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2016 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591716643604
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Farah Godrej1
Abstract
Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to
dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay
I demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing
that yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of
contemporary Western neoliberal societies. In its current and most common
iteration in the West, yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing
neoliberal constructions of selfhood. However, yoga does contain ample
resources for challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading
the yogic tradition in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical
elements over others, while directing its practice toward an inwardoriented detachment from material outcomes and desires. Contemporary
claims about yogas counterhegemonic status often rely on exaggerated
notions of its former purity and authenticity, which belie its invented
and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather than engaging in these
debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners may productively turn
their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga,
while remaining self-conscious about the particularity and partiality of the
interpretive position on which such a practice is founded.
Keywords
yoga, neoliberalism, biopolitics, Bhagavad-Gta, Yga-Stras, Patanjali,
authenticity
1Department
Corresponding Author:
Farah Godrej, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2213
Watkins Hall, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
Email: godrej@ucr.edu
Political Theory
Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to
dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay, I
demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing that
yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of contemporary Western neoliberal societies. The multivalence of the yogic tradition allows it to be put in service of a variety of socio-cultural norms and
political commitments. In its current and most common iteration in the West,
yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing neoliberal constructions of
selfhood. However, I caution against seeing this as a distortion of yogas
so-called original principles and norms, for modern, Western, capitalist,
and/or neoliberal tropes may occasionally be compatible with key norms of
the yogic tradition. Ultimately, I argue that yoga contains ample resources for
challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading the yogic tradition in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical elements over
others, while directing its practice toward an inward-oriented detachment
from material outcomes and desires. However, in so doing, we must resist the
essentialism that marks contemporary discourse around yoga: the projection
of a pure, monolithic tradition characterized by seamless continuity of theory and practice over centuries.
I begin with a brief historical overview of the yogic tradition, including its
arrival and development in the West. Next, I explore how current forms of
yogic practice tend to align with forms of neoliberal subjectivity seen in
regimes of biopolitical self-governance. I also propose a counterhegemonic
reading that may allow yoga to stand in opposition to neoliberal selfhood. In
concluding, I note that contemporary claims about yogas counterhegemonic
status often rely on exaggerated notions of its former purity and authenticity, which belie its invented and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather
than engaging in these debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners
may productively turn their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga, while remaining self-conscious about the particularity
and partiality of the interpretive position on which such a practice is founded.
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deconstructed and reconstructed both within and beyond South Asia, leading to the emergence of a new transnational tradition developed through
encounters between Indian yoga reformers engaged with modern thought,
[and] Europeans and Americans interested in topics ranging from metaphysics to fitness.8 Various intellectual modernizers, both Indian and
Western, aimed to establish yogas legitimacy in the West as a contemplative and ethical tradition of ancient provenance. Following his famous
address to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami
Vivekananda gave a series of lectures in the United States, offering a rationalist, ascetic, contemplative interpretation of yogic spirituality. Using a
selective reading of Patanjalis Yga-Stras that reified the centrality of the
text, Vivekanada constructed a monolithic and ostensibly authentic version
of yogas classical history that today constitutes its most predominant narrative: From the time it was discovered, more than four thousand years ago,
Yoga was perfectly delineated, formulated and preached in India.9
Vivekananda expressed disdain for yogas bodily practices, downplaying
their importance, but other Indian reformers began representing yoga as a
physical fitness regime comprised primarily of postures and exercises.
Among others, Sivananda Saraswati and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya constructed new postural systems with putative roots in earlier textual traditions.
