Over the past decades yoga has gradually become part of mainstream culture in affluent western societies drawing celebrities and hipsters, infants and retirees, and has shaped the body culture and corporate culture into a multibillion-dollar industry.  In the United States in particular yoga has become a commodity.  Statistics show that about 16 million Americans practice yoga every year.  For most people, this means going to a yoga center with yoga mats, yoga clothes, and yoga accessories, and practicing in groups under the guidance of a yoga teacher or trainer. However despite the immense popularity of postural yoga practice worldwide there is little evidence that asana, with the exception of certain seated postures in mediation has ever been the primary aspect of any Indian yoga practice tradition.  The primacy of asana performance in transnational yoga today is a new phenomena that has no parallel in pre-modern times.

This course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history, theory and practice of yoga spanning from India’s ancient yoga traditions to the modern day postural practice.  Topics include the origins of yoga in ancient India, philosophical expressions of yoga and their commentarial traditions, Buddhist Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Tantric Yoga, and the medicalization and commercialization of yoga in the modern period.  Throughout the semester the course will continuously address central questions regarding the relationship between India’s ancient yoga traditions and the modern postural yoga that people are practicing in the world today, challenge our popular assumptions about yoga theory and practice that mostly date from the past 150 years, and investigate how for the past 2,000 years each age has created its own version and vision of yoga in a practice of continual reinvention.