SPIRITUAL BOYFRIENDS I
Yoga; Culture, body and power
Cultural power
Yoga has become a very representative practice of the contemporary Western vision of body worship and new spirituality.
Yoga dates its origins on 1500 BC in Hindu religious writings, the Vedas. The fact is that these texts do not mention any physical practice (asana) but a spiritual practice based on meditations, visualizations, and breath control(1). Paralleling Christianity, the body, the asana (physical practice of yoga), initially would have been rejected, excluded and associated with magicians, ascetics, and street performers (2); Physical forms of mundane expression with which yoga did not want to be linked since they diverted from the divine, the atman or the soul.
The construction of modern physical/postural practice of yoga can not be understood without revising its hybrid and transcultural (3) origins (largely due to British colonization), and without revising the historical context of independence of India, during which some physical practices and tendencies related to the body were imported/imposed from the west. Some examples are the YMCA (Young Man’s Catholic Association), which imposed the construction of a new image of the Hindu man, related to its militar empowerment and its vigorization. Practices related to a new tendency called Muscular Christianity, Swedish Gymnastics and bodybuilding (which became a worldwide exported practice by Eugene Sandow) were conjugated and hybridizing with Hindu practices. Yoga is today a spiritual, symbolic, iconic and representative practice in both India and the Western world and the debates around its origins, rights, cultural apropiation are discussed by many scholars, practicioners and techniques which are often fighting to prove their authenticity agains the others.
Physical practices linked to a symbolism and culture have a great coercive power over the body, the individual, the masses and the way we think. A power that is not always imposed from an external force but often becomes a power that the individual self-imposes “freely”.
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1. Singleton, Mark. Yoga Body 2010 (p. 3). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Ibid., p. 4
3. Singleton, Mark. Yoga Body 2010. Chapter 5: Modern Indian Physical Culture: Degeneracy and Experimentation. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.