Like Vivekananda, however, these reformers also undertook a selective, creative reliance on so-called ancient textsparticularly the Yga-Stras and
the Bhagavad-Gtreifying certain texts over others, loosely linking postural practice to classical texts, and eliding the fact that the provenance of
these invented postures was hardly ancient or classical. Many of the
poses taught by these teachers (and now routinely practiced), despite their
Sanskrit names, do not occur in the medieval tantric texts where hat.ha-yga
is elaborated, much less in the earlier classical texts, where there is scarcely
any mention of physical postures.10
Thus, popular postural yoga came into being in the first half of the twentieth century as a hybridized product of colonials Indias dialogical encounter with the worldwide physical culture movement,11 along with nationalist
aspirations to building a strong, disciplined population capable of rejecting
colonial rule and ruling itself. Indian yogis internalized the importance of
physical fitness during the late colonial period, constructing indigenous
exercises partially borrowed from imported fitness techniques, resulting in a
pan-Indian hub of physical culture revivalism.12 The methods of postural
yoga that became popular in India in the early to mid-twentieth century (and
later in the West) would not have been considered yoga prior to this period
of Indian history.13 Meanwhile, the connections between these postural
methods and their putatively ancient textual roots is tenuous. Monolithic
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Some (influenced by Marx) focus on the role of economic policies and the
restructuring of socio-economic and class relations,27 while others are more
likely to focus on neoliberalisms effects on individual subjectivity: how subjects come to understand themselves, how their behavior is shaped and their
sensibilities cultivated by neoliberal assumptions.28 Here, I follow the latter
Foucauldian form of scholarship, which tends to emphasize the governmentality effects of neoliberalism.
My usage of neoliberalism follows those who see it as a large-scale historical project . . . operating through a wide variety of social agents, involving a
deep transformation of culture.29 Seen in this way, the project of neoliberal
governmentality plays out equally on the levels of social, economic, cultural,
and personal life.30 This approach focuses on the culture of neoliberalism,
and the specific governmentalities through which it insinuates itself into the
fabric of our lives . . . touch[ing] on many of the most innocuous and personal
categories of self-understanding, from sexuality and embodiment to emotional
self-management and intimacy.31 It seeks to trace the ways in which neoliberal thought has penetrated people, including the ways we understand who we
are and how we live our lives.32 It focuses particularly on the routine, everyday practices of living, assuming that we are all implicated in shaping politics
through quotidian personal conduct.33 Admittedly, this entails a uniquely
Foucauldian view on the power of discourses and technologies of government
to shape peoples lives,34 although many Foucauldians acknowledge that this is
not an uncontested lens through which to read our current moment, and that
Foucaults account of neoliberalism is quite distinct from many others.
A key aspect of its socio-cultural transformation is neoliberalisms emphasis on what has variously been called the optimization of the self or the technization of its well-being.35 Theorists like Binkley and Barbara Cruikshank
demonstrate how positive psychology, self-esteem movements, and other
discourses of personal self-help and transformation create self-governing
subjects.36 On this view, individuals govern themselves through the cultivation and optimization of their own . . . potentials, and everything, including
ones own mind, body, and emotional state is a resource . . . to be developed,
exploited or leveraged for advantage in a world of competitive actors.37
Neoliberal governmentality entails the freedom to take up self-cultivation as
an enterprising program:38 central to its apparatus are frameworks through
which individuals reflect back on themselves, assess themselves for their
potentials and aptitudes for independent conduct, and work to optimize their
freedom.39 Those who fall short of the realization of this potential are seen
to have betrayed their human capacities.40
This emphasis on responsibilizing citizens to optimize their potentials is
rooted in what Brown and others have called the self as an entrepreneurial
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demanding posture or sequence, while reassuring students that they are welcome to modify them to make them less demanding, or to skip certain
sequences by taking childs pose or blsana, a restorative fetal position
accessible to almost all. Yoga sometimes adopts the neoliberal ethos of risk
management that responsibilizes the individual for her choices: signing a
waiver releasing the teacher or studio from legal liability due to injury is now
mandatory at most yoga studios in the United States. Nor is there any doubt
that postural yoga has become a commodified, fetishized object of material
gain. Magazines such as Yoga Journal attest to the variety of yoga merchandise, along with photo shoots featuring pouty models and designer yogawear, all reinscribing consumerism and heteronormative beauty standards.
