Decolonizing Yoga; Making Space for Cultural Plurality
Posted on October 26, 2018As many children of immigrant parents can attest, navigating the streets, parties, and politics of the U.S. while balancing in between cultures can feel like quite the acrobatic feat. Going back and forth between two different cultural realities with a rigid boundary is one thing, but when one of those cultures is consistently othered by the other, it can make any kind of true cultural plurality difficult to achieve.
These are the thoughts that are difficult for me to empty when I go to a yoga class. Whenever I walk past randomly placed statues of Hindu deities, hear sitar music playing in the background, and enter a room where I am often the only person of color; each artifact, sound, and observation webs out into a map of cultural appropriation. Just as a person with white privilege can take their pick of foods, garments, and practices from South Asian culture without fearing for their safety or being stopped at airports, the western yoga industry adopts its chosen aspects of the ancient practice with little regard for their holisticity, religious significance, or cultural relevance. The symbolic violence of these commercialized yoga spaces is even more disturbing given their intentions of offering activities to promote self-care, wellness, spirituality, and healing.
In many yoga studios in the States, religious symbols and statues of Hindu deities are used as decoration. Sitar music is played to access an “exotic” feeling. Bits and pieces of spiritual practice from Hinduism and Buddhism find their way into the class minus their religious context in the form of “ohm”s and Sanskrit chants. The word, “namaste,” which in my experience is used as a respectful greeting, particularly to elders, feels out of place and strange to me when uttered to close a yoga class. At the end of class, I can’t help but notice the contrast between the intention of the activity and my own internal experience, and think about how this way of practicing yoga affords access to healing to certain people but not others.
Yoga philosophy is rooted in Hinduism, and is referenced in religious texts such as the Rigveda and the Upanishads. It is not simply a physical exercise, but a way of living that comprises eight limbs of thought. Among the ideas that Yoga philosophy preaches are nonviolence, honesty, compassion, a focus on nonmaterialism, careful use of energy, and mindfulness and meditation. Western yoga practice focuses on one of these limbs: physical asanas, and mostly ignores the rest. The industry has profited from breaking down and commodifying yoga to alignin it with Western fitness ideals. The video below from CollegeHumor provides an excellent illustration.
Yoga, mindfulness, and meditation have become a popular movement in the Western world, with very little or appropriative acknowledgement of their religious roots in Buddhism and Hinduism. Just like the trends among privileged white communities of appropriating preferred aspects of South Asian culture but rejecting the people, the selective secularization of yoga and meditation perpetuates symbolic violence and an erasure of South Asian culture and people from its practices. It has also enabled yoga and meditation to be assimilated so thoroughly into capitalist culture in the West that they are now presented as forms of stress reduction to help people cope with the demands of a society that prioritizes productivity and efficiency over compassion and wellness. Yoga asanas, as well as the practices of mindfulness and meditation, have been subverted to serve corporate agendas that are arguably opposite to the tenets of Yoga philosophy, and utilized to make people perform better in an industrialist society.
Photo by BeStickerShop on Etsy.com
The yoga boom in the United States has also spawned other industries like specialized yoga apparel, smartphone mindfulness apps, and a bevy of props, cushions, and incense. These industries further contribute to the global economic hegemony of the U.S. and the western world. With striking similarity to the time of British colonialism in India, western companies and societies continue to profit enormously off of the appropriation of South Asian foods, fibers, resources and cultural practices, while maintaining a political and economic relationship that keeps the power firmly in the hands of the corporate West. The rise of Lululemon and the unprecedented rate of farmer suicide in rural India are both direct results of the neocolonialist nature of Western-led capitalism and globalization.
Globalization, however, is not going anywhere. Our societies are becoming increasingly mobile, melded, and diverse – as of 2015, the Indian immigrant population in the United States surpassed two million. Many of those people will raise families here – families that will have to navigate cultural pluralities for the rest of their lives. Cultural exchange can be an enormously beneficial and powerful way of building connection and community, especially as communities become less homogeneous, but it can also present a minefield of imperialist and destructive power. I see an important role for thoughtful design in the exploration of new, nonviolent, vehicles of cultural exchange and pluralism. How can we design methods of cultural exchange that do not perpetuate colonialist violence? Are there ways to make space for both individualistic and collectivist values in the integrated global societies of the future? Maybe we could start with imagining what it might look, sound, and feel like to attend a decolonized yoga class.
-Meghana Srinivasan
Sources:
Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/01/05/india.farmer.suicides/index.html
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states
http://www.danielsimpson.info/archive/mindfulness-in-schools-constructive-critique