Abstract
I problematise the understanding of yoga in popular forms of yoga travel by pointing to the discrepancy between yoga as it originated in ancient India and yoga as it is practised in contemporary Western societies. Overlooking the socio-historical and philosophical context within which yoga arose, I argue, tends to misplace the ways in which it is understood today. This gap in understanding seems to form the basis of an unhealthy hybridisation of yoga that permeates the spiritual industry today. While I am in favour of creative reinterpretation of classical beliefs and practices for contemporary use, I argue that there needs to be in place a mode of critical reflection that disallows bogus formulations of hodgepodge to pass off as authentic systems of belief and practice.
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- 1.
I recognise that destinations for yoga travel include most countries in South Asia among other destinations in the world. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I shall restrict my analyses to India.
- 2.
I do not mean to suggest here that only the Western traveller is subject to this kind of exploitation. Indeed, travellers from, and to, South Asia fall prey to this mechanism of yoga tourism. My point here is to emphasise the ways in which unilateral approaches to yoga travel tend to overlook certain significant and even problematic features of the current yoga industry.
- 3.
However, not all systems of wisdom view yoga as described in the text. There are many other kinds of yoga that serve to support different metaphysical and epistemological systems. Advaita Vedanta, for instance, is a non-dual atheistic school and, in opposition to Samkhya-Yoga, argues against the need for God or yoga as leading to liberation. Yoga in Advaita Vedanta is merely a Wittgensteinian ladder in the process of self-realisation. Advaita Vedanta refutes yoga as the ultimate goal and posits sat-cit-ananda—existence-consciousness-bliss—as the ultimate seat of liberation. There are, of course, ongoing debates about the differences and similarities between these systems and the final resultant states. That is a separate, more detailed conversation. My point here, however, is to showcase the various ways in which yoga is formulated, and ways in which it is used to justify a varied set of epistemic goals and metaphysical systems.
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Singamsetty, M. (2016). A Ticket to Self-Discovery: Situating Yoga in Yoga Travel. In: Beaman, L., Sikka, S. (eds) Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32512-5_10
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