Yoga, Science and Health: The Social and Discursive Construction of the Yoga Body
I have begun my academic research on yoga in 2017 with my doctoral thesis in sociology at the University of Milan – Bicocca, Italy. It is notable that I forwarded my PhD application only one day before moving to a neo-Hindu ashram in Portugal, where I lived with my (back then) guru and other devotees. A few months into my ascetic life I was invited by the University for an interview and I eagerly choose the academic path over the monastic one.
It is then clear that I was already involved in the world of yoga as a practitioner before approaching it as a socio-cultural object of study. This signified that when I started to study yoga, I was full of preconceptions and ideas about what “true” yoga was and its aims, most notably self-realization. I was thus inevitably confronted with questions of belonging, self-reflective critiques and a great deal of disenchantment when I began to read the ‘classics’ of yoga studies and noticed the growing concerns among practitioners, scholars and the media on the potential abusive relationships among some of the most important yoga teachers and gurus of the last century and their students, especially female students. Compared to the existing research on yoga, which is largely based on the study of yoga texts or on the history of yoga’s development in the last couple of centuries, my research was and is still characterized by the first-hand appreciation of the practice as a tool to better theorize about the apprenticeship process of the modern yogi and by a focus on practitioners’ experiences, largely absent from Yoga Studies’ traditional areas of interest.
In fact, I quickly decided to focus on the pedagogical dimension of practicing yoga, that is, the ways in which teachers transmit their knowledge and the ways in which students embody these teachings “on” and “off” the yoga mat. To my surprise this was a largely ignored subject although, I contend, it has profound repercussions on our sociological understanding of what yoga is, how it is lived and its role in practitioners’ life, not to mention the rising industry of yoga teachers. During my research I progressively focused on the connections between the practice on the mat and the broader every-day life of the practitioners as I identified that yoga, at least in its mainstream forms, simultaneously offer an alternative to the hectic, performative and uncertain labour market as well as a practice that can help practitioners to navigate it more competently. Here, practitioners’ quests for meaning, health and well-being as well as their spiritual concerns, contribute to make of contemporary yoga a malleable practice which, time by time, assumes different connotations according to the reasons why people decide to practice it in the first place.
Methodologically, I relied – and continue to rely – on some of the main research methods of the sociological trade: dozens of interviews to yoga teachers and practitioners, participant observations of weekly classes, master classes, festivals and other events, and discourse analysis of a plurality of sources such as schools’ websites, yoga magazines and manuals. Among the future areas of study that I would like to explore there are a thorough examination of the history of yoga in Italy, the study of the professionalisation of yoga teaching and the conflation of the horizons of physical and spiritual health in contemporary yoga practice and discourses. If you are interested to learn more about my research here it is a collection of my publications, many of which focus on different aspects of teaching and learning yoga as well as on the ways in which yoga has changed to progressively accommodate to new socio-cultural environments.
Matteo Di Placido (researchgate.net)
Department of Cultures, Politics and Society
Science Religion and Health 