Deethicalization and Folklorization

In her remarkable ethnography of a women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2012) describes the various practices that participants in this movement use in their attempts to cultivate a truly pious self and to live their everyday lives in accordance with God’s will. These include prayer, veiling and forms of avoidance behaviour indicative of feminine modesty. According to Mahmood, the women she studied see themselves as combatting increasing secularization and a resulting “folklorization of worship” within the larger Egyptian Islamic community. On their view, many Muslims have come to treat acts of worship as mere signs or customs that index (i.e., signify) membership in the community of Islam. In contrast, mosque movement participants aim to bring their religion to bear on the organization of daily life and ordinary conduct. One participant remarks (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2012, 49):

Fatma, Mahmood’s informant here, goes on to explain that many people fail to appreciate the significance of Ramadan and simply abstain from food during the day, but eat a lot at night and go out to the market. According to Fatma, an understanding of the “real meaning and spirit of Ramadan” (Reference Mahmood2012, 49) requires that a Muslim conduct herself in a particular way and engage in behaviors that convey “the fuller meaning of the fast, such as abstaining from anger and lying, avoiding looking at things that stir one’s appetite (sexual or culinary), and being extra diligent in one’s prayers” (Reference Mahmood2012, 49). Key to Fatma’s view is the idea that fasting during Ramadan is not merely or primarily a custom, performance or sign but rather a disciplinary technique, a practice of self by which one cultivates piety. Commenting on her discussion with Fatma, Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2012, 50) writes:

Fasting during Ramadan can thus be understood in at least two ways. On the one hand, it can be understood as a custom or tradition and thus any act of fasting can be seen as sign or performance in accordance with that tradition. On the other hand, it can be understood as a practice by which one performs operations on the self, establishes a relation with oneself. On this latter understanding, the particular occasion of fasting is not self-sufficient but rather involves a range of associated behaviors. Together, these various strands of ethical conduct serve to effect a transformation of the self, to constitute the pious subject, to bring about a subject who behaves in pious ways.

Parallel considerations emerge in discussions of veiling. Thus, Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2012, 50–51) reports Hajja Nur as saying:

Again, rather than treat donning the veil as a self-sufficient sign, mosque movement participants understand it as one of a set of interrelated practices that together allow for the cultivation of virtuous modesty. The veil on this view, “entails other responsibilities” and has real consequences for the conduct of everyday life. In short, donning the veil is a technique of the self that derives its significance and efficacy from the larger set of practices of which is a part.Footnote ²

On Mahmood’s account then mosque participants reject what they see as a pervasive folklorization of Islam in which disciplinary techniques of the self are recast as signs of group membership or as customs. Under the influence of such a folklorization, the practices (of, e.g., veiling, prayer) are seen to have lost their capacity to produce pious subjects. In the case of deethicalization that I discuss below, yoga practitioners express concern that the techniques of asana are in danger of losing their specifically ethical significance while remaining effective as tools for cultivating good health and for body sculpting. Despite this difference, however, both folklorization and deethicalization point to the fact that any understanding of technique is dependent upon the encompassing set of ideas within which it is seen to operate, what Keane (Reference Keane2018) describes as “semiotic ideology.” Moreover, in both cases the reductive process is seen to involve isolating particular practices, recasting them as somehow self-sufficient and in this way decontextualizing them.

A Yoga School in Southern India

Located in the southern Indian city of Mysore, the school (or shala) where I conducted 12 months of research intermittently between 2013 and 2018, is dedicated to the teaching of Ashtanga yoga.Footnote ³ It was founded by Sri K Pattabhi Jois in 1948 and he taught there continuously until his death in 2009 at the age of 93. Today the shala, which was relocated in 2002 to a much larger space in a relatively affluent Mysore suburb, can accommodate mats for about 60 to 70 students at a time. During the busiest season, there are approximately 300 students studying at the school. The current director is Pattabhi Jois’s grandson, Sharath Jois.Footnote ⁴

When students register at the school, they are given “timings” for regular classes (held Tuesday to Friday), as well as for led classes (held Saturday and Monday). Sunday is a rest day. Regular class start times begin at 4.30 am “shala time” (which is 10 minutes ahead) but students are expected to arrive 20 to 30 minutes early so about 70 students begin their āsana practice at 4 am. For most students, the āsana practice lasts between one and two hours. Instruction is quite minimal and then one-on-one. Often, and ideally, a student will receive help only with a few specific āsanas that require it (e.g., the so called “catching” or chakra bandhāsana which involves the student bending backwards and grabbing their own heels, knees or thighs with the assistance of the teacher). The teacher sits on an elevated platform watching the room or moves between the mats to reach a student in need of assistance.

Students are permitted to study at the school for no less than one month and no more than three (in the past, before the introduction of this rule, some students stayed for as long as a year or more). During this time, they are required not to study with any other yoga teacher in Mysore – and there are many. The school is not an ashram and the students live independently during the time that they are studying. As such, much of the time in Mysore is free time. Indeed, those who start their practice in the earliest shift are more or less free by 6 am unless they are tasked with the job of assisting the guru in the shala. As they are not permitted to attend āsana classes with other teachers, students spend their days resting, socializing, keeping house and so on. There are occasional day trips to sites in and around the city (e.g. Chamundi Hill). Many students take classes in Sanskrit and/or some aspects of Indian philosophy (e.g., close readings of the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the works of Shankaracharya are all popular). Some students also study ayurvedic medicine, traditional drawing, anatomy and so on.

During the months it is open, approximately 300 hundred students are registered at the school. While detailed and comprehensive demographic information is not available, some sense of where these students come from can be had through a consideration of the list of authorized teachers. Teachers are listed according to the country in which they teach so this is not a totally reliable indication of national origins or ethnic identification. The list (as of the time of the research for this essay) includes two teachers in China, 13 in Hong Kong, 13 in South Korea, 14 in Taiwan, 12 in Thailand and 26 in Japan. Australia and New Zealand together have 40 teachers listed. Central and South America have a total of 26. There are just over 220 teachers listed for both Europe as a whole and roughly the same number for North America. Most students have made multiple trips to study at the school and many have made more than 10 such trips, several more than 20. The students, especially those who have studied for many years, describe these visits as an annual pilgrimage and conceptualize the school and its environs as a sacred place, deserving of respect and acts of devotion. Almost all of the students bow to the guru in an act of respectful obedience when they are leaving the shala. In sum, the students treat yoga as a practice of devotion to their guru and ethical self-reform, and many of those who speak English explicitly describe it in just this way.

Techniques of Āsana

Within this tradition, āsana is understood to serve a dual function. On the one hand, it is a tool for cultivating inner qualities (see Mauss Reference Mauss1973 [1931] for an early comparative approach to such body techniques).Footnote ⁵ On the other hand, it is a means by which to prepare for the more difficult and esoteric forms of yogic practice (e.g., so called “internal practices” of pratyāhāra ‘sense withdrawl’, dhāraṇā ‘concentration’, etc.). This is often talked about in terms of correction. Thus, Sharath Jois suggests: “one can teach, and be taught, āsana… but the research is work that you must do yourself. … The research begins with the āsana, this is the first step. We must correct the fundamentals within ourselves, in both body and mind, in order to build a strong foundation”Footnote ⁶ (emphasis added). Similarly, in a public talk that was later published, Pattabhi Jois (Reference Jois2003), citing Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1.2, suggests that: “There is nothing better than Yoga for attaining mind control” but goes on to note that this cannot be achieved at first “because the body is too weak”. As such, Jois explains, the novice must first cultivate the practice of āsana and prāṇāyāma. Only once this is established and the body is purified can the practitioner hope to “still the fluctuations of the mind.”

The practice itself consists of a set series of poses that are linked by prescribed patterns of movement. The entire system is organized such that each breath (actually, each inhale and each exhale) is “counted” and associated with a place to which the gaze is directed (drishti) as well as a specific configuration of the body.Footnote ⁷ This “vinyasa count” thus provides a template in relation to which every breath, every glance and every movement is accountable.Footnote ⁸ A “perfect” practice of yoga would involve an exact number of inhales and exhales, a correspondingly exact number of discrete physical movements, and a precisely fixed gaze without distraction. This, at least, is the ideal which students attempt to approximate. The motivating idea is that, at every moment within the practice of āsana, body movement, breath and focus of attention are externally determined such that they are not an expression of the individual practitioner but rather of an external agency however that is understood.

Along these lines, Sharath Jois once suggested that yoga is “getting rid of the I.” This echoes a statement from the founder of the method, Pattabhi Jois, who wrote (Reference Jois1999 [1962], 19–20):

In other words, the āsana practice (which includes the patterned breathing and gazing described above) is understood to provide a strict template that regiments each individual body such that individual agency is subordinated to a pre-established pattern (one that is conceptualized as timeless and largely anonymous). By, in this way, dissolving the self and stripping away all aspects of personal identity, the practice of āsana provides a technique for “getting rid of the I”.

Further evidence for this understanding comes from the testimony of one of the first American students of Pattabhi Jois (Brad Ramsay) who described practicing prāṇāyāma with the master as “a pretty wild experience, because when he holds his breath, a lot of times he just goes out, you know, he’s not there anymore, he forgets to count” (Donahaye and Stern Reference Donahaye2010, 46, emphasis added). This same practitioner describes his own experience of practicing āsana in a somewhat more modest way saying, “I got lost in it. I would lose myself in it” (Donahaye and Stern Reference Donahaye2010, 46, emphasis added). The idea is then that in the course of the practice of āsana one experiences a form of ego-dissolution or self-effacement. At the same time, the failure of yoga is often explained in terms of the continuing influence of ego. The techniques of Ashtanga yoga can in this way be seen as a bounded, or, better circumscribed (see below), form of renunciation similar to other kinds of ascetic practice in India – the method involves, as Eliade (Reference Eliade1963, 128) put it, “dying to this world” (i.e., renouncing all ties to the world), but only within a narrowly defined, temporally circumscribed context (see also Dumont Reference Dumont1980 [1960]).Footnote ⁹

Yoga Beyond Technique

The techniques of yoga āsana are thus specified at a very fine level of detail. Body configuration, movement, breath pattern, gaze direction – according both to authorities and students, all must be correctly executed if the techniques are to have their intended effects.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, the constitutive physical movements of āsana—including gaze direction and breath pattern—are strictly regulated and there is a broadly shared standard of correct procedure (codified in books etc.) against which any given application of the method can be evaluated. However, these techniques of the body, breath and focused attention are not considered to be self-sufficient. Rather, according to the authorities, they must be accompanied by the appropriate mental states in order to be effective. Specifically, without devotion, the practice of āsana devolves into mere “circus” or “gymnastics.”

In one of the weekly conferences held at the school Sharath Jois suggested that the yamas and niyamas (a set of ten observances including ahimsa ‘non-harming’, satya ‘truthfulness’, and saucha ‘cleanliness’ etc.) purify the mind and so prepare the practitioner for āsana by allowing the requisite mental state to be established.

And in another of the weekly conferences, Sharath Jois suggested that without “devotion” āsana “doesn’t become spirituality, it becomes only circus, bending body, going in the beach doing handstand, building the body, it becomes like that.”Footnote ¹¹ These remarks already point to the possibility of deethicalization which I will discuss in the next section. Specifically, Jois here suggests that in the absence of the necessary mental state, the techniques of yoga lose their efficacy as spiritual, self-forming practices.

The physical and observable character of the techniques of Ashtanga yoga give the project as a whole its distinctive character. Students strive to master the techniques of āsana and their efforts are monitored, scrutinized and, when found lacking, corrected by the teacher. While the founders and current guru of the method note the criterial importance of a largely unobservable spiritual, devotional, and inner accompaniment to the practice of āsana, the emphasis is squarely on physical technique. This is seen, for instance, in methods of assessment. It is on the basis of their ability to execute these techniques that students are evaluated by the teacher. Indeed, there are several poses that both students and teachers see as particularly challenging and that must be mastered to a high degree of proficiency before the student is permitted to go further in the series. Students describe being “stopped” by the teacher at such a point or as being “stuck” at a particular asana, sometimes for several years. Such experiences encourage students, most of whom are, for various reasons, deeply motivated to “progress”, to focus their attention on the physical techniques. Some spend afternoons stretching to open up parts of the body seen as particularly tight. Others seek the advice of physical therapists, ayurvedic doctors or other students in their attempts to master the body techniques of āsana.

At the same time, both students and teachers emphasize the importance of “practical experience,” over and above “theory” and “book knowledge.” Many long-term students do, in fact study Sanskrit and various aspects of yoga philosophy quite seriously and of course Pattabhi Jois was himself a professor at the Sanskrit college in Mysore, renowned for his deep knowledge of, and ability to quote at length from, the shastras. Nevertheless, the emphasis on technique is clear and is reflected in a set of expressions which are emblematic of the school and its teachings: “practice, and all is coming,” “one percent theory, ninety-nine percent practice” and so on. Although this emphasis on practice does not necessarily preclude more mental and esoteric techniques of, for instance, pratyahara (translated as ‘sense withdrawal’) it is generally interpreted in this way. Thus, students speak of their “practice” to mean their practice of yoga āsana. They ask one another, “what do you practice?”, by this meaning what series of āsana do you practice, or, “where do you practice?”, by this meaning at what school in your home country do you practice āsana. Furthermore, students at the school in Mysore often compare Ashtanga yoga with other methods, suggesting that what distinguishes it from these other forms of yoga is the physically demanding character of the body techniques.

Expressions such as “practice, and all is coming” convey, then, the baseline assumptions and guiding principles of the method. Thus, while practitioners (and masters within the tradition) insist that the bodily practices must be executed with the appropriate mental state in order to be effective, they simultaneously deny that extensive theoretical knowledge is required.Footnote ¹² Somewhat ironically, textual authorities are sometimes cited in defense of this view. For instance, section I:68–69 of the Hatha Yoga Pradikipa states that, “Success comes to him who is engaged in the practice. How can one get success without practice; for by merely reading books on Yoga, one can never get success. Success cannot be attained by adopting a particular dress. It cannot be gained by telling tales. Practice alone is the means to success. This is true, there is no doubt.”

To summarize, among teachers and students at the school in Mysore, yogic techniques of the body including āsana and prāṇāyāma are conceptualized as tools for the cultivation of inner qualities and for more esoteric ends however those might be imagined. But despite this there is, at the same time, a widespread worry about the potential for a deethicalization of yoga and of yoga āsana in particular. In response to the development, in the 1990s, of Ashtanga derivatives termed “power” or “rocket” yoga by their advocates, Pattabhi Jois wrote the letter to the periodical Yoga Journal with which I began. In this he writes that he “was disappointed to find that so many novice students have taken Ashtanga yoga and have turned it into a circus.” He goes on to suggest:

As already noted, Jois concludes the letter by contrasting “the precious jewel of liberation” with the “mud of ignorant body building.” In fact, Jois had long been aware that the emphasis on technique made Ashtanga vulnerable to being recast (or misunderstood) as a form of exercise. In his discussion of Sūrya Namaskāra in Yoga Mala which was written between 1958 and 1961 and first published in Kannada in 1962, he suggests, “performing the sun salutations without following the rules mentioned above is little more than exercise, and not true Sūrya Namaskāra” (Reference Jois1999 [1962], 40 emphasis added).Footnote ¹³

And, as noted, this is also a common theme of the conferences held at the school in Mysore. On one such occasion, Sharath Jois suggested that practicing yoga brings mental clarity and eventually some measure of spiritual knowledge. But, he went on, this does not come easily. One must practice diligently in order to change oneself and this will involve putting effort towards all eight limbs of yoga (including the yamas and niyamas). And here Sharath Jois invoked the possibility of deethicalization suggesting that without such effort “yoga becomes only exercise, the same as going to the gym.”

Semiotics of Deethicalization

I want to suggest that the processes which have led to deethicalization have their origins in early twentieth century efforts to entextualize yoga in ways that would allow for increased circulation and dissemination. And these built upon still earlier moves to circumscribe yoga as a definite set of yoga “practices”. We can identity three key semiotic operations here: circumscription, performance of staged demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization.

The founders of the Ashtanga method, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois, rejected the idea that liberation through the techniques of yoga required total renunciation of the profane world of ordinary social relations and even suggested that yoga was particularly suitable for householders (see Eliade Reference Eliade1963; also Alter Reference Alter2004). More importantly, by emphasizing the primacy of āsana, these pioneers of the modern approach allowed for a conception of yoga in terms of a circumscribed “practice” that could be done by ordinary persons otherwise engaged in a range of occupations.Footnote ¹⁴

In both Krischnamacharya’s Yoga Makaranda and Jois’s Yoga Mala, after setting out the reasons for practicing yoga, the authors go on to discuss practical details such as where it should be practised and which āsana should be performed. A clear implication of this is that yoga āsana, combined with pranayama, comprises a circumscribed practice or set of techniques. For instance, Krishnamacharya (Reference Krishnamacharya2006[1938], 33–34) advises:

Similarly, Jois (Reference Jois1999 [1962], 25–26), writes:

Through their focus on āsana and associated techniques the founders of this tradition were thus able to identify a “practice” of yoga as a circumscribed, temporally bounded activity. While they insisted that yoga could not be reduced to the performance of āsana, and much less bodily technique, and while they included quite lengthy discussions of the other “limbs” of yoga in their various writings, the method they developed nevertheless had the effect of isolating āsana from the rest. The net result was to reconstruct yoga as a circumscribed practice of āsana (and associated practices of pranayama).

Such a circumscribed practice of yoga āsana was recontextualized in various ways. In his foreword to the English language translation of Yoga Mala, Eddie Stern (in Jois Reference Jois1999 [1962], xv) writes that Pattabhi Jois was fond of quoting a passage from the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna “proclaims that one comes to yoga in his life only by having practiced it in a previous life, and is pulled toward it against one’s will, as toward a magnet”. Stern (Jois Reference Jois1999 [1962], xv) then gives an account of how Jois came to study with Sri T Krishnamacharya:

Stern goes on to write that Jois “quickly learned all of the āsanas” and that Krishnamacharya was so pleased with his progress that he soon had Jois perform demonstrations himself. Some 45 years later, in 1972, Americans David Williams and Norman Allen were present at a demonstration given by Manju Jois (Patttabhi Jois’s son) at the Ananda Ashram in Pondicherry. It was this that led them to travel to Mysore to seek out Patttabhi Jois. In the 1990s Pattabhi Jois toured Europe, Australia and the US. These visits abroad often included demonstrations in which he would call out instructions and Sharath Jois would execute āsana for the audience. (Several such performances were filmed.)

These performed demonstrations adapted and repurposed the now circumscribed practice of yoga āsana, presenting this as a form of entertainment, advertisement or teaching. As Bauman and Briggs (Reference Bauman1990, 73) note, performance such as this puts the activity performed “on display - objectifies it, lifts it to a degree from its interactional setting and opens it to scrutiny by an audience.” Moreover, performance brings a heightened awareness to the activity and, as such, “licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performer’s accomplishment. By its very nature, then, performance potentiates decontextualization” (Reference Bauman1990, 73). Bauman and Briggs (Reference Bauman1990, 73–74) go on to describe some of the “the means available to participants in performance situations to render stretches of discourse discontinuous with their discursive surround, thus making them into coherent, effective, and memorable texts”, concluding that “performance as a frame intensifies entextualization.”

Here of course we are considering not the spoken word per se but a complex assemblage of language (as the teacher calls out the āsana to be performed), bodily movement and presentational technique. But, regardless, the effect of these demonstrations was to put the circumscribed practice of āsana on display and to make it available for new kinds of circulation – among persons, for instance, who were not themselves practitioners, or yet practitioners. Performed demonstration then not only served to frame yoga as entertainment and advertisement, it also contributed to the decontextualization of bodily techniques of āsana.

As already noted, both Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois attempted to describe the bodily techniques of āsana in writing. There was nothing unusual or novel about this. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a compilation of earlier hatha yoga texts complied by Svātmārāma in the 15^th century, describes fifteen āsanas, eight of which are not seated postures (see Mallinson and Singleton Reference Mallinson2017, 87). For instance: “While in cock pose, take the neck tightly in both hands and lie back like an upturned turtle. This is the upturned turtle pose” (Mallinson and Singleton Reference Mallinson2017, 108).

However, the writings of Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois went much further in this direction – their descriptions are considerably more detailed, sometimes extending for several pages. They also included, along with a technical description, a discussion of the health benefits of each āsana along with notes on situations in which the āsana is counter indicated. More importantly, though, both Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois included photographs of almost all of the āsana they discussed. The result was a much more effective guidebook, a nearly self-sufficient educational resource. This had profound consequences from the development of yoga in the twentieth century. As Singleton (Reference Singleton2010, 163–165) puts it:

In the specific case of Ashtanga yoga, photography allowed for an increasingly technical conception of yoga as a set of bodily techniques. We can track this development across some of the most influential written texts in this tradition. Thus, the photographic images that accompany the descriptions of Krishnamacharya and Pattabhi Jois have a clear artistic quality. For instance, several of the photographs in Jois’s book capture his demonstration of the āsana against a white background, with lighting effects used to produce a shadow companion figure (figure 1).

Figure 1.

Pattabhi Jois demonstrating second surya namaskara, 7^th vinyasa (Jois Reference Jois1999 [1962], 45)

The English edition of the book, published in 1999, includes, along with the older images of Pattabhi Jois, photos taken some forty years later of Sharath Jois demonstrating āsana (figure 2). The contrast is striking – in these later images there is no shadow, rather the light is dispersed to give a clear yet aesthetically unassuming image.

Figure 2.

Sharath Jois demonstrating marichyasana (a) & (b) (Jois Reference Jois1999 [1962], 78)

Here then the āsana is represented by a simple and aesthetically unadorned image, designed merely to supplement the written text by providing visual guidance. Each such photo is captioned with the name of the āsana (e.g., marichyāsana (a)).

Other works elaborated this technical approach in various ways. In a book authored by Lino Miele and published in 1996, the same photos of Sharath Jois demonstrating the āsana are used (see Figure 3). But in Miele’s book the image has been extracted from its background, literally decontextualizing the āsana-performing human figure from the photographic setting. Moreover, after an introductory passage describing the benefits of the āsana for health (e.g., “This āsana has a powerful effect on the liver (…) and spleen (…), both organs play a part in the digestive processes of the body.” (Miele Reference Miele1996: 44)) the vinyasa count is presented in a chart-like form indicating “inhale” or “exhale” along with notes which appear to represent instructions that might be given by an instructor, e.g. “Hands up”, “Head up”, etc.

Figure 3.

Images of Sharath Jois in marichyasana (a) & (b) extracted from background in Lino Miele’s Astanga Yoga, (Miele Reference Miele1996, 50–51)

This same book also includes a remarkable set of script-like drawings created by Jois’s student John Scott (see Figure 4). These are similar to comic illustrations and are presumably meant to give a sense of the continuous movement which is characteristic of this method. In these drawn representations, the spatial and temporal context of performance is reduced to a single, continuous line which simultaneously invokes the floor space upon which the āsana are performed and the passage of time along which the series unfolds (notice the arrowhead at the termination of each line).

Figure 4.

John Scott’s yoga “script” from Lino Miele’s Astanga Yoga (Miele Reference Miele1996, 50–51)

All of these developments presaged the use of video technology. In 1993, a video was made featuring six American students practicing the first and second series as Jois called out the vinyasa count instructions. This was, in other words, a filmic entextualization of just the kind of performed demonstration that Jois himself had performed in the 1930s as a student of Krishnamacharya. There followed many other such videos by David Swenson, John Scott, Lino Miele, and, eventually, Sharath Jois. In these forms of entextualization the focus on āsana as bodily technique reaches its apogee.

Such photographically enhanced entextualization was of course part and parcel of a larger process of print commodification and mediatization – one way in which yoga poses, instruction, and knowledge were transformed into a saleable commodity. My concern here though is with the, no doubt related, process of deethicalization. These couplings of descriptive instruction and photographic image encouraged a conception of yoga as a set of techniques independent of the mental and spiritual accompaniments that Jois otherwise insisted upon. And these forms of extextualization themselves built upon and elaborated earlier semiotic processes which I have described as circumscription and performed demonstration.