Yoga Body : The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
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Review
What Mark Singleton does prove, with massive, irrefutable, fascinating and often hilarious evidence, is that yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing inter-disciplinary construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim for it. (Wendy Doniger, Times Literary Supplement )
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Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world-practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim? In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (asana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented asana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising-and surely controversial-thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today. Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I highly recommend this readable and detailed account of the origins of postures in modern yoga. Mark Singleton has done a work of significant research that traces the links between 19th century bodybuilding and gymnastics to yoga as practiced today in the west. It's well argued and backed up by pages of footnotes and references - and at the same time accessible and understandable.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It takes a special and humble intelligence to wear one's learning lightly. Mark Singleton's book wins in being both academically rigourous but an accessable work, presenting challenges on tradition, mysticism and cultural translation. It is much more than a book about Yoga in the narrow or one for the narrowly Yoga focused. By turns anthropological study, detective story and at times humourous in puncturing obsessions with perfectionist fitness (the 'primary series' having its origins in a homework sheet!?) it stands also as just a good read. Rather like recipes I like to go back to where things started and a cursory investigation will tell you spaghetti is southern Italian pasta, and Bologna is in the north - spaghetti bolognaise is a geographical non starter. What is appealing is the author does not impose a conclusion as to the rightness or wrongness of how you, I or others interpret the receipe for Yoga. What you may be left with is that Yoga (as commonly available) has as much to do with ancient Indian spirituality and practice as my mum's spaghetti bolognaise has with Italian traditional food - I still love it though - and loving it with the discipline of knowledge that cultures bend, invent and coalesce traditions is a welcome headclearing freedom!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I ordered this book after picking up debates on it on various blogs talking about ashtanga yoga - although the author addresses modern yoga as practiced in the west in general, it is perhaps ashtanga whose myths are most challenged by the book.
I am an ashtanga student myself, practicing almost daily - and it's easy for me to see how the gymnastic origins of what we do, as postulated by Singleton, is completely credible. Having seen yoga practiced by saddhus in India (their practice is also covered in the book - then, as now, they were seen as outside of mainstream Hinduism and viewed with disdain or suspicion) it is clearly different (and, I would suggest, in some cases involves a whole other level of commitment). For some though, the idea that they are practicing something ancient, found in ancient texts and passed down from a guru in a cave in Tibet to Krishnamacharya, and then to Jois, is important and makes what they do more than just exercise. What actually makes it more than just exercise as usually understood these days is probably the breathing more than anything else - timing the movement with breathing. That too though, is, according to the book, borrowed from western exercise systems of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. I don't care much personally, as I find all the cod-sanskrit and po-faced spiritualism of some in the ashtanga scene more than a bit tedious (and, to be fair, from what I've seen of Jois himself, he never took it so seriously). A change in approach may be required though from those who currently insist, with a straight face, that bending over and touching the floor is veda-inspired and a step on the road to enlightenment.
Great book anyway - well-researched (including interviews with a number of people who were students of Krishnamacharya), balanced (although some will see an agenda, he doesn't make assertions he can't back up with empirical evidence, and is generous in giving some of the stories told about the origins of modern yoga, such as the 'yoga korunta' being eaten by ants, more of the benefit of the doubt than they probably deserve), and, for an academic text, easy to read. Lots of very interesting photos comparing yoga poses and the systems which the thesis says they are borrowed from.
I am an ashtanga student myself, practicing almost daily - and it's easy for me to see how the gymnastic origins of what we do, as postulated by Singleton, is completely credible. Having seen yoga practiced by saddhus in India (their practice is also covered in the book - then, as now, they were seen as outside of mainstream Hinduism and viewed with disdain or suspicion) it is clearly different (and, I would suggest, in some cases involves a whole other level of commitment). For some though, the idea that they are practicing something ancient, found in ancient texts and passed down from a guru in a cave in Tibet to Krishnamacharya, and then to Jois, is important and makes what they do more than just exercise. What actually makes it more than just exercise as usually understood these days is probably the breathing more than anything else - timing the movement with breathing. That too though, is, according to the book, borrowed from western exercise systems of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. I don't care much personally, as I find all the cod-sanskrit and po-faced spiritualism of some in the ashtanga scene more than a bit tedious (and, to be fair, from what I've seen of Jois himself, he never took it so seriously). A change in approach may be required though from those who currently insist, with a straight face, that bending over and touching the floor is veda-inspired and a step on the road to enlightenment.
Great book anyway - well-researched (including interviews with a number of people who were students of Krishnamacharya), balanced (although some will see an agenda, he doesn't make assertions he can't back up with empirical evidence, and is generous in giving some of the stories told about the origins of modern yoga, such as the 'yoga korunta' being eaten by ants, more of the benefit of the doubt than they probably deserve), and, for an academic text, easy to read. Lots of very interesting photos comparing yoga poses and the systems which the thesis says they are borrowed from.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Yoga Body: The origins of modern posture practice
A brilliant book setting out the that sets out to demolish the assertion that the roots of modern yoga, specifically asma/postures lie in ancient India. Read more
Published 3 months ago by John of Highgate
Academic and informative. Challenging for ashtanga people.
As others have indicated, this is an academic treatise. It is clearly well researched and laid out. The second half is more interesting than the first half. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Rick Sareen
brilliant, but sometimes hard to keep a clear view
Like others have stated before me, this book is extremely well researched indeed. And that's a great thing. Read more
Published 9 months ago by McAnna
for me, not very interesting
I am very interested in yoga and the history of yoga, so when I bought this book I was very excited. Unfortunately I did not like it. Read more
Published 11 months ago by A. E. Grissen
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