April 18, 2016
All Day
Mershon Center, 1501 Neil Avenue | Room 120 Columbus, Ohio 43205
Abstract
Contemporary Western postural yoga projects an authenticity and unbroken ancient heritage onto the yogic tradition, while mourning the commodification, secularization and denuding of that tradition by the West. Such lamentation belies the fact that modern postural yoga is a creature of fabrication and reinvention. It also ignores the fact that contemporary forms of yogic practice are not always a distortion of the so-called “original” principles of the yogic tradition.
They may occasionally be compatible with key norms of the yogic tradition, in all its plurality. Anxieties about yogic “authenticity” are implicated with the same essentialisms on which modern yoga’s trajectory in the West has been built, for there has never been a “pure” or “authentic” form of yoga.
This event is co-sponsored by Asian-American Studies Program and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Bio
Farah Godrej is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization, comparative political theory, and environmental political thought. Her research appears in journals such as Political Theory, The Review of Politics, and Polity, and she is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her new work explores the intersection between politics and materiality, focusing on the role of the body in ancient and contemporary Indian traditions of thought. She was the recipient of the 2013-14 UC President’s Research Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities.
