“It’s a Practice, Not a Performance”: Unraveling the Atomized Self and Becoming Nomadic Through Ashtanga Yoga By Andrea Reid A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada July 2017 Copyright © Andrea Reid, 2017 Abstract Modern forms of yoga practice are increasingly focused on the body, emphasizing the physical benefits of the practice while positioning the body as an effective tool for accessing and working with the mind. Holding patterns in the body are often interpreted in relation to psychological or emotional tendencies and certain postures are seen as manifestations of fears or anxieties encountered in daily life. In this way, the yoga mat can be interpreted as an intensely psychological space, one that mobilizes the body in the project of self-transformation and healing and lends itself to the creation of therapeutic communities and relationships. This work explores the links between the embodied nature of yoga, specifically ashtanga yoga, and the cultivation of more relational and nomadic forms of subjectivity. Through participant observation and individual interviews conducted with ashtanga teachers and practitioners at a specific yoga studio in Western Canada, I explore the contexts in which the practice of ashtanga yoga can unsettle bounded or atomized understandings of self. I focus explicitly on how, when practiced in an intersubjective environment that emphasizes healing over transcendence or enlightenment, the practice can provide an effective medium for identifying across and between difference, challenging conceptions of what a body is and does in ways that can open up the possibility for a more affirmative relation with alterity. By encouraging practitioners to understand the body as intimately connected to them yet exceeding their ability to fully know or control it, a sustained engagement with the ashtanga practice can introduce a quality of Otherness into practitioners’ understandings of self and can help relinquish some of the need for ownership and control characteristic of settler subjectivities. I examine the factors that render practice more accessible to certain segments of the population, namely the middle-class, and emphasize the need to continually investigate ways of keeping practice communities open and flexible.   i Acknowledgements This work is the product of many past and ongoing conversations and would not have been possible without the patience, support, and openness of the amazing people in my life. Thank you to the many practitioners who participated in this project through the interview process and through the many conversations had in coffee shops, in backyards, and on our mats. I am inspired by all of your kindness, generosity, and dedication. Thank you for sharing all of your insights into practice and life. To Dana Blonde, Brent Mulligan, and the amazing community at The Yoga Shala. Thank you for showing me what it means to build and be a part of a community and for giving me so many opportunities to show up. A huge thank you to my supervisor, Richard Day. Thank you for introducing me to so many new critical conversations and for giving me the space to do the work that I wanted to do. Your questions and feedback challenged me to think in different ways and your sense of humour made the whole grad school process seem far less scary and intimidating. I would also like to thank my committee member, Sarita Srivastava. Thank you for all of your feedback along the way and for helping me articulate my ideas in new ways. Thank you to my parents, Lori and Gord, and their partners, Barry and Beth, for all of the conversations had around kitchen tables and over the phone. Thank you for always supporting   ii me, for challenging my perceptions and ideas in loving and constructive ways, and for encouraging me to do what I love no matter where that has taken me. And, last but not least, to my sister, Melissa, and my friends, Tracey and Nolan. Thank you for a lifetime of conversations, unconditional love, and support.   iii Table of Contents ABSTRACT  .........................................................................................................................................  I   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  ................................................................................................................  II   CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION  .......................................................................................................  1   YOGA, NATIONALISM, AND SHARED NARRATIVES  ........................................................................................  2   ASHTANGA YOGA: PROGRESS AND POSSIBILITY  ..........................................................................................  5   THE MELANCHOLIC SUBJECT: QUESTIONS OF AMBIVALENCE AND DEPENDENCY  .......................................  7   BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND PHILOSOPHICAL NOMADISM  .......................................................................  8   POSITIONING AFFECT  ................................................................................................................................  9   CHAPTER OUTLINE  ..................................................................................................................................  10   A NOTE ON ENCOUNTERS, OR, BRINGING CRITICAL THEORY BACK TO GROUND  ......................................  13   CHAPTER 2: HEALTHY SUBJECTS, DANGEROUS OTHERS: THE AUTHENTIC SELF AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SETTLER SPACE  ..............................................................................  15   ASHTANGA NATION?: MODERN POSTURAL YOGA AND THE AUTHENTIC SELF  ...........................................  16   MODERN YOGA AND ITS CONSTITUTIVE OTHERS  ......................................................................................  19   VIVEKANANDA AND HINDU NATIONALISM  ................................................................................................  21   MYSORE, INDIA: PHYSICAL CULTURE AND MILITANT RESISTANCE  ............................................................  