The rational, prudent yoga consumer chooses her specific practice from this
smorgasbord, she chooses daily to come to her mat, to modify the postures
in accordance with the available choices, and to be responsible for recognizing her own bodily capacities and limitations.
This convergence of yogic practice with the neoliberal logic of consumer
choice exemplifies postural yogas occasional detachment fromand transformation ofthe dominant norms of the Indic traditions. In premodern
Indic contexts, yogic knowledge was typically transmitted within the context
of a gurudisciple relationship characterized by submission of disciple to
guru. Premodern and contemporary Indian guru-oriented yoga is sometimes
characterized as rigorous, physically demanding, and forceful, requiring
physical stamina, capacity for exertion, and submission to the teachers
instructions (hence the translation of the Sanskrit term hat.ha-yga as violent or forceful exertion). Stories are told of legendarily authoritarian
Indian teachers like Iyengar and Jois who were famous for their punitive
teaching styles, sometimes employing corporeal discipline, such as aggressive physical adjustments and even slapping and shouting. However, yoga
now functions largely according to the principles of individual choice, as
each practitioner chooses his or her own path eclectically, without immersion
within a lineage. Of course, lineages of modern Indian gurus are reified by
some Western yoga practitioners who seek to travel to India to study at the
source and thus authenticate their teaching or practice.59 Yet, discipleship
under modern Indian gurus takes on the normative features of modern
Western life.60 The individual choice of the student continues to take precedence as the organizing principle for Western practitioners, even when filtered through the lens of gurudisciple tradition.61
The trope of yoga as an investment in oneself is ubiquitous in public
discourse; yoga magazines, websites, and ads exhort subjects to treat yoga as
an investment in yourself . . . with many positive returns,62 directly connecting its role as a self-care strategy to its perceived potential for increasing the
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value of the self.63 These languages and frameworks underscore that many
contemporary subjects of postural yogic practice are hailed in public discourse
as human capital to be managed entrepreneurially through investing in their
own long-term well-being. Like education, fitness, diet, therapeutic work, and
other activities of personal reform and self-optimization, yoga is increasingly
seen as a strategic practice designed to enhance ones own esteem and future
value, whether understood in terms of stress reduction and overall good health,
or attracting future investors such as significant others or even social peers.
But even while postural yogas participation in neoliberal biopolitics
occurs at the expense of distorting certain predominant yogic norms, it simultaneously converges with others. Of all yogic principles, those most likely to
resonate with the responsible, self-governing subjects of neoliberalism are
self-discipline and self-mastery. The very translation of yoga, despite the
variety involved, usually denotes self-discipline or self-mastery. In almost
every text now construed as authoritative, self-discipline and self-mastery are
considered primary routes toward yogic goals. This self-discipline and selfmastery so foundational to the definition of yoga appear to have been translated into and made compatible with contemporary forms of self-regulation
required in neoliberal times. Like weight loss and exercise regimens that
[assign] to each individual the responsibility for monitoring and measuring
their bodys activities, yogas fundamental commitment to self-mastery
aligns creatively with a neoliberal biopolitics that affords individuals both
the tools and the motivation for increasing levels of self-governance.64 This
alignment is further intensified by the branding practices of yoga merchandising firms which appropriate yogic practice into a consumerist model of
discipline and self-care in order to reinforce Western ideologies of healthism
and personal optimization.65
In a study interviewing yoga practitioners, a majority of respondents
answered that among the things they valued in yoga was the discipline and
work ethic it instilled. In a representative response, a student explains: I
stopped smoking, I lost about fifteen kilos, I stopped doing drugs, I stopped
drinking . . . I have developed self discipline . . . I am more focused.66 Like
diet and exercise, postural practice becomes one more way in which neoliberal subjects can become governors of their own selves.67 The financial
incentives offered at yoga studios for regular attendance hail the committed
