After following the blogs of Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey for quite some time, I was pleased to learn that they were collaborating as editors on an anthology of essays dealing with contemporary yoga in N. America. Both think body electric and it’s all yoga baby grapple with the tensions we find in N. American yoga and I was looking forward to reading 21st Century Yoga, which I hoped would give writers the room to delve deeper into the nuances and complexities that shorter blog posts cannot accomodate.
No matter what your stance is regarding contemporary yogic debates, all of the essays will likely help spark new ideas in your mind about yoga, especially if you are already thinking about issues that have crop up frequently on the blogs of Horton and Harvey. The essays are also written in a very accessible manner; I read the whole book in one sitting!
The strongest essays are based primarly on personal experiences and offer conclusions drawn from them. I would highly recommend reading Chelsea Roff’s personal story about her struggle with anorexia. It is a moving, brave and thoughtful piece that demonstrates both the power and the limits of yoga practice in regard to a very modern affliction. I’d also recommend Matthew Remski’s observations regarding the lack of community in contemporary mainsteam yoga. Drawing on his experiences in community organization, he offers an interesting list of calls to action for studio owners/community leaders. Whether you agree with his suggestions or not, it’s heartening to see practitioners and studio owners being critical of on the ground operations and sharing their thoughts in print.
Other essays provide an interesting contextual background to modern yoga, such as Be Scofield’s discussion of the role of spirituality in warfare (yes, even religions like Buddhism and Hinduism that we consider “peaceful” can advocate for violence and extreme fundementalism), or Nathan G. Thompson’s comparison of Zen and Yoga communities which ties differences between these communities to the mind-body divide.
The essays are weaker when they attempt to present more sweeping theses about the nature of yoga, or the nature of reality. The constraints of a fairly short essay format/style make this challenging to pull off well. Not all essays do this, or if they do, only in part. I found Julian Walker’s piece about Western discourse about the body particularly problematic. It adopts a more objective voice as it weaves together cherry picked examples from a very wide range of cultures and time periods to reach generalized conclusions. For example, Walker claims that “there is nothing bigoted or prejudicial in pointing out that in cultures that have embraced post-Enlightenment Western values, life is infinitely better for individual human beings than in those where this is not the case.” The oversimplification of this idea shows the danger in making sweeping claims in a thesis that only has a few pages to flesh out such claims. (Not only are there many ways to demonstrate that life is infinitely better in communities that have not embraced post-Enlightenment Western values, this statement completely ignores the fact that the greatest instances of human suffering in known human history – systemic genocides like the Holocaust and what have you – have all been perpetuated by societies that fully embrace post-Enlightenment Western values.)
Overall, this volume definitely delivers on what I had hoped for: to pick up threads of discourse from the yoga blogosphere and to develop them with a greater richness in detail. If there is one thing I would have liked to see more of, it would be greater diversity in terms of how N. American yoga is represented. Carol Horton mentions how yoga has moved beyond a primarily white, new age practice to reach marginalized populations, at risk groups, etc. and I would love to see more content along this vein. Cultural appropriation is also a major topic of discussion in the yoga blogosphere that was not picked up on in this volume. I would be curious to read essays from people who identify as standing in the margins as yoga grows in accessibility in N. America. Perhaps this could be a focus for a second volume of 21st Century Yoga?
Oculus divinorum v.4 
December 10, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Your counter claim to Julian’s argument could use some further fleshing out as well, otherwise, you would be making a disservice to your primary point aw well (even if it is just a review). IMHO
December 11, 2012 at 12:38 am
I take your point, although I would say the purpose of a review is very different from that of an essay.
December 10, 2012 at 9:21 pm
one small quibble with your brief and insubstantial critique. in the context of my chapter, the holocaust does not represent post-enlightenment western values. i am quite clear that these have to do with an attitude of equality, freedom, and embracing the body and human being as inherently sacred. none of these ideas have any truck with racism or ethnic cleansing whatsoever – in fact to the contrary.
the weird notion that somehow separating church and state and moving toward equality for all under democracy with science and art being freed from religious repression somehow led to the holocaust and hiroshima always boggles the mind. as if these things have anything to do with one another!
further, the reality of living in the middle east today, for example, where the enlightenment never happened is in stark contrast, especially for women, to living under democracies that are free of religious hegemony. to deny this is quite odd and usually a reflection of overdone PC relativism.
i challenge you to name cultures that were not liberated by the enlightenment in which life is better than in the countries that went through that shift away from monarchy and theocracy. would you rather life under those sorts of regimes?
December 11, 2012 at 12:30 am
Thank you for sharing your comment. Yes, I actually do see these things that you find completely separate as very much connected. I see that WWII (and the resultant atrocities) arose from the interdependent systems of democracy, state power and capitalism and the discursive logic that guides those systems. Given the “brevity” of a blog comment, I think perhaps it would make most sense for me to direct you to writers who have obviously influenced my thinking: Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, etc. You are of course, free to completely disagree with them, as others do too. You might also consider researching racism and the enlightenment/romanticism. From these movements we find development in paradigms of thinking like hierarchical models of life (e.g. thinking along the lines of The Great Chain of Being) or racist stereotypes (e.g. The Noble Savage) which were critical in constructing racist discourse and in rationalizing brutal colonial projects. I’m not suggesting you should do this, or that you should agree with certain writers; I only suggest this as a way of genuinely understanding how I came to the viewpoint I hold if that is something you wish to explore.
I think one of our main differences is that you seem to me to view democracy solely as a liberating force (correct me if I’m wrong) whereas I see it as inseparable from the machinations of state power, which both liberates and oppresses. This has nothing to do with relativism; this is about a fundamental difference in our understanding of democracy and how it functions as a political system of power. I also think a major difference is that what appears to you as relativism is what I deem as seeing complexities in situations that in my view, do not lend themselves to generalized conclusions and sweeping statements. I personally find generalizations dangerous, especially when it comes to thinking about discourse, politics, etc., I say this as someone who can be prone to making sweeping generalizations myself sometimes!
As for your challenge, my friends and I have lived and worked in various aboriginal and indigenous communities and yes, in these “unenlightened” places, we have experiences of finding that these societies offer great benefits. For example, the modern concept of ownership/land ownership – a notion that we can trace back to John Locke, a figure of the Enlightenment if there ever was one – is absent from the community I lived in. What was theirs was mine, although admittedly it was a shift for me to be ok w/what’s mine was theirs. Yes, I would rather live under this logic from an “unliberated regime.” This is only one example of a benefit I experienced; there are many others. And yes, I have seen some urban people voluntarily make the move b/c they would prefer living in these “unenlightened” societies.
December 10, 2012 at 9:22 pm
live*