Yoga Body

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Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
OCLC
318191988

Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice is a 2010 book on

vinyasas) adapted from the gymnastics of the physical culture movement. This was encouraged by Indian nationalism
, with the desire to present an image of health and strength.

The book attracted wide interest, both among scholars and among yoga teachers and practitioners. Its argument has largely been accepted by scholars, and it has encouraged further research into the nature of modern yoga and its origins.

The book was attacked from two sides: saffronising Hindu nationalists wanting to reclaim yoga as a single thing, distinctively Indian; and modern global yoga marketing wanting to wrap its product "in the mantle of antiquity"[1] to maximise sales.

Book

Publication

Yoga Body was published by Oxford University Press in paperback in 2010.[YB 1] A Serbian translation came out in 2015 with a new preface.[2]

Purpose

The author, Mark Singleton, sets out the book's purpose as follows:

The book targets an essential, but hitherto largely ignored, aspect of yoga's development. Studies of

Elizabeth De Michelis and Joseph Alter, have focused on both these moments in the history of transnational yoga, but they have not offered a good explanation of why āsana was initially excluded and the ways in which it was eventually reclaimed.[YB 2]

Contents

Westerners viewed yoga with suspicion, grouping it with fakirs (pictured in 1907) and charlatanry.[YB 3]
Further information: Yoga as exercise

Yoga Body begins by describing traditional

vinyasas), in his Mysore yogashala.[YB 8] Singleton notes that "yoga" has become almost synonymous with the practice of āsanas, something not true of any pre-modern yoga.[YB 9]

Illustrations

The book is illustrated with numerous monochrome photographs of yoga pioneers, asanas, and historic images which set modern yoga in its context. There are images of Indian fakirs, Western

bodybuilders in the physical culture tradition, and pioneers of modern asana-based yoga such as Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar
.

Reception

In favour

Samakonasana in Thomas Dwight's "The Anatomy of a Contortionist", Scribner's Magazine, April 1889.[YB 3]

Harold Coward, reviewing Yoga Body for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, writes that the book provides a "very detailed analysis" of how hatha yoga changed "from being seen as a blight" to regaining "a positive perception in the modern West."[3] In his view, the book is "an excellent contribution to our understanding of how asana yoga evolved in the decades after Vivekananda and became the basis for much of the postural yoga experienced in Anglophone culture today", offering "user friendly, but serious scholarship" on the history of modern yoga.[3]

The historian

creolized tradition",[4] he neither provides a single clear narrative, nor states which of the many causal factors he identifies are the most important. He notes that Singleton is a scholar-practitioner, "and he adopts a tone of respect even as he skewers sacred cows."[4] Farmer suggests that Singleton may, by looking towards factors in British India, have overlooked some American contexts, and states that "Yoga Body deserves controversy, which I mean as a sincere compliment."[4]

The author and yoga teacher

surya namaskāra, your sensation of internal oneness might be vibrating with the conjunction of cultures and histories."[1]

The yoga instructor Timothy Burgin, reviewing the same book for Yoga Basics, calls it "fascinating and remarkable", both well-documented and likely to "ruffle a few yogis' feathers", noting that before the modern yoga transition, "Hatha Yogis were considered to be derelicts and ruffians and were avoided by both native Indians and Westerners alike."[5]

The yoga teacher Jill Miller, reviewing the book on

Gaiam, observes that Singleton showed how many modern asanas were "derived during an environment of Indian neo-nationalism and infused with doses of European gymnastics, bodybuilding and the Christian agendas of the YMCA." She records that this agreed with a feeling she had long had, that many of the poses were very similar to those used in martial arts, and that authenticity in yoga was not what it seemed.[6]

Singleton's thesis has launched an academic discourse on what "authenticity" means with respect to modern yoga, as seen for instance in Cristina Renee Sajovich's 2015 graduate thesis Decolonizing Yoga: Authenticity Narratives, Social Feelings & Subversion in Modern Postural Yoga, which endorses Singleton's arguments.[7]

Discussion

Patañjali's eight-fold yoga but from the aṣṭāṅga dandavat pranām pose.[YB 10]

In 2011, the yoga scholar and philologist

Vrikshasana (tree pose) among them.[9]

The book provoked discussion among yoga practitioners as well as scholars.

