Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation in the Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia.
20% discount code (until 12/31/2023): ESA32
(Ebook is available, and South Asian paperback should be available in 12-18 months)
Join us at the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies online book launch event on November 13, 2023 at 10am Pacific.
Critics' Reviews:
“This passionate book combines inspired philosophical insight and critical commentary on a range of experiences that constitute transnational yoga. Based on years of participant observation in the United States and India, Miller’s intimate understanding of embodied practice provides a new, multivalent understanding of yoga in personal and social experience.”
Joseph S. Alter, author of Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy
"Miller’s transnational, multi-sited ethnographic research issues a clarion call for more attention to the deeply embodied ways of living and worlding in yoga communities. Including chapters on dietary practices, mantra (chants) and kīrtan (sacred music), and prāṇāyāma (breathing exercises), this wonderfully conceived book is a vital reminder of all that yoga is beyond āsana (yoga postures)."
Amanda Lucia, author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals
Description:
Embodying Transnational Yoga is a refreshingly original, multi-sited ethnography of transnational yoga that obliges us to look beyond postural practice (as̄ana) in modern yoga research.
The book introduces readers to three alternative, understudied categories of transnational yoga practice which include food, music, and breathing. Studying these categories of embodied practice using interdisciplinary methods reveals transformative “engaged alchemies” that have been extensively deployed by contemporary disseminators of yoga. Readers will encounter how South Asian dietary regimens, musical practices, and breathing techniques have been adapted into contemporaneous worlds of yoga practice both within, but also beyond, the Indian Ocean rim.
The book brings the field of Modern Yoga Studies into productive dialogue with the fields of Indian Ocean Studies, Embodiment Studies, Food Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Pollution Studies. It will also be a valuable resource for both scholarly work and for teaching in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and South Asian Religions.
Christopher Jain Miller, the co-founder and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Arihanta Institute, completed his PhD in the study of Religion at the University of California, Davis. He is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut and Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology where he co-developed and co-runs a remotely available Masters Degree Program focusing on Engaged Jain Studies. His current research focuses on Modern Yoga and Engaged Jainism. Christopher is the author of a number of articles and book chapters concerned with Jainism and the practice of modern yoga. He is a co-editor of the volume Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington 2020) and author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2023).