Getting Centered: An Ethnography of Yoga Culture

Abstract

Why has yoga become popular in America, and what are the implications of that popularity, given yoga’s status as a cultural transplant from India? This thesis uses participant observation, interviewing, and embodied practice to examine this question. I argue that yoga represents technological equipment for living, capable of aiding participants with emotional trauma and quotidian difficulties. I argue that yoga is a limit experience in that it encourages participants to transgress normative boundaries to reconstitute subjectivity against the bureaucratic rationalism of modernity. This thesis situates these rationalities for practicing yoga amidst a local spatiality that reflects yogic philosophy even outside the studio. It also situates these rationalities alongside a neoliberalist consumerism that implicates females in a particularly gendered form of symbolic violence and complicates the boundary between material and spiritual practice. The thesis concluded by considering yoga’s politics and the cultural importation of health and wellness resources more generally.