mindful yoga teacher Frank Jude Boccio joined the debate on whether Singleton was ignoring earlier syncretism between yoga and other philosophies.[10]
Remski observed that there were ad hominem attacks on Singleton: he was labelled "a debunker, a cultural appropriator, a 'junior scholar from England', and a pro-colonial revisionist intent on delegitimizing the Indian roots of postural practice."[1] Remski notes that most of these emerged and vanished on social media, their ephemerality indicating their "intellectual poverty", but their presence demonstrating Yoga Body's reach to a non-academic audience, "and its sting."[1]

The yoga teacher Bernie Gourley called Singleton's premise "a bold and stunning hypothesis" but stated that he was not persuaded. He argued that Singleton put "immense weight" on a few 19th century sources, mainly Europeans who may not have viewed yoga objectively, and that the choice of the 19th century as a boundary was arbitrary, even if there are few earlier sources. He questioned whether Krishnamacharya was, as Singleton implied, lying about learning his yoga from a scripture (the undocumented Yoga Korunta) from a Himalayan master (Ramamohana Brahmachari). He stated that the book avoided detailed examination of individual asanas, and that many asanas may have existed without documentation.[11]

Seven years after the book's publication, Anya P. Foxen wrote on the

B.K.S. Iyengar's midcentury classic Light on Yoga (1966), would have us believe."[12]

Singleton's response

In 2015, Singleton wrote a careful new

Elizabeth de Michelis. He corrected the major misconceptions that had appeared in discussions of the book, stating that it did not tell anyone how to practise yoga, nor say what such practice should be like now or in the future; it did not suggest that modern internationalised yoga consisted solely of asanas; it did not assert that asanas had been invented recently; it did not accuse pioneers like Krishnamacharya of plagiarism. He suggested instead that it made more sense[1][2]

to speak of adaptation, reframing, reinterpretation (and so on) rather than invention, insofar as these terms foreground the ongoing processes of experimentation and bricolage that characterise the recent history of globalised yoga, and keeps us away from debates about the genealogies and ultimate origins of particular postures. It is here, in the very work of interpretation and assimilation of tradition and modernity, that the main interest of this book lies."[2]

Singleton suggested two reasons why Yoga Body had divided opinion so sharply. Firstly, he stated that

hagiographic image. The truth, however, is in his view something more complex: the old has been adapted and transformed to create something new, suitable for a radically different social environment.[1]

References

Primary

These references are supplied to indicate the parts of the Yoga Body text being discussed.

  1. ^ Singleton 2010
  2. ^ Singleton 2010, p. 4
  3. ^ a b c Singleton 2010, pp. 35–80
  4. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 25–34
  5. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 81–142
  6. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 143–162
  7. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 163–174
  8. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 175–210
  9. ^ Singleton 2010, p. 3
  10. ^ a b Singleton 2010, p. 205

Secondary

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Remski, Matthew. "Mark Singleton Responds to Critics Who Didn't Want to Understand His Book". Matthew Remski. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  2. ^ a b c Singleton, Mark (2015). "Preface to the Serbian edition of Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice Mark Singleton Translated by Nikola Pešić (Belgrade: Neopress Publishing, 2015)". Academia.edu.
  3. ^
    doi:10.7825/2164-6279.1469
    .
  4. ^
    S2CID 246283975
    .
  5. ^ Burgin, Timothy. "Yoga Body by Mark Singleton". Yoga Basics. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  6. Gaiam
    . Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  7. ^ Sajovich, Cristina Renee (2015). Decolonizing Yoga: Authenticity Narratives, Social Feelings & Subversion in Modern Postural Yoga. University of Colorado Department of Religious Studies.
  8. ^ a b c Mallinson, James (9 December 2011). "A Response to Mark Singleton's Yoga Body by James Mallinson". Academia.edu. Retrieved 18 May 2019. This is a revised version of a paper given at the American Academy of Religions conference in San Francisco on 19 November 2011.
  9. OCLC 928480104
    .
  10. ^ "Keep Yoga Vodou". The Babarazzi | giving contemporary yoga the star treatment. 11 December 2013. Retrieved 18 May 2019. See also "Mark Singleton's 'Yoga Body' | No This Isn't a Review | Just Some Thoughts". 16 December 2013. Archived from the original on 17 December 2013. (theBabarazzi's comments on that discussion).
  11. ^ Gourley, Bernie (23 February 2015). "BOOK REVIEW: Yoga Body by Mark Singleton". the !n(tro)verted yogi.
  12. ^ Foxen, Anya P. (15 November 2017). "5 facts that help us understand the world of early American yoga". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 18 May 2019.

Sources

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