practitioner who brings herself to practice with regularity. The system of the
series or multi-class pass encourages monitoring of attendance; regular attendance is incentivized through a pricing that makes a drop-in class far more
expensive than a series. To commit seriously to yoga is to work steadily and
cumulatively, perhaps over years, on precision, alignment, breath flow, and
so forth. Every sana (pose) is a challenge that sometimes has to be
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practiced intensively until you finally master it.68 Even when shorn of the
ascetic implications of transcendence, these aims require disciplined, regular
practice, and mental and corporeal self-mastery. In this sense, the conceptualizations of selfhood that are produced within yoga converge with neoliberal
constructions of selfhood, and these discourses are therefore mutually reinforcing and constantly reproduced.69
Yogic norms of self-mastery may also assist the subject in dealing with
neoliberalisms contradictory demands. As Julie Guthman notes, neoliberal
governmentality produces contradictory impulses such that the neoliberal
subject is emotionally compelled to participate in society as both out-of-control consumer and self-controlled subject.70 Neoliberalism and its attendant
forms of consumer culture require the subject to engage in obligatory forms
of ingestion, while simultaneously moderating her own consumption or atoning for it through forms of health-inducing self-cultivation. The perfect subject-citizen who either resists the temptation of unhealthy foods or
moderates their physical effects, achieving both eating and thinness, is
imbued with rationality and self-discipline. Postural yoga serves as an instrument to fulfill these conflicting demands: either the repeated physical practice militates against eating unhealthily, or self-discipline allows the subject
to avoid temptation altogether. Meanwhile, the popularity of postural yoga in
the Euro-American middle classes may also be explained by the demands of
the post-Fordist economy, in which the density of work is increased while the
workday is delimited by blurring the boundaries between work and the rest
of ones life. Postural yoga may allow subjects to continue coping with the
stresses of the post-Fordist workplace, while keeping the body healthy, useful, flexible, and productive enough to work all hours.71 Yoga may empower
citizens to enhance their capacities and skills in ways that subtly (if unintentionally) shape them into self-monitoring and self-reliant subjects . . . prepared for success in global capitalism.72
Contemporary forms of yoga thus illustrate the empowering aspect of
self-governance at the heart of governmentality. On Foucaults view, exercises of power do not necessarily result in the removal of liberty; rather, they
may empower or activate subjects and enlarge the field of individual
freedom and choice.73 Participation in postural yoga empowers its subjects
to choose the form of practice that may best aid their self-enhancement, while
partaking in an ethic of what Nikolas Rose calls active biological citizenship:
exploring and pushing their own physical limits, accessing new realms of
possibility in the rest of their lives, achieving new things in body and mind,
encountering challenge, and perhaps conquering physical limits.74 As Sara
Rushing notes, the concept of empowerment, once identified with civil rights
activism and feminist consciousness-raising, was co-opted by neoliberals,
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deployed to diminish social safety nets by valorizing entrepreneurial selfcare and responsibilization, . . . [a] solicitation to self-discipline and subjectivity in compliance with the dominant logic of systems of power.75
In this way, the practice of postural yoga may fulfill the neoliberal cultural demand for entrepreneurial, disciplined, and self-regulating subjects.76
The techniques of self-governance valorized by yoga produce forms of
agency both required and rewarded by neoliberal regimes, providing individuals the ability and motivation to ensure the productive and predictable
development of their own body toward the end of smooth economic development.77 Modern postural yoga may creatively align with biopolitical imperatives, as the language of yogic self-discipline converges with neoliberalisms
self-surveillance, self-monitoring, and self-mastery. Many yoga practitioners
may become perfect subjects of neoliberalism: autonomous, self-disciplined,
driven by the logic of choice, responsible for their own health, geared toward
progressive self-cultivation, made amenable to the competing demands of the
neoliberal economy, and empowered to be productive members of such an
economy through their own entrepreneurial self-investment.
