Being alone together: yoga, bodywork, and intimate sociality in American households

Abstract

Using ethnographic data from Providence County, Rhode Island, this paper explores yoga as a bodywork practice that is part of everyday health and wellbeing routines in middle class households. In this context, participants define their bodywork practices as individual activities that answer health and wellbeing needs, but notably discuss bodywork in terms of their everyday social experience. Along with other bodywork activities, yoga emerges as a shared social practice that links participants to their partners, children, and other intimates, facilitating a sense of togetherness by allowing time and space for autonomy. By giving atmospheric and sensory attention to the ethnographic data, the paper further reveals how domestic intimacy is cultivated via the generation of bodily heat and positive energies and that yoga may tacitly facilitate such atmospheres. In this way, yoga can help households meet an American need for self-development and autonomy while still facilitating a far more enduring human need for intimate connection. Ultimately yoga is characterized as a pragmatic bodywork practice that blends self-development and social intimacy through shared energetic encounters.