The Laurier community is invited to attend public talks by two key innovators in cultural analysis:

1

• The Laurier community is invited to attend
  public talks by two key innovators in cultural
  analysis
• Renato Rosaldo
• "Stories, truth and fiction Reflections on
  ethnographic analysis"
• Tuesday 31 October 530 pm Paul Martin Centre
• Mary Louise Pratt
• "Language and contemporary geopolitics"
• Wednesday 1 November 500 pm Paul Martin Centre

2

• You will have the opportunity to improve your
  participation grade in this course by writing a
  one-page, double-spaced synthesis of the main
  ideas discussed in EITHER one of the two talks.

3
Based on what you have read so far, what can you
say about the movie we saw last class?
4

• Modern yoga is not a pristine ancient practice,
  but rather a transnational cultural product.

5
Modernity

• A critical mode of engagement with the world a
  project that assumes that unlimited progress is
  possible and desirable.

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Alternative Modernities

• Fractured and perpetual projects that reflect a
  range of different aspirations.

7
Health and Freedom

• Symbolic cart through which yoga was brought to
  audiences in the United States and Europe.
• Yogas appeal lay in a universal spiritual
  framework that was non-exclusive and scientific
  (testable through practice).

8
Yoga

• Succeeded because it provided a great method for
  achieving the goal of self-development.
• Fits within the good life living a modern,
  engaged life while being able to alleviate the
  problems this kind of life creates.

9
Focus

• Ideological community deriving from the teachings
  of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh.

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Multi-Sited Research

• For Strauss means
• not only going to several different places, but
• looking at non-geographically bounded sites of
  interactive research.

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• Different places are tied together by a shared
  frame of reference.

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Shared Frame of Reference (or matrix)

• Defined by individual actors, institutions,
  paradigms, and products, with their own
  characteristics, histories and power relative to
  each other.

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Vivekananda (1863-1902)
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• Founded the Ramakrishna Mission and the Vedanta
  Societies in India and the West.

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Vivekananda

• Crystallized and popularized many different
  philosophical paths into four key categories and
  offered these to a public hungry for practical
  instruction in spiritual progress.

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Four Key Categories of Yoga

• Raja Yoga (techniques of moral, physical, and
  mental discipline as defined in Patanjalis eight
  limbs)
• Bhakti Yoga (the path of love and devotion)
• Jnana (the path of knowledge and intellectual
  learning)
• Karma Yoga (the path of work and selfless service
  to others)

17

• Reconciled various Hindu philosophic traditions
  with modern science, creating a universal,
  rational and practical religion based on
  self-improvement and service to others.

18
Vivekananda

• To demonstrate the rationality of spiritual
  belief, he encouraged his followers to judge his
  recommendations for spiritual enlightenment for
  themselves through practice and experiential
  knowledge.

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Knowledge has no value without personal
experience
20
Yoga

• A way to navigate the dangers of modernity
  without falling pray to materialism.

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Jivanmukhti

• Living liberation here and now, in the context
  of modern life.

22
Swami Sivananda (1887-1963)
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Sivananda

• Arrived in Rishikesh in 1924, where he renounced
  worldly life and became a monk.
• Settled in to a life of meditation and service on
  the banks of the Ganga river.

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Sivananda

• His reputation began to grow.
• Aspiring meditators began to head north to
  Rishikesh beginning in the mid-1920s.
• He published his first book of yoga teachings in
  1929.

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Divine Life Society

• Sivanandas official ashram, established in 1936
  with the help of a large community of
  international disciples as well as locals.

26

• Through the flow of people and ideas through
  printed articles and books, Sivanandas
  organization enabled the development of an
  imagined community of yoga practitioners.

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• Sivananda promoted the conflation of Western
  ideas of individual freedom with Hindu notions of
  spiritual liberation.

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Sivananda

• Focused on developing the essential traits of
  middle-class conformity the ability to adjust,
  adapt and accommodate.
• Preached across India the need for tolerance,
  love, understanding and harmony. These ideas
  helped perfect the colonial subject as well as
  the national citizen.

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Sivanandas approach to solving the worlds
problems

• Grounded in personal reform (physical and
  spiritual), and the notion that if each
  individual made him or herself into a better
  person, the world would be a better place.
• More personal than political focused on
  personal health and freedom.

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The realization of the oneness of the Self with
all other selves is key to both individual bliss
and world peace.
31
Sivananda

• Helped erode the distinction between religious
  pilgrimage and secular tourism.
• Created what Strauss calls oasis regimes.

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Oasis Regimes

• Spaces where practitioners can engage in an
  ascetic lifestyle for a short while in order to
  improve their stressful lives and the world
  around them.
• These oases, first developed in India, soon took
  over the 5 continents, in what Strauss calls an
  exercise in empire-building.

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Sivananda

• First to promote the export guru as an
  authentic Indian product.
• Since the late 1950s young swamis went on
  missions to other parts of India and the world.

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Imagined Community of Yoga Practitioners

• A global community of people who, though rarely
  acquainted to each other face-to-face, feel
  connected through interest in and practice of
  yoga.