Now, some may object that there is surely nothing wrong with a healthy,
productive populace in which people discipline themselves, take responsibility, and feel challenged or empowered by their pursuit of health. But Wendy
Brown reminds us that neoliberalism as rationality has prepared the ground
for profoundly anti-democratic political ideas and practices to take root.78 It
produces an unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian orientation, undermining
an already weak investment in an active citizenry and an already thin concept of a public good.79 Neoliberal conceptions of selfhood produce a pacified and neutered citizenry80 divested of any orientation toward the common.
Citizenship is reduced to self-care, consumption and entrepreneurship,
thereby ensuring that the project of navigating the social becomes entirely
one of . . . procuring a personal solution to every problem, while the conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into
consumer items entails depoliticization on an unprecedented level.81
Unemployment, obesity, or ill healthand by extension povertyare attributed to the failure of responsibility, entrepreneurship or self-mastery, rather
than to unjust socio-political structures. Democratic subjects, wholly in thrall
to their own interests, become available to political tyranny . . . precisely
because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that
they mistake for freedom.82
The danger is that contemporary yogis may become perfect neoliberal subjects, as the practice of yoga may inadvertently reinscribe a consumerist, politically passive, undemocratic, and anti-egalitarian orientation. Responsibilizing
yogic subjects for health-inducing self-cultivation and consumption of
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Yga-Stras in classes.105 Teachers write about introducing Patanjalian concepts such as satya (truth), swdhyya (self-inquiry) and aparigraha (nonpossession) in order to encourage developing self-awareness of ones
externally motivated self-image,106 questioning contemporary yogas conflation of bodily perfection with self-optimization,107 critiquing the
achievement-oriented nature of contemporary yoga by refusing to push
oneself into difficult postures, and emphasizing the anticompetitive nature of
yoga by keeping ones gaze inwardly focused instead of comparing oneself
with others.108 Of course, these contemporary efforts do not seek as radically
ascetic a fulfillment of the Patanjalian ideal as, say, Indian renunciates have
long attempted, engaging in acts of intense self-deprivation and austerity
such as fasting, celibacy, and nakedness designed to produce absolute mystical union. Nor can they, for in the Euro-American context, such radical asceticism and transcendence carry little resonance. Rather, these efforts, while
rooted in a fundamentally ascetic set of principles, are more modest in aim,
focusing on moving the needle away from uncritical investment in exteriorized, competitive, consumerist, values of self-optimization, and closer
toward the ideal of inward-oriented detachment from material desires and
outcomes.
However, a deeper reading of yogic texts also reveals that the very purpose of Patanjalis philosophy is to amplify human dissociation from the
changeable, dissatisfying environment of eco-social complexity.109
Patanjalis adept is liberated when concentrated in meditative experience
(samdhi), in order to attain the state of kaivalya (isolation or aloneness) in
which mind, body, and phenomenal world are transcendeda state hardly
conducive to the sort of socio-political awareness and action required to subvert neoliberalisms. The premodern practice of yoga was in fact thought to be
radically individualist, asocial, anti-human, and perhaps even anti-ethical,
requiring the removal of the individual from webs of conventional social
relation, obligation, and concern that render social ethics possible,110 resisting the values of traditional householding, convention, and human attachments.111 Is it possible, then, that the marrying of postural practice to classical
yogic philosophy can end up depoliticizing the subject in ways that might
comport conveniently with neoliberalism?
Certainly one narrative holds that the classical yogic philosophy encourages a withdrawal from the phenomenal world and an indifference to, if not
emphatic prejudice against, socio-political engagement.112 However, this narrative ignores the lively contestation in classical texts about combining the
renunciatory project with a concern for worldly ethics. The Bhagavad-Gt
bears out this multivocality, for despite what is often thought to be a reduction
of the socio-political world to the status of an illusion or cosmic spectacle, the
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Conclusion: An Authentically
Counterhegemonic Yoga?