23   PUBLIC HEALTH AND SOMATIC NATIONALISM  ..........................................................................................  24   SOMATIC NATIONALISM IN THE WEST: NEOLIBERALISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE  ..................................  26   THE MELANCHOLIC YOGI?: HEALTH, ANXIETY, AND EVICTIONS IN SETTLER-COLONIAL SOCIETIES  ..........  33   THE MAKINGS OF A NATION OR SEEDS OF A COUNTERCULTURE?  ............................................................  39   AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN ASHTANGA YOGA  ...............................................................................  40   “SEEKING” PRACTICE  .............................................................................................................................  41   EASTERN TRENDS IN THE BEATS  ...............................................................................................................  44   KEEP ON MOVING: ON THE ROAD TO AUTHENTICITY  ...............................................................................  46   MOVEMENT AS CAPITAL  ..........................................................................................................................  49   CHAPTER 3: RETHINKING THE EMBODIED SELF: THE CONTINGENT BODY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF POLITICIZING PRACTICE  ......................  51   LIMITS, BOUNDARIES, AND SUSTAINABILITY  .............................................................................................  52   SOMATIC THOUGHT AND THE INTERSUBJECTIVE SELF  .............................................................................  55   ORGAN SPEECH AND THE ANALYTIC THIRD  .............................................................................................  56   THE BREATH AS A NOMADIC FORCE  ........................................................................................................  58   APPEARING DIFFERENTLY: PRACTICE AT THE LEVEL OF EMBODIED NORMS  ............................................  60   POLITICIZING PRACTICE  ..........................................................................................................................  63   THE CULTURAL SCREEN: PRODUCTIVE LOOKING AND THE ACTIVE GIFT OF LOVE  ..................................  65   THE YOGA SHALA  ....................................................................................................................................  68   YOGA THERAPY: THE SHALA AS A SAFE SPACE  .........................................................................................  72   THE CONTINGENT BODY: EXTENDING REPRESENTATIONAL PARAMETERS  ................................................  77   THE BODY AS OTHER  ...............................................................................................................................  83   REVALUING MELANCHOLIA  .....................................................................................................................  86   ACCOUNTABILITY TO PLACE  ....................................................................................................................  88   CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION  ..........................................................................................................  90   REFERENCES  .................................................................................................................................  94   APPENDIX 1  ....................................................................................................................................  98     iv RESEARCH ETHICS APPROVAL  .................................................................................................................  98       v Chapter 1: Introduction   This work will seek to revalue yoga, specifically ashtanga yoga, investigating the possibility of mobilizing the insights derived through practice in ways that are conducive to decolonial aims and agendas and thus become politically and ethically viable in these frameworks. My interest in the political potential of yoga proceeds from a belief that it is not enough to work solely on decolonizing the mind. For any process of sustainable and ongoing change, the body has to be mobilized in the project of cultivating a felt understanding of different ways of being, living, and relating. As the practice and popularity of yoga continues to grow so, too, do the communities and networks that emerge through practice. While yoga is often portrayed as being equally available and accessible to everyone it is undeniable that, particularly in the West, it is far more accessible to those with access to excess capital in the form of both time and money. In the context of the colonial nation-state of Canada, this often results in a majority of white, middle-class practitioners. Individuals who identify as yogis or as having a regular yoga practice often see themselves as invested in living life differently, in gaining new perspectives on their habits and actions, and as ethical agents or, at the very least, as invested in exploring questions of ethics. While this inclination towards self-awareness and ethical action is promising, the extent to which yoga is bound up with discourses of neoliberal rationality and responsibilization, serving to further processes of inequality, has been well documented (Kern, 2012; Koch, 2013; Markula, 2014; Schnabele, 2013). Given these tensions, in what contexts can yoga be mobilized in ways that could support decolonial efforts and contest dominant norms? Under what conditions does the practice become simply another way of reifying settler legitimacy? Is it possible to take up practice in ways that unsettle settler subjectivity, creating space for the emergence of more relational, nomadic subjectivities in the process? By attuning   1 practitioners to the agency of the body in a way that exceeds the control of the individual self, the practice of ashtanga yoga, when practiced in an intersubjective context, can unsettle the sovereignty of the autonomous self, opening the subject up to a more contingent and process- oriented sense of self all the while creating openings for more affirmative relations with alterity. Yoga, Nationalism, and Shared Narratives Modern forms of yoga practice are increasingly focused on the body, emphasizing the physical benefits of the practice while positioning the body as an effective tool for accessing and working with the mind. Holding patterns in the body are often interpreted in relation to psychological or emotional tendencies and certain postures are seen as manifestations of fears or anxieties encountered in daily life. In this way, the yoga mat can be interpreted as an intensely psychological space, one that mobilizes the body in the project of self-transformation and healing and lends itself to the creation of therapeutic communities and relationships. By rendering tangible psychological and emotional processes that are often abstract and hard to grasp, yoga can be valued as an effective practice for engaging with questions of subjectivity, providing the practitioner with a framework for evaluating the ways in which she both affects and is affected by that which surrounds, composes, and exceeds her. While I see a great deal of subversive potential in the psycho-social aspects of yoga practice, it is important to emphasize the extent to which modern forms of yoga are bound up with past and ongoing practices of nation-building (Singleton, 2010) and serve as an effective tool for mobilizing what Alter (1997) describes as “somatic nationalism”, a process whereby nations are imagined and constructed through discourses of public health in which anxieties are dealt with through ritualized self-care. Practice does not happen in a vacuum. When individual practice is decontextualized from   2 the historical, social, and political forces through which it takes shape, we risk obscuring the ways in which certain anxieties or fears get selected and prioritized as those that are made manifest and purified in and through the body. In this way, the discourses and shared narratives that emerge through practice are more than just collective experiences that further bind a group of people, they are also revealing of deep-seated anxieties and political motivations that, in this intensely neoliberal climate, often become labeled as individual pathology and as work that needs to be carried out upon the individual self. Shared narratives are also a way of world- defining and world-building and, as such, can be mobilized in subversive ways. Shared ways of framing and speaking about lived experiences can provide a way of defining one’s self within a community of others and can include both implicit and explicit critiques of dominant structures, institutions, and practices. When those narratives can be developed and engaged in ways that resist stagnation and rigidity, remaining open and flexible to the contingency of the forces through which those narratives emerge, they can form a foundation for the creation of links of affinity and solidarity beyond the community in question. If we can examine the shared narratives and discourses that surround yoga practice to investigate what anxieties are driving the increasing practice and popularity of yoga, then those anxieties can be mobilized in ways that challenge atomized understandings of self and help practitioners contextualize the insights that happen on the mat and in their bodies with broader structures of systemic inequality and oppression. Cultivating a felt or embodied understanding of how neoliberal and capitalist rationalities literally become us can provide the foundation for and help propel collective action. In exploring these connections, I will conceptualize settler subjectivity as profoundly melancholic, highlighting a need for certainty and boundedness that must be constantly reenacted through a perpetual process of physical and symbolic violence. Relying on a disavowal of   3 dependency and vulnerability, these patterns of violence allow the settler subject to cope with the glaring contradictions between the ongoing reality of colonial violence and the discourses of settler legitimacy and benevolence through which settler subjects are continually interpellated (Razack, 2015). The settler subject comes to know itself and persists as itself through violence and, in this way, violence becomes a way of being in the world, an effective or even the only coping mechanism that allows one to continue functioning as a “good” or “successful” settler subject. I am interested in what contexts the growing interest in yoga, a practice rooted in ahimsa or non-violence, is indicative of a willingness to recognize and disrupt these patterns of violence and to what extent it is serving as simply another ideological tool with which to quell cognitive dissonance. By emphasizing the distinctly affective dimensions of yoga practice, I will conceptualize practice as a method for engaging with the ambivalence inherent in subjectivity (Butler, 1997) in ways that actively contest the boundedness of settler subjectivity. Through the cultivation of a felt sense of permeability and contingency, the practice of yoga can allow the subject to open up to that which surrounds, composes, and exceeds it, coming to a different understanding of vulnerability and dependency that functions to extend the subject’s limits of awareness and consideration. In order to ground these insights and take them out of the purely abstract, I conducted interviews with yoga teachers and practitioners at a particular yoga studio in Western Canada with the aim of investigating the ways in which the practice shapes how practitioners relate to themselves and to one another, exploring the alternative forms of community that can be generated through practice. The interviews aim to narrate how processes of becoming play out at the level of everyday life, examining the therapeutic communities that emerge through practice and how these communities provide the support and space necessary for the cultivation of new representational parameters that foster more affirmative and ethical   4