Inhaling Spirit

Abstract

This book follows up on recent findings that modern postural yoga is the outcome of a complex process of transcultural exchange and syncretism and digs even deeper, looking to uncover the disparate but entangled roots of contemporary yoga practice. In doing so, it proposes that some of what we call yoga, especially when it comes to North America and Europe, is only slightly genealogically related to premodern Indian yoga traditions. Rather, they are equally if not more grounded in Hellenistic theories of the subtle body, Western esotericism and magic, premodern European medicine, and late nineteenth-century women’s wellness programs. Marshalling these under the umbrella category of “harmonialism,” the book argues that they constitute a history of analogous practices that were gradually subsumed into the language of yoga. This allows us to fundamentally recontextualize the peculiarities of Western and especially certain mainstream American forms of yoga—their focus on aesthetic representation, their privileging of bodily posture and unsystematic incorporation of breathwork, and above all their overwhelmingly privileged female demographics. The initial chapters lay out the basic shape and history of these concepts and practices, and the later chapters explore their development into a spiritualized form of women’s physical culture over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the ways in which they became increasingly associated with yoga.