I have argued here that the politics of contemporary yogic practice is characterized by multiple levels of ambivalence. First, forms of postural yoga practice prevalent in the West may militate against but simultaneously legitimate
forms of selfhood that are produced within neoliberal biopolitical regimes.
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advocacy of a purist, authenticity-obsessed mode of yoga, and thus to precisely the same essentialisms on which much of modern yogas trajectory in
the West has been built.
But I wish to stress that the link between these is contingent rather than
necessary. Therefore, seeking counterhegemonic potential in a particular
philosophical and renunciatory reading of the tradition (as I have suggested
above) must avoid replicating facile appeals to the trope of contemporary
yoga as a commodified divergence from some authentic, premodern, monolithic, cultural ideal.122 These appeals ignore the fact that yoga has repeatedly
been reinvented, both in the West and in India.123 The modern practice of
postural yoga is built on countless accretions: what people have been getting out of yoga, whether in premodern India, modern India, or in the contemporary West, has always been subject to a variety of modes of
meaning-making by those who have undertaken its practice: instrumental and
otherwise, materialist and anti-materialist, secular and spiritual, political and
apolitical.124 Admittedly, this recognition sits ill at ease with recent attempts
to assert Indian cultural ownership of yoga,125 for if ancient Hindu yogis,
Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Sufis, medieval Nath yogis, and Kanphata tantrics, not to mention Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and countless
others each reinvented yoga, why should Westernized forms of yoga
involving stand-up paddleboards, silk scarves, Yogalates, and so forth not be
deemed equally legitimate? As sympathetic as we may be to the claims of
those like Vandana Shiva who point to the biopiracy of Western institutions
profiteering from indigenous, non-Western knowledge, our sympathy sits at
odds with the recognition that the very idea of an authentically Indian
yogic tradition is to some extent a retrospective reification.
If we accept this, then we must disarticulate yogas anti-neoliberal potential from its ostensible purity or authenticity. The anti-materialist and
politically compatible reading of the Yga-Stras and the Bhagavad-Gt
must be self-conscious about appealing to specific strains within a highly
plural tradition, while eschewing the notion that this appeal accurately represents an entire tradition. It must understand itself as a syncretic and piecemealyet constructive interpretation of the yogic tradition for the express
purpose of emphasizing its counterhegemonic potential, rather than being
motivated by the glib desire to authenticate ones practice.126 Instead of
presenting an authoritative understanding of yoga, our reading seeks to
selectively employ aspects of the tradition for our critical project, tempered
by the recognition of the partiality of our own perspective in light of the traditions multivalence.
The danger is that it is precisely this multivalence that allows yoga to feed
into neoliberalism by giving it many footholds. But I have suggested that not
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Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. David Gordon White, ed., Yoga in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), 2.
2. Ibid., 2.
3. Geoffrey Samuel, Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Mircea Eliade, Yoga:
Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
4. White, Yoga in Practice, 6.
5. Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 18.
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62.
Yoga: Making an Investment in Yourself, http://duskyleaf.ca/blog/
yoga-making-investment-in-yourself/
63. Colette M. Herrick and Allan D. Ainsworth, Invest in Yourself: Yoga as a SelfCare Strategy, Nursing Forum 35, no. 2 (2000): 3226.
64. Lavin, 1920.
65. Christine Lavrance and Kristin Lozanski, This Is Not Your Practice Life:
Lululemon and the Neoliberal Governance of Self, Canadian Review of
Sociology 51, no. 1 (2014): 76.
66. Sarah Strauss and Laura Mandelbaum, Consuming Yoga, Conserving the
Environment: Transcultural Discourses on Sustainable Living, in Yoga
Traveling, 185.
67. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 89, 91.
68. Verena Schnbele, The Useful Body: The Yogic Answer to Appearance
Management in the Post-Fordist Workplace, in Yoga Traveling, 146.
69. Strauss and Mandelbaum, Consuming Yoga, 187.
70. Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy,
Culture and the Politics of Fat, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
24 (2006): 444.
71. Schnbele, The Useful Body, 14344.
72. Lavin, 20.
73. Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, 20
74. Schnbele, The Useful Body, 146.
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75. Sara Rushing, Whats Left of Empowerment After Neoliberalism?, Theory &
Event 19, no. 1 (2016).
76. Lavin, 19.
77. Ibid., 5.
78. Brown, American Nightmare, 702.
79. Ibid., 703, 695.
80. Ibid., 709.
81. Ibid., 695, 704.
82. Ibid., 699, 703.
83. Lavrance and Lozanski, This Is Not Your Practice Life, 80, 85.
84. I owe this to Sara Rushing.
85. Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and
Practice (Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, 1998), 100, 103.
86. Ritu DasGupta Sherma, Sacred Immanence: Reflections of Ecofeminism in
Hindu Tantra, in Lance E. Nelson, (ed.), Purifying the Earthly Body of God:
Religion and Ecology in India (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 95. See also
Farah Godrej, Orthodoxy and Dissent in Hinduisms Meditative Traditions: A
Critical Tantric Politics? New Political Science 38 (2), 2016, 256-271.
87. Feuerstein, The Yga-Stra of Patajali, 26.
88. Barbara Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishnas Counsel in Time of War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), VI.4, 63.
89. Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita, VI.12, VI.18, 6465.
90. Jain, Selling Yoga, 6570.
91. Feuerstein, The Yga-Stra of Patajali, 59, 80, 86.
92. Schnbele, The Useful Body, 148
93. Feuerstein, The Yga-Stra of Patajali, 34, 3536, 60; Stoler-Miller, The
Bhagavad-Gita, 67.
94. Feuerstein, The Yga-Stra of Patajali, 79.
95. Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita, VI.4, 63: detached from sense objects and
actions (sarva-san.kalpa-sannysi).
96. Feuerstein, The Yga-Stra of Patajali, 45.
97. Laura Duhan Kaplan, Physical Education for Domination and Emancipation:
A Foucauldian Analysis of Aerobics and Hatha Yoga, in Philosophical
Perspectives on Power and Domination, ed. Laura Duhan Kaplan and Laurence
F. Bove (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 75.
98. I owe this to Lisa Disch. See also Dean Mathiowetz, The Political Potential of
Mindful Embodiment, New Political Science 38 (2), 2016, 226-240.
99. Arnold I. Davidson, In Praise of Counter-Conduct, History of the Human
Sciences 24(4), 2011, 28.
100. Amy Allen, Foucault and the Politics of Our Selves, History of the Human
Sciences 24, no. 4 (2011): 44.
101. McGushin, xxi, xxix, Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as
a Practice of Freedom, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994), 282.
102. Kaplan, Physical Education, 7576.
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Fight Over the Body of Yoga, in On Hinduism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
125. Hauser, Yoga Traveling, 6; Rob Schware, Restoring Yoga to Its South Asian
Roots, Huffington Post, October 21, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robschware/restoring-yoga-to-its-sou_b_4005329.html; https://saapya.wordpress.com
126. For a detailed treatment of methodological and interpretive issues involved in
employing non-Western texts to solve political problems within Western contexts, see Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice,
Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
127. Harvey, Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, 35.
128. Don Kalb, Afterword, in Nicolette Macovichy, Neoliberalism, Personhood
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Author Biography
Farah Godrej is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political
thought, Gandhis political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization, comparative
political theory, and environmental political thought. Her research appears in journals
such as Political Theory, The Review of Politics, New Political Science, and Polity,
and she is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Her new research explores the intersection between politics and materiality, focusing on the role of the body in ancient and
contemporary Indian traditions of thought. She was the recipient of the 20132014
UC Presidents Research Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities.