Yoga and White Public Space

Rumya S Putcha

doi:10.3390/rel11120669

Abstract

This article connects recent work in critical race studies, museum studies, and performance studies to larger conversations happening across the humanities and social sciences on the role of performance in white public spaces. Specifically, I examine the recent trend of museums such as the Natural History Museum of London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to name but a few, offering meditation and wellness classes that purport to “mirror the aesthetics or philosophy of their collections.” Through critical ethnography and discursive analysis I examine and unpack this logic, exposing the role of cultural materialism and the residue of European imperialism in the affective economy of the museum. I not only analyze the use of sound and bodily practices packaged as “yoga” but also interrogate how “yoga” cultivates a sense of space and place for museum-goers. I argue that museum yoga programs exhibit a form of somatic orientalism, a sensory mechanism which traces its roots to U.S. American cultural-capitalist formations and other institutionalized forms of racism. By locating yoga in museums within broader and longer processes of racialization I offer a critical race and feminist lens to view these sorts of performances.

Highlights

In November 2017, the New York Times published a report within their “Fit City” column titled “Namaste, Museumgoers.” The article described weekly yoga and meditation events that had recently become an official part of the museum’s community programming
According to the program director at the Rubin Museum in New York City, yoga programs utilize the space of the museum to “engage people personally and emotionally” by “mirroring the aesthetics or philosophy of their collections”
In the past twenty years museums have been moving towards more interactive models, to close the gap between what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes as the distinction between “informing and performing” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998)

Summary

Introduction

In November 2017, the New York Times published a report within their “Fit City” column titled “Namaste, Museumgoers.” The article described weekly yoga and meditation events that had recently become an official part of the museum’s community programming. 2013), or an example of extension of colonial knowledge projects and monuments to imperialism This attitude towards the individuals engage with that spacebut extends to the imperatives wellness cultures, 2018), as an broader extension of colonialof knowledge projectswhich and way space operates in museums and how individuals engage with that space extends to the broader center on white racial framings of attitude health. Such framings require an understanding of health as both monuments to imperialism. I explore how somatic orientalism shapes yoga programs in museums and more generally in

Still images yoga tourism

Yoga in the Museum

Boston and Yoga

Somatic Orientalism and White Speech

Conclusions