Bodies in yoga: tangled discourses in Canadian studios

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a one and a half-year ethnographic study conducted in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The research focused on participants’ experiences of their bodies in the context of yoga as a health practice—specifically how they conceptualised their musculoskeletal bodies in this practice through ideas of systems, fragments, and materiality. It argues that participants’ larger narratives about health and healthy bodies inform how yoga as a health practice is embedded in discourses of body work where yoga, health, and particular notions of bodily-ness become a project for the transformation of the self into a particular idea of what a body is or should be.

Keywords:

• Yoga
• health practices
• musculoskeletal bodies
• body work

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the editors of the special issue, Dr. Kaytaz and Dr. Shaw, and to the anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the participants in the research.

Ethical approval

This project received ethics approval from the University of Victoria Human Research Ethics Board, Protocol Number: 17-237.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes

1 Greater Victoria, as a cursory search shows, encompasses: the city of Victoria and twelve districts surrounding the city area, including Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Colwood, Langford, the Highlands, Metchosin, Central Saanich, North Saanich, Sidney, and Sooke (Google).

2 Over the course of the research, it became evident in participants’ reflections that they engaged with various health practices simultaneously—something that had not been considered on the onset of the research.

3 or social anthropology, in Europe.

4 Though muscles can be considered part of flesh, they are an intrinsic part of the musculoskeletal system, and thus are considered together as separate from the “fleshed”/whole body for the purposes of this paper.

5 This included: coffee shops, yoga studio rooms, researcher’s office, participants’ offices and homes. Interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed.

6 This view was echoed in other participants’ narratives—notably participants involved in the health sector.

7 Though, in her text, Martin speaks to the effects of gendered language on the attributes given to male and female bodies, her analysis of language and linguistic inclinations—particularly with regards to how people speak about their bodies—still stand (2007, 417, 422-425).

8 Here again, Mol’s ‘body multiple’ can be a helpful point of reference: ‘parts’ in this sense, can refer to the multiplicities that compose the participants’ bodies, but also refer to their literal body parts (2002, 151).

9 Effectively, exhibits like Bodyworlds seek to ‘educate’ people on how bodies ‘work’ by peeling back the layers and ‘revealing’ their interior (van Dijck 2007).

10 There is a popular cultural concept of targeting certain areas of the body (e.g. YouTube videos that target the glutes only and prescribe results within a set amount of time).

11 Here, in the context of the research, participants mainly spoke about the transformation in physical terms.