Conveners
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 1
- Suzanne Newcombe (Open University)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 2
- Ida Pajunen (University of Cambridge)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 3
- Jens Augspurger (SOAS University of London)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 4
- Peter Pasedach
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 5
- Travis Chilcott (Iowa State University)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 6
- Jason Birch (University of Oxford)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 7
- Christopher Chapple (Loyola Marymount University)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 8
- Marissa Clarke (University of Edinburgh)
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 9
- There are no conveners in this block
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 10
- There are no conveners in this block
Institutionalisation: Institutionalisation panel 11
- There are no conveners in this block
In the past 3 years, many ethnographers of ecologically-inflected wellness movements have seen an
unprecedented rise in what Ward and Voas (2011) first termed ‘conspirituality’. Conspirituality is
both coherent with and a departure from the history of esotericism in combining fears of a
corrupted social present, and a firm belief in the inevitability of forthcoming ecological and...
What can or should yoga practitioners and teachers do with the research findings of yoga scholarship? What are the specific implications for contemporary yoga practice? Whilst increasing opportunities exist to be taught by academics and researchers in this area, enthusiastic learners are still often left on their own to ponder the significance of this information on their practice and...
Abstract:
In 1967, the Indian Pandit Gopi Krishna (1903–1984) published his autobiographical account, Kundalini. The Evolutionary Energy in Man. The book revolves around a bodily experience, which he interpreted as the awakening of the Tantric energy notion of kuṇḍalinī. Research into kuṇḍalinī thenceforth developed into the major aim of his life. Along with a growing group of international...
Over the past decade, victims/survivors have streamed forward to report sexual violence within the modern transnational yoga context, creating a distinct survivor movement: #metooyoga. Despite a growing body of victim/survivor narratives and investigative documentation, discussion of sexual abuse perpetrated by revered figures is conspicuously absent within the wider yoga community and...
Yoga continues to be popularly employed in mainstream spaces such as corporations, educational institutions, and elitist networks. Recently, there has been a global uptick of yoga’s deployment by far-right political entities, such as police academies, detention facilities, vigilante groups, armed forces, and law enforcement programs. While existing literature advances critical understandings...
At first glance the history and spread of yoga in German speaking countries is fairly well documented. In transnational comparison, local discourses on yoga were heavily influenced by German Romanticism, the new science of Depth psychology, and a well-established Indological scholarship. By the turn to the twentieth century, ‘yoga’ became a buzzword in exclusivist bourgeois circles: in the...
The institutionalization of yoga as a therapeutic practice in Western countries is the result of a secular cultural transformation. Patients’ expectations and changing demands cause modern medical doctors to start questioning the biomedical paradigm and searching for new methods to treat chronic diseases, stress, cancer, and ultimatly reflecting on the way they intend prevention. This research...
This paper concerns the application of biomedical yoga intervention on sleep health in on-reserve Indigenous populations in Treaty 6 territory (rural Saskatchewan, Canada). Following a decade-long research relationships with rural Indigenous communities, and as part of a large-scale study of First Nations’ sleep health, our research team has designed and is implementing yoga interventions...
Prolonged hours of sitting at work among desk-based workers have been associated with a host of physical and mental health conditions. These conditions can lead to work disability, absenteeism, and a significant economic and psychosocial burden. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to assess the effectiveness of yoga interventions on the well-being and productivity of desk-based...
Patañjali was the name of a premodern Indian sage to whom important works on Sanskrit grammar, yoga philosophy and the medical system of Āyurveda are ascribed. In recent decades increasing attention has focused on Patañjali as the authority on and figurehead of yoga. Some authorities now also consider Patañjali a patron of music and dance, and in South Indian traditions he sometimes features...
Metaethics may be characterised as the philosophical and soteriological framework in which a tradition’s implicit normative ethical theory and practical ethical precepts are embedded. This paper compares two traditions that contributed to the evolution of modern transnational yoga as it is currently practiced: Patañjali’s Yoga, exemplified in his Yogasūtra, based on the dualist Sāṃkhya system...
Drawing upon the work of Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952), this paper explores a set of deep and unexpected parallels between the ethical theories of Patañjali and the post-Kantian philosopher J. G. Fichte. In Yoga as Philosophy and Religion (1924), Dasgupta claims that Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras put forward two essential requirements for reaching ultimate liberation: (1) an ethical ideal of...
Abstract: This paper aims to explore the concept of theistic yoga in the Īśvara Gītā (8th century CE) which is believed to a Śaiva text, especially a Pāśupata philosophical text. Many yogic texts do not accept the concept of God (Īśvara) or sometimes prescribe the worship of Īśvara for the attainment of liberation, but Īśvara is not conceived as the almighty Īśvara with Omni-attributes rather...
A form or another of dualism within the Sāṃkhya philosophical system has long been noticed and denounced. Early opponents of Sāṃkhya were quick to point out the inherent and problematic dualism they perceived in the system’s distinction between 1. puruṣa, the only metaphysical category representative of consciousness in the Sāṃkhyan list of twenty-five core realities (tattva-s), and 2....
Who is well Versed in Yoga: Insights from Yogaśatakam of Haribhadra
This paper delves into Yogaśatakam, an 8th-century medieval Jaina yoga text composed in Prakrit by Śvetāmbara Ācārya Haribhadra in verse style. As a yogic text, Yogaśatakam employs various Jain yoga techniques. The focus of this study is to examine the concept of the "efficient person in yoga" (adhikārī) within the...
Our understanding of the relationship between the different forms of Yoga and Vedānta philosophies stands to this day on works composed in Sanskrit (i.e. Fort 1998 for Advaita). The connection between Haṭhayoga in particular and Vedānta as well has been explored by scholars through Sanskrit textual sources (i.e. Bouy 1994). This paper proposes to enlarge our insight into the early modern...
Menstruation for some is a sacred thread connecting women with their natural rhythms whilst for other, such as Kashmirian tantric brahmins, menstruation is ‘that which could not be suppressed in [the women of the cult], the monthly discharge of their inner depravity’ (Sanderson 1985:202). But it could be halted. Fourteenth century haṭha yoginīs draw up menstrual and sexual fluid inside their...
Patricia Sauthoff
Hong Kong Baptist University
Assistant Professor
PhD South Asian Language and Cultures, SOAS University of London
Patricia is an Assistant Professor in the department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. She was previously Assistant Lecturer in History, Classics and Religion at the University of Alberta and a Postdoctoral Fellow on the European Research...
Psychoactives and Psychedelics in Yoga: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Culture
Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Oregon State University
In this paper, I examine the intimate relationship between the mind-body disciplines of Hindu systems of yoga and the use of psychoactive substances in the Indic religious context, with an eye to the ways in which modern cosmopolitan forms of yoga have been...
