Ethnographic Research Project: Yoga To The People

Résumé du document

As our mantra says...this yoga is for mothers, brothers, sisters and grandmothers, poets, bakers, painters and artists. This is Yoga to the People! So let all of your doubts or questions be set aside... come and explore the world of yoga', are the words one can read when entering Yoga to the People's website. Is Yoga really practiced by everyone? i.e. regardless of someone's social class? If the practice of Yoga in Occidental societies is becoming more and more popular, one has to know that yoga has been part of the Occidental culture for a long time. Indeed, during the Antiquity, Alexandre le Grand, in his conquests beyond Persia, had brought back to Greece a yogi so that he could show his talents to the public. At the beginning of the 20th century, accounts of travellers such as Alexandra David-Néel or Romain Roland caused the curiosity of some Westerners, attracted by the concept of body experiment of the religion and by the philosophical corpus of the Hindu texts. Occidental societies seemed then prepared to receive the Hindu culture and the first centers of yoga were created.

Extraits

[...] They actually seem to attach a sacred character to Yoga, and to consider it as more than a simple sport or activity rather, a profound philosophy. The interactions between the students proved me, in spite of their saying during the formal interviews, that people are actually proud of practicing Yoga. They strive to show that they share its philosophy; some wear Indian clothes (mostly men) that do not seem very convenient for the practice of Yoga, other breathe aloud (often with insistence), they perform exotic actions : saying Namaste at the end of the class, bowing, meditating (yet very briefly, which is telling of their wish to have performed this action, and not to actually perform it) as if they were trying to show that they knew a lot about Yoga, and above all about its philosophy. [...]

[...] This donation based system, which indeed allows a broad public to enjoy yoga sessions, is however difficult to judge and appreciate. One actually feels that they have to give a decent amount of money in the "tissue box", held by the teacher, who, during the last 5 minutes of the class - between a principle of Yoga's philosophy and a direction to change one's posture - reminds with a smooth voice that "this is a donation based studio, if you want to keep seeing those doors opened, please be generous and don't forget to put money in the tissue box". [...]

[...] The importance of those social markers is developed by Bourdieu, who states that "identity is relation", it is forged in opposition to others as a marking of what renders one "distinct". The sociologic writes on “habitus.”[10] He believes that there's a grid; behind anything that a person claims to enjoy, there's a meaning behind it at the level of classification. There's a grid in which you can locate certain populations based on the cluster of activities they enjoy doing. Drinking, green tea, participating yoga, and being an intellectual individual of around 45 are qualities that comprise markers of a specific class. [...]

[...] it's Yogi times. Annex TEXT 1 : "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is out light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world and there is nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that others won't feel insecure around you. [...]

[...] This ethnographic research study will therefore consist in verifying this assumption, and figure whether people are conscious of the social connotation of their activity. Willing to figure whether people are exclusively doing Yoga for healthy reasons, or if this practice is determined by socio-cultural factors, I will try to conduct this ethnographic research as objectively as possible. Indeed, this analysis will aim at being actor-oriented[1], and will be based on the "participant observer" method, according to Evans-Pritchard principles[2]. I Analysis through the angle of the activity and the physical space : Yoga & Yoga to the people What is Yoga and how can one explain its growing popularity ? [...]