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Research Round Up - Apr 18
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Once again I’m aiming for there to be something in this research round up for everyone: yoga scholars and students, history geeks and activists, casual and dedicated practitioners. Get in touch with me and comment in the usual places to get the conversation going.
This mailing list relies on all of you too, so if you see something interesting out there on this of any aspect of historical or contemporary yoga, whether it’s a book, article, blog or recording, send it over.
This month, I took time out from editing the first draft of the thesis to answer a little confusion about the term ‘post-lineage yoga’. It’s a shorthand term I’m using in the thesis, and as yet, it isn’t fully explained in academic print, although I’ve been using it for a while here and there. As a result, a few yoga teachers have picked up on it and are using it, and it’s time to help the wider community understand what they, and I, mean when we use it. I realised a quick blog post would help as I continue to work towards publication.
And that got me thinking about the many times academics have created terms with ‘post-‘ at the start, often as a way to explain something that is both new, and yet connected to what has come before. It’s a useful prefix, and so probably over-used, and I feel a little guilty for adding to it. But here’s a few ‘post-‘ terms that might be interesting to think with this month.
Again, for all you independent minds without academic access, here’s a little useful link for you:
http://unpaywall.org/welcome
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Firstly, for context, that blog post.
“Post-lineage does not mean anti-lineage. It can be commercial or traditional, radical or neoliberal, but it is rarely strict or branded. It just shifts the authority for deciding good yoga practice away from the absolute power of previous masters, to small community groups of teachers. The term therefore might be of wider usefulness.”
Wildcroft, Theo. 2018. 'Post-lineage yoga', Accessed 22/04/2018. https://www.wildyoga.co.uk/2018/04/post-lineage-yoga/
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Here’s a classic article by Malory Nye that doesn’t just talk about ‘post-religion’, but also indulges in another useful scholarly trick: turning nouns into verbs, and thus talking about the processes embedded in institutions.
"A discourse of religioning also moves away from looking at 'religion' in terms of 'religions' (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.), but instead looks at religious influences and religious creativities, and the political dynamics through which certain conceptualization of religious authenticity are produced and maintained.” p467
Nye, Malory. 2000. 'Religion, post-religionism, and religioning: Religious studies and contemporary cultural debates', Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 12: 447-76.
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One of the most influential ideas in religious studies that Nye was drawing on is that of a ‘post-Christian’ society. More recent rises in evangelism, and newly influential forms of Christianity emerging from African churches in particular, have complicated things even further. But this core idea, of a way of interacting with a religion that attempts to honour its roots but reject its institutions, will feel very familiar to the yoga community.
“at the heart of much post-Christian feminist writing is a critique of the Christian tradition, often of a very detailed and specific nature. There is a serious engagement with the Christian tradition even when it is being attacked” p167
Woodhead, Linda. 1993. 'Post‐Christian spiritualities', Religion, 23: 167-81.
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Moving away from theories of religion, here’s an uneven article on ‘post-sport’ movement practices. I think the author takes a personal experience and extrapolates it far beyond usefulness here, in order to suggest a tenuous connection between the ‘inner wilderness’ of yoga and the ‘outer wilderness’ of fell-running. You can be annoyed and intrigued in equal measure, or even play academic buzzword bingo as you read?
“Post-sport athletics are at once moral, reflexive, community-oriented, green, spiritual, anarchic and potentially Eros-filled physical cultural practices.”1250
Atkinson, Michael. 2010. 'Entering scapeland: yoga, fell and post-sport physical cultures', Sport in Society, 13: 1249-67.
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Post-modernism: the original concept
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Perhaps the most influential, and least-understood concept emerging from the Humanities in the contemporary era is that of post-modernism. In a way, all more recent ‘post-…’ terms owe a debt to this idea. It’s a huge and complex body of work, which in recent times has become associated with all sorts of largely unrelated political debates. And most of the time, it is employed really badly, which I’ll come back to. Let’s start with some accurate definitions. This is heavy theory, I’m afraid, so here’s three attempts to explain it, from the simplest, to the most complex. All of these are free to read online.
“Postmodernism, also spelled post-modernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.”
Palmer, Daniel. 2014. 'Explainer: what is postmodernism? ', Accessed 22/04/2018. https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-postmodernism-20791
“Theorists associated with postmodernism often used the term to mark a new cultural epoch in the West. For philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition was defined as “incredulity towards metanarratives”; that is, a loss of faith in science and other emancipatory projects within modernity, such as Marxism.”
Duignan, Brian. 2018. 'Postmodernism', Accessed 22/04/2018. https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
“That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”
Aylesworth, Gary. 2015. "Postmodernism." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://www.britannica.com
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Post-modernism: the critique
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Despite what you might have heard (I’m looking at you, Jordan Peterson), post-modernism as a term has been heavily debated and criticised in the Humanities for at least thirty years. We were encouraged to pull it to pieces when I was an undergraduate studying literary theory, more years ago than I care to remember. Among the most useful criticisms are those that question whether ‘we’ have ever really been as modern as post-modernism claims. Implicit in that question is who we mean when we say ‘we’. There are two books I’m linking to here whose writers do a great service in expanding our ideas of what a contemporary human being is. Full disclosure: the second is a supervisor of mine.
“With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.”
(from a review at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674948396)
Latour, Bruno, and Catherine Porter. 1993. We have never been modern (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)
“Normal people continue to respond to gut-and heart-feelings and to the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Without recourse to rational enquiry they tend to have a sense of place, occasions, boundaries, gravity and so on. The evidence of such senses, and of scientific enquiries that resist solipsism, may (re)turn modern societies more fully to the sense of what it would mean to act respectfully in a relational, participative world” p188
Harvey, Graham. 2006. Animism : respecting the living world (New York: Columbia University Press)
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Finally, a worrying sign of our times, and a reminder that, like journalists, when researchers describe a phenomenon, that doesn’t mean they approve of it.
“’It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse. Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.’ [Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl]”
Flood, Alison. 2016. ''Post-truth' named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries', Accessed 22/04/2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries
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