Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313 (January 2020), we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga's depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access.
Some scholars consider Sanskrit (ISO 639-3 SAN) to be a “dead” or moribund language. However, Sanskrit has survived as a post-vernacular, second language (L
Satsaṅga is a public domain where ideas related to transcendence and culturallycontingent “Truth” are suggested. This paper combines a longitudinal study of Shanti Mandir’s (www.shantimandir.com) satsaṅga, with close reading of local and non-local literary theories related to the performativity of satsaṅga and the doctrine of appreciating tranquillity (śāntarasavāda). This leads to the possibility of framing satsaṅga as a rasavatkāvya (charming-literature) literary artefact; which we can regard as a type of hybrid campū-rasavat kāvya. Finally, from an interdisciplinary perspective, I provide a novel epistemological bricolage to understand the soteriological and sociological aims of satsaṅga from within the Temple of Peace (Shanti Mandir) organisation, and propose an analytical framework about how satsaṅga operates as a formal learning domain; where sādhaka-s (aspirants) attempt to gain access to a yoga-inspired disposition related to becoming (praśama), embodying and experiencing śānti (tranquillity), which occurs through learning to become śāntamūrti-s (embodiers of tranquillity) by appreciating śāntarasa (the aesthetic mood of tranquillity).
Global yoga has become exceptionally popular. The emic description of this global yoga network is often called Yogaland. This paper maps out some of the key topographical features of this metaphysical, social imaginary –scape, and situates the physical body of the global yoga practitioner within a complex entanglement of intersecting social, political, economic and theological ‘worlds’. This paper first explores how the concept of spiritual bypass effects a particular averted gaze towards problematic issues within Yogaland. This leads to the second part of the paper that discusses the fundamental nature of entanglement, which often involves being entangled in worlds the individual would not want, mean to be, or perhaps even be aware, exist. Therefore, this paper identifies ways in which global yoga participants are socialised through their neo-liberal subjectivities to unwittingly support, in an often banal way, a Hindu supremacist ideology; which, in turn, can lead to a type of ‘yoga fundamentalism’.
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