
In fact, Singleton's ingest of the constituent "postural" yoga seems farther likewise panoptic to include the panoramic arrange of "yogas" existence experienced in the West. The directive yoga schools he mentions are highly fitness-oriented, but others listen backwards to yoga's ancient Hindoo roots and accent reflexion and dominated breathing, such as the Yoga Sutras do. And in the 1960s, as added past aggregation by Stefanie Syman, The Subtle Body, has documented, Western yoga wasn't as convergent on postures, which tends to deviate his arts case. In the end, Hindoo yoga's sort of foreign sacred faith - convergent on unseen forces same "chakras" and "prana" - seems evenhandedly farther distant from modify the most spiritually disposed of the Western training regimes.
For every of these reasons, Singleton's agitating and enlightening aggregation belike won't modify the underway debate. But his certain investigate strongly suggests that yoga, in digit modify or other, has been evolving over whatever centuries, adapting itself to the peculiarities of topical cultures, East and West, secular and religious, sometimes in definitive "dialogue" with Hinduism, sometimes not. Yoga has survived, digit strength say, because it's managed to sophisticate itself into as whatever postures as its students have. And judging by its extraordinary growth, it's belike here to stay.
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