J S Alter
Biographic Data
| ID | 54509 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J S Alter |
| GIVEN NAMES | J S |
| FAMILY NAME | Alter |
| SIGNATURE | ALTER J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0642-9284 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 273 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Māyā of Things: South Asian Reflections on Social Theory and the Magic of Humanism
The study of religion and magic, broadly defined, has been integral to the formulation of modern social thought in the western humanistic tradition. Building on the work of posthumanist scholarship that develops analytical methods for the decolonization of knowledge in academia, this article draws on the southern Asian philosophy of Sāṃkhya to theorize magic and illusion in the articulation of contemporary social theory. The focus is on the power…
The Embodiment of Meaning and the Meaning of Embodiment
Drawing on the example of kuśtī-pahalvānī (traditional wrestling in India) to engage with arguments presented in each of the chapters that have come before, this “Afterword” engages with the problem of how meaning is assigned to physical practices and to the body engaged in various forms of self-development and self-discipline. An analytical perspective based on semiotic theory is used to examine the problem of embodied meaning as well as methodo…
The Embodiment of Meaning and the Meaning of Embodiment: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns in the Study of Postural Practice
Drawing on the example of kuśtī-pahalvānī (traditional wrestling in India) to engage with arguments presented in each of the chapters that have come before, this “Afterword” engages with the problem of how meaning is assigned to physical practices and to the body engaged in various forms of self-development and self-discipline. An analytical perspective based on semiotic theory is used to examine the problem of embodied meaning as well as methodo…
Biosemiotics and Hominidae history: Technicity, Animals, and the Limitations of Human Exceptionalism
This article is focused on problematic distinctions of difference among animals in the lineage of great apes. It combines several theoretical perspectives on evolutionary relationships, technological innovation, the development of body parts as tools, and a semiotic interpretation of what André Leroi-Gourhan called technicity. Foundational questions in social theory are developed using biosemiotics, particularly as concerns a materialist understa…
The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen: Neoliberalism, Competition, and Capitalism in India
Drawing on Weber's classic study of religion, salvation, and the motivation to be a successful capitalist, this article problematizes the relationship among competition and the embodiment of success in the practice of yoga in modern India. Contemporary postural yoga has been popularized in ways that fetishize the body and the relation between the body and enlightenment. It has become a sign of self-realization in a mode that reflects the possibil…
Nature cure and public health: Illness Narratives, Medical Efficacy, and Existential Suffering
Nature cure is a globalized system of nineteenth century European medicine that developed synergistically in opposition to biomedicine, and that has become popular in India. This essay examines the question of how anthropologists should understand claims that all diseases can be cured with earth, air, sunlight, water and raw food. The question is complicated by a paradox of relativism deeply embedded in the desire to find cures, to articulate tho…
Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language, Society and the Supernatural
An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. Th…
Why Study Asian Medicine
Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the editorial forum. For our launch of this new format, an international range of scholars working on Asian medicine across different geographical, temporal, and disciplinary contexts were invited to respond to the question “Why study Asian medicine?” The perspectives they have expressed here reflect their diverse interests, motivations, and career trajectories across the spectru…
Pahalwan Baba Ramdev: Wrestling with yoga and middle-class masculinity in India
In the view of many people, Baba Ramdev embodies the practice of modern yoga in twenty-first century India. A tremendously successful entrepreneur, infamous 'godman' with political ties, and a highly visible TV personality, he is also a vocal supporter ofpahalwani(Indian wrestling) as a way of life and of wrestling in India as a national sport. Beyond sponsorship of tournaments and support for a new professional wrestling league, he promotes a fo…
Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homeopathy, written by Shinjini Das
From Lebensreform to Swadeshi: Vithal Das Modi and the Development of Nature Cure in India
As an institutionalized “indigenous” system of medicine in India, nature cure derives directly from ideas and practices developed within the rubric of Lebensreform, a radical, back-to-nature health reform movement that took shape in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century central Europe. Nature cure developed in twentieth-century India as a deeply embodied manifestation of Swadeshi, a social, cultural, and anticolonial political movement int…
Exorcism
Exorcism involves the removal of an evil spirit from a person who is possessed. Although this may be taken as a straightforward definition, the rituals and beliefs associated with exorcism must be understood within the larger, holistic context in which they are meaningful. Most broadly, interpretation and analysis must take into consideration distinctions between mind and body, and between social reality and the supernatural, that often shape int…
Nisargopchar Ashram: Gandhi’s Legacy and Public Health in Contemporary India
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a staunch advocate for nature cure. He promoted the use of earth, air, sunlight, water and diet not only to treat medical problems but also as an integral feature of a programme for comprehensive public health reform. As such, Gandhi conceptualised healthcare as an encompassing, biomoral project designed to produce Swaraj in the broadest sense of the term. Nature cure was, in other words, fundamental to sarvodaya as…
Nature Cure and Non-Communicable Diseases: Ecological Therapy as Health Care in India
With rapidly increasing rates of non-communicable diseases, India is experiencing a dramatic public health crisis that is closely linked to changing lifestyles and the growth of the middle-class. In this essay we discuss how the practice of Nature Cure provides a way of understanding the scale and scope of the crisis, as it is embodied, and a way to understand key elements of a solution to problems that the crisis presents for institutionalized h…
Rachel Berger. Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900–1955
This is a tightly argued, concise, and lucidly written book about much more than the institutionalization of Ayurvedic knowledge and practice in the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh in twentieth-century colonial India. Focused on a shift in policy and government orientation toward indigenous medical practice in the interwar years, the author explicates and provides critical insight into the changing structures of bio-political practice, public …
Gattungswesen - The Ecology of Species-Being. Alienation, Biosemiotics, and Social Theory
Anthropos , Seite 515 - 532
Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, written by Projit Bihari Mukharji
Spirits and Exorcism: On the Semiotics of Healing and Recovery
Focusing on the ambiguous and indeterminate relationship between spirit possession and alcoholic spirits, this article shows how biosemiotics provides a way to understand healing and recovery from addiction. The efficacy of treatment for addiction is a spiritual function of social relations anchored in symptomatic diagnosis, rather than in the embodiment of belief as an expression of cultural meaning in ritual forms of treatment. As such, this ar…
Nature Cure and Ayurveda: Nationalism, Viscerality and Bio-ecology in India
Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely li…
Sinister Yogis—in the Eye of the Beholder. David Gordon White
Sinister Yogis—in the Eye of the Beholder. David Gordon White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 376pp. ISBN: 978-0226895147 (pbk). $25
Sacrifice, the Body, and Yoga: Theoretical Entailments of Embodiment inHathayoga
In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayoga's embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms…
In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement by Smriti Srinivas
God‐botherers and other true‐believers: Gandhi, Hitler, and the religious right – By F.G. Bailey
Yoga in Asia—mimetic History: Problems in the Location of Secret Knowledge
On one level, and with reference to a specific frame of reference, embodied forms of practice that have come to be associated with Yoga and Taoist philosophy appear to be very similar if not identical in terms of form, structure, and purpose. However, there is no clear-cut history of communication between eastern and southern Asia concerning the exchange of ideas linked to these practices, and where some scholars presume direct, linear exchange, …
Rethinking the History of Medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine
In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's…
Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India
It is well known that mahatma gandhifelt that sexuality and desire were intimately connected to social life and politics, and that self-control translated directly into power of various kinds, both public and private. Gandhi's enigmatic genius and his popular appeal among India's masses may be attributed, at least in part, to the degree he was able to embody a powerful ideal of sexual self-control that linked his sociopolitical projects to pervas…
Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and Militant Hinduism
In the West it is commonplace to regard sport as either an extracurricular form of leisure, or else as a business enterprise. Games and contests of all kinds are a form of distraction; and for some a very lucrative form at that (Smith 1978). Almost by definition sports direct our attention away from 'real life' to some form of fantasy world where there is high drama but little by way of the material or ideological substance of productive, pragmat…
Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India
Many scholars have noted that brahmacharya (celibacy) is an important concept in Hindu notions of male identity (cf. Kakar 1981, 1982, 1990; Obeyesekere 1976, 1981; for comparison, see Gilmore 1990). Although the psychological basis of this concept has been studied, there is very little in the literature on the "medical mechanics" of being and becoming a brahmachari. Nor is there a comprehensive account of the precise relationship between sex and…
The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics
Heaps of Health, Metaphysical Fitness: Ayurveda and the Ontology of Good Health in Medical Anthropology
Because most scholars take it for granted that medicine is concerned with healing and problems of ill health, the way in which various medical systems define good health has not been adequately studied. Moreover, good health as such is usually regarded as a natural, normative state of being even by most medical anthropologists, who otherwise take a critical, relativist perspective on the subject of illness, pain, and disease. Using the case of Ay…
Nature Cure and Ayurveda: Nationalism, Viscerality and Bio-ecology in India
Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely li…
Gandhi's Body, Gandhi's Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in …
The Celibate Wrestler: Sexual Chaos, Embodied Balance and Competitive Politics in North India
L'A. analyse l'interface problematique dans le catch indien (pahalwani, Bharatiya kushti) entre energie sexuelle et celibat. Energie potentielle et self-controle sont intimement lies, et de ce fait un equilibre delicat doit etre maintenu entre les deux. La pratique du catch indien en tant qu'art de la performance est un acte complexe d'auto-developpement ou l'incarnation de l'equilibre permet au catcheur de s'eprouver lui-meme ; son objectif etan…
Indian Clubs and Colonialism: Hindu Masculinity and Muscular Christianity
Following Edward Said'sOrientalism(1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy …
The sannyasi and the Indian wrestler: The Anatomy of a Relationship
Indian wrestling (pahalwani) is a disciplined way of life that demands rigorous physical and moral training. In this regard it is analogous to the Hindu life path of world renunciation (sannyas). Here I show how Indian wrestlers use the model of sannyas to help define their way of life. Wrestlers recognize the centrality of the physico-moral body as a defining idiom of identity. Their interpretation of body discipline thus sheds light on general …
Yoga and fetishism: Reflections on Marxist social theory
Classical social theory - including Marxist social theory - is based on a critique of the relationship between religion and society. The philosophical underpinning of this is the question of consciousness and the projection of consciousness onto things. Drawing on contemporary anthropological and philosophical theories of fetishism, this article engages with Marx's critique of religion and the recovery of social value by way of an analysis of yog…
Subaltern Bodies and Nationalist Physiques: Gama the Great and the Heroics of Indian Wrestling
Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersec…
A therapy to live by: Public health, the self and nationalism in the practice of a North Indian yoga society
In this article I focus on the relationship between concepts of self and health in modern North India. Drawing on field research in a popular yoga society, I argue that yoga therapy, as practiced by the Bharatiya Yog Sansthan of Delhi, provides a reconceptualization of what can be meant by public health. Using studies that challenge both the essentialist and epistemological facticity of the self, I show how the discourse and practice of yoga is i…
"The Once and Future "Apeman: Chimeras, Human Evolution, and Disciplinary Coherence
Many have argued that anthropology, as a four-field discipline, lacks intellectual coherence. Recent developments in the field of biotechnology and the possibility of producing chimeras with recognizable human characteristics make it necessary to think in terms of a new kind of "old" four-field holism. The production of a human/nonhuman chimera raises theoretical questions about the nature of the species barrier in human evolution and about the l…
Yoga at the Fin de Siècle: Muscular Christianity with a ‘Hindu’ Twist
This paper examines what came to be known as muscular Hinduism and its expression through yoga practices in India. It argues that identifying Anglo-American muscular Christianity as the locus point for the configuration of ideas that link the body to morality is a colonial distortion. Christianity is the primary referent for muscularity at the fin de siècle, but to properly understand muscular Christianity one must think much more broadly about e…
Rethinking the History of Medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine
In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's…
Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language, Society and the Supernatural
An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. Th…
Sacrifice, the Body, and Yoga: Theoretical Entailments of Embodiment inHathayoga
In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayoga's embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms…
Pahalwan Baba Ramdev: Wrestling with yoga and middle-class masculinity in India
In the view of many people, Baba Ramdev embodies the practice of modern yoga in twenty-first century India. A tremendously successful entrepreneur, infamous 'godman' with political ties, and a highly visible TV personality, he is also a vocal supporter ofpahalwani(Indian wrestling) as a way of life and of wrestling in India as a national sport. Beyond sponsorship of tournaments and support for a new professional wrestling league, he promotes a fo…
Physical education, sport and the intersection and articulation of ‘modernities’: The Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal
This paper focuses on the problem of delimiting and contextualizing ‘alternative modernities,' and the way in which sport factors into the logic of delimitation. After postulating six ideal type alternative sportive modernities in India, the Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal is analyzed as the articulation of a type of modernity that is linked to liberal secular nationalism. By looking at both the development of the HVPM through time as well as the …
Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations
Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations. NICOLE SAULT, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. