Breathing in India, c. 1890

Abstract

And so to the physical exercises. When the Englishman comes to this stage in Yoga he is completely and entirely disarmed. From Breathing to Writing: Meditation in the Colonial Public Sphere. As one of the last bastions of the universal, breathing appears to have withstood the assault of relativism over the past century. With the cultures of its variously modified forms regarded as separable from, and even irrelevant to, the universal essence of breath, respiration has been widely accepted as an ideologically neutral sphere of human activity. In the course of the twentieth century thisassumed universality enabled distinctive Asian cultures of breathing (Yoga, Tai Chi) to be translated into European and American environments that proved otherwise less hospitable to the moral and political structures that had sustained these practices in their original contexts (ascetic renunciation, Chinese warfare). In short, breathing has seemed neither to require nor reflect a context. Yet like any other human activity, breathing always has a context and is indeed in its various forms (fast, shallow, hard, weak) perhaps the most subtly contingent of all human activities. This contingency is still more the case with regard to the deliberate modifications of breathing found in systems of meditation, for breath control and meditation are no less shaped by history than any other form of physical culture.