TRADITIONS OF YOGA 2022: A WEBINAR SERIES

SITEMAP: (Traditions of Yoga – 2022)     ||    (Studio Yoga Series – 2022)     ||       (Traditions of Yoga – 2021)
ZOOM REGISTRATION LINK:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rdeyurzgoHNHLAipHyt33443wqBN6AyjJ

Today, postural yoga is practiced around the world, and has fostered a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. But where did it come from? And how did it get here? That is, what were the historical contexts in which postural yoga first developed in South Asia? And how did certain colonial and postcolonial cultural “flows” lead to the globalized traditions found in today’s yoga studios? And what is it doing here, now that it’s here?

These are the questions that we investigate in ASIA 210: Traditions of Yoga, a course taught in the Dept. of Asian Studies at UBC. Given that these concerns are shared by yoga practitioners, South Asian communities in the diaspora, and other general publics, we are pleased to invite you to join us for a public WEBINAR SERIES on Wednesday afternoons in conjunction with the course, as we welcome noted scholars to discuss how and why they study yoga through historical, cultural, and critical lenses.

All events are free ZOOM webinars and open to the public.

After each session, there will be a “virtual chai” reception reserved for students of the course.

This event is presented by the Sanskrit Program at the Department of Asian Studies, UBC, in collaboration with the Yoga Studies Network, Univ. of Victoria. 

TO REGISTER for the ZOOM Webinars, please visit:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rdeyurzgoHNHLAipHyt33443wqBN6AyjJ

FULL SCHEDULE: 

MARCH 23 / 4-5.30PM PDT

Daniela Bevilacqua (SOAS, London)

How Sadhus Understand Hatha Yoga

CLICK HERE for more info

MARCH 30 / 4-5.30PM PDT

Paul Bramadat (Univ. of Victoria)
Yoga and the Public Square

CLICK HERE for more info

APRIL 6 / 4-5.30PM PDT

Rumya S. Putcha (Univ. of Georgia) | Shreena Gandhi (Michigan State Univ.)
Yoga and Settler Colonialism

CLICK HERE for more info

Detailed Information:

Wednesday, March 23, 4-5.30PM PDT

Daniela Bevilacqua
Hatha Yoga and Yoga Sadhana, As Understood by Sadhus in India:
Evaluating textual sources and modern yoga through ethnographic data

In this talk I demonstrate how ethnographic data can help us understand but also question the role and the function of textual sources, and can also be helpful for exploring and positioning modern yoga. Considering textual, visual and oral sources we are going to reconstruct the meaning, and by consequence the practice, of haṭha yoga and yoga according to contemporary Hindu ascetics in India, focusing our attention on sādhus belonging to traditional orders associated with these embodied practices (i.e., Nāth Yogīs, Saṃnyāsīs, Rāmānandīs and Udāsīs). The aim of the talk is to present emic understandings of concepts and labels that can help us widen our comprehension of an issue as complex as yoga.

Bio:

Daniela Bevilacqua (PhD, Univ. of Rome, Sapienza) is a South Asianist specializing in Hindu asceticism, as investigated through ethnographic and historical perspectives. She worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for the ERC- funded Haṭha Yoga Project (2015– 2020) at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (SOAS. She is currently a Research Fellow at SOAS.

ZOOM REGISTRATION LINK:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rdeyurzgoHNHLAipHyt33443wqBN6AyjJ

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Wednesday, March 30, 4-5.30PDT

Paul Bramadat
Yoga and the Public Square

In 2015 a plan to celebrate the inaugural International Day of Yoga in Vancouver generated a powerful – and for the organizers, clearly unanticipated – backlash. What might have been for some a public expression of their interest in a trendy wellness activity, and for others a meaningful demonstration of an important spiritual practice, was cancelled just a week after it was announced. Looking carefully at what was a rather spectacular public failure helps us to understand how controversies that, on the surface, are about yoga, are also about a great many other social, political, and historical forces. Postural yoga seems likely to be at the centre of future debates – around the body and wellness, not to mention the legacies of colonialism – so it should be worthwhile to use this case study to think about “what we talk about when we talk about” yoga in our society.
Bio:

Paul Bramadat is Professor and Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. He is interested in the ways we imagine religion and spirituality when we talk about wellness, health, diversity, security and civil society. His two most recent research projects involve spirituality in the Pacific Northwest bio-region, and the curious ways postural yoga is reimagined in a globalized world.

ZOOM REGISTRATION LINK:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rdeyurzgoHNHLAipHyt33443wqBN6AyjJ

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Wednesday, April 6, 4-5.30PM PDT

Shreena Gandhi & Rumya S. Putcha
Yoga and Settler Colonialism

Shreena Gandhi and Rumya Putcha will talk about their research experiences and expertise concerning yoga in the United States and then enter into dialogue with each other on race, exclusion, commodification, and appropriation in contemporary yoga spaces in the USA.

Bios:

Shreena Gandhi, PhD, is a part of the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, where is primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas. She is working on a manuscript, A Cultural History of Yoga in the United States, which looks at the impacts of white supremacy, race, gender and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces. Dr. Gandhi regularly offers  talks and workshops on cultural appropriation for yoga studios, and finds that the conversation that these events generate is a step towards better understanding white supremacy and how we can all be anti-racist and anti-oppression in our everyday lives. She is also a part of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective and together with her peers they recently published, “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in Formation,” which scrutinizes the dynamics of white supremacy and casteism in the study of Hinduism. Their newest piece, “Auntylectuals: A Nonce Taxonomy of Aunty-Power,” will be published in Text and Performance later in 2022.

Rumya S. Putcha is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women’s Studies as well as in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. Her research interests center on post-Enlightenment, colonial and anticolonial thought, particularly around constructs of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law. Professor Putcha received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2011 and her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke Univ. Press, 2022), develops a critical race and feminist approach to South Asian performance cultures. Her second book project, “Namaste Nation: Wellness Cultures and Orientalism in the 21st Century“ extends her work on transnational South Asian performance cultures to critical analyses of capitalist fitness industries within legal and affective discourses of body, race, wellness, and citizenship.

ZOOM REGISTRATION LINK:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rdeyurzgoHNHLAipHyt33443wqBN6AyjJ

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