Transnational Exchange and the Genesis of Modern Postural Yoga

Abstract

This book focuses on yoga’s transcultural dissemination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course of this process, the term “yoga” has been associated with various distinctive blends of mental and physical exercises performed to achieve improvement in terms of esotericism, fitness, self- actualization, body aesthetics, or health care. This introductionary chapter surveys the development of modern yoga studies as a new field of academic inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. It shows how the emergence and diversity of today’s postural yoga provides rich source material for understanding the process of cultural diffusion and knowledge transfer. With a cursory glance at the sources and approaches in the historical and philological study of Indian yoga the chapter then argues that yoga never constituted a monolithic or homogenious entity. The remaining section explores how recent ways of theorizing global spaces, transna- tional flows, and cultural interactions can inspire and facilitate the analysis of present-day yoga and its dynamics and thus provide a provisional outline for the notion of transculturality in relation to the study of yoga’s global circulation. This leads to a brief synopsis of the following chapters.