A Preliminary Genealogy of Yoga in Italy: Between Religion and Contemporary Spirituality

Abstract

In this article, we design a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, showing its positioning within the growing field of “contemporary spiritualities”, their premodern, esoteric and theosophical roots and Catholicism. Our main claim is that yoga and contemporary spiritualities as practiced in XXI-century Italy are neither entirely new nor are they clearly an alternative to more established religions. We rely on the methods and tools of a “discursive study of religion” approach to unpack the intricacies, genealogical roots and definitional boundaries that yoga, contemporary spiritualities and religion in Italy share. More specifically, we question the novelty of contemporary spiritualities in Italy, unveiling some of their esoteric, theosophical and anthroposophical roots, presenting, in turn, a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, discussing its positioning amid Catholicism and contemporary spiritualities. We conclude by reflecting on the creation, use and limits of sociocultural theorizing about interpreting and understanding the spiritual and religious field, with a specific emphasis on the overlapping and porous boundaries between the concepts of religion, contemporary spiritualities, Western esotericism and modern yoga.

“Scholar–Practitioners”, Reflexivity and the Illusio of the Field: Ethnography, Yoga Studies and the Social Scientific Study of Religion

“…Mooji, an internationally renowned neo-Advaita guru who has been at the center of several controversies since 2019, is listed in 59th place in Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine's The 100 most spiritually influential living people 2023, thus testifying to his importance in the current religious and spiritual landscape. Before moving to Monte Sahaja, I worked as a yoga instructor for about two years in several centers in Genoa, Italy (as has been argued elsewhere, "In Italy, although data on the number of practitioners are unreliable, it is possible to see a gradual increase in interest, with about 2 million practitioners (30 percent of whom are men), 20,000 centers throughout the country (especially in the center-north, with an increase of more than 100% since 2010) and a generated income of nearly 200 million euros" (Yoga: trend e numeri di un fenomeno in crescita-Manageritalia, accessed 21 February 2023 [12] (p. 7)), my hometown, and I had experimented with different styles of yoga for several years before that. These biographical elements are relevant since I am myself a "scholar-practitioner", as are most scholars currently studying modern forms of yoga [5][6][7].…”

Spiritualities of the Body: Yoga, Spirituality and Health in Italy

“…2 For a few notable exceptions, see Bertolo (2013); Bertolo and Giordan (2016); Di Placido (2022a); Di Placido and Palmisano (2023); Mangiarotti (2022) and, of course, the pioneering work of Squarcini (2006) and Squarcini and Mori (2008). Naturally, this claim ought to be softened in relation to meditational and denominational forms of yoga whose aims are exactly those of transcendence and bodily detachment in an attempt to reach enlightenment or spiritual liberation.…”

“…Postural practice has become a global phenomenon for a spectrum of reasons, not least of which is that it is said to be different from and better than other forms of exercise and self-development". (Alter 2022, p. 50) While unveiling the progressive assimilation of yoga within hybrid conceptions of health-and more implicitly also with the notion of spirituality-scholars have noted yoga's positioning within a variety of transnational movements, such as physical cultures and Eastern movement forms (Brown and Leledaki 2010;Singleton 2010), Western harmonialism (Foxen 2020), the New Age (De Michelis 2004) and contemporary spiritualities (Di Placido and Palmisano 2023), to name just a few. Particularly prominent, I contend, is the positioning of yoga within the so called "embodied spiritualities" (Bertolo and Giordan 2016), that is, spiritualities that, in line with the "spiritual revolution" (Heelas and Woodhead 2005) and the "spiritual turn" (Houtman and Auspers 2007;Watts 2022) theorized by sociologists, privilege the experiential, private and autonomous dimensions of individuals' access to the sacred also through the mediation of the body (Giordan 2007(Giordan , 2009Giordan and Sbalchiero 2020).…”