Below is a summary of my research, which this blog sits alongside. As with any such project, it is always in a state of flux, so this is best understood as its current title and objectives,
Mediating yoga: An exploration of the cultural translation of yoga in the UK through its popular representations (1958-75).
My research takes an identified period of yoga’s popularisation in the UK and explores its development through its mediation at the time, the experience of yoga practitioners, and the archives and collections of those practitioners and yoga communities.
In this way, mainstream media archives and yoga community archives are used to explore the discourses at play, and the ideologies presented, and these are triangulated alongside ethnographic interviews with practitioners from the period and the personal collections they have amassed.
The idea is that this enables my research to interrogate what the mediations reveal and hide about yoga’s cultural translation and practice in the UK, in turn addressing issues of cultural appropriation and commodification.
The overall aim of this research is:
To explore what the mediation of yoga in mainstream media and community archives reveals about the processes of its cultural translation in the UK (1958-75).
In turn addressing the following research questions:
- How were understandings of yoga shaped by mainstream media, yoga communities, and yoga lineages/gurus?
- In what ways were the mediations and representations of yoga related to its cultural appropriation and commodification?
- How can yoga community archives be used to challenge and/or corroborate mainstream media representations of yoga?