Joseph Alter
Joseph S. Alter is an American
Biography
Joseph S. Alter was born in
He is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.[3]
He is known for arguing, in his own words, that "The invention of
Reception
Yoga in Modern India
Alter's 2004 book Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy examines three main themes in the history and practice of yoga in the 20th century: Swami Kuvalayananda's medicalisation of yoga;
Stuart Ray Sarbacker, reviewing the book in History of Religions, found the book illuminating on the historical background of yoga, complete with "acerbic asides, including several humorous references to Yoga Journal and its sociological and ideological placement in American consumer society." In his view, the examples were well-researched and brought to life with suitable photographs.[11]
Cecilia Van Hollen, reviewing Yoga in Modern India for The Journal of Asian Studies, writes that it aims to correct the popular tendency to imagine an Indian, spiritual yoga opposed to a corrupt, materialistic American yoga, by examining what Indian texts from the 20th century say about yoga, and constructing a social history of the subject. In her view, what emerges is yoga "as a transnational system of knowledge and practice that emerged in the interstices of colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and postcolonial Hindu nationalism."[6] She notes that Alter calls the Indian government-led fusion of the yogic subtle body with the physical body of modern anatomy and physiology in the early 20th century a "mistake". All the same, she writes, it helped to transform yoga into what Alter called the "tremendously popular, eminently public, self-disciplinary regimen that produces good health and well being, while always holding out the promise of final liberation."[6] She observes also that Alter shows what "strange bedfellows" yoga and Hindu nationalism were, for while the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) could readily adopt yoga's physical and mental discipline to make men strong, yoga's philosophy is the opposite of "narrowly Hindu".[6]
The yoga scholar
The book won the 2006
Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism
Alter's Gandhi's Body connected
See also
- Positioning Yoga: balancing acts across cultures, a 2005 book of yoga anthropology by Sarah Strauss
- Yoga Body, a 2010 book about the origins of modern postural yoga by Mark Singleton
- The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, a 1996 book about the role of Mysore in creating modern postural yoga by Norman Sjoman
Notes
- ^ Other authors who share this approach to yoga as exercise include Norman Sjoman and Mark Singleton.
References
- ^ "Joseph S. Alter". Penguin India. 2019. Retrieved 9 February 2019.
- ^ "Prof. Joseph S. Alter". Modern Yoga Research. Retrieved 9 February 2019.
- ISBN 9780691118741. Retrieved 9 February 2019.
- ^ Alter, Joseph (2017). "Yoga, Bodybuilding, and Wrestling: Metaphysical Fitness". Asana International Yoga Journal. Retrieved 9 February 2019. from Debra Diamond, ed. (2013). Yoga: The Art of Transformation. Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
- ISBN 978-0-19-939026-7. quoting Alter 2004, p. 10
- ^ S2CID 162812282.
- ^ OCLC 318191988.
- ^ Alter 2004, pp. 73–108.
- ^ Alter 2004, pp. 109–141.
- ^ Alter 2004, pp. 142–177.
- doi:10.1086/513263.
- .
- ISBN 9780812204742.
- ^ "The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 5, December 2001, Pages 1784–1785". academic.oup.com.
Works
- Pehlwani : identity, ideology and the body of the Indian wrestler. University of California, Berkeley (thesis). 1989.
- Knowing Dil Das: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter. University of Pennsylvania Press. 1999.
- Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000. ISBN 0812204743.
- The wrestler's body : identity and ideology in north India. University of California Press. 2003.
- Yoga in modern India : the body between science and philosophy. Princeton University Press. 2004. ISBN 0691118744.
- Asian Medicine and Globalization. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005.
- Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India. Penguin. 2011.
External links
- Joseph S. Alter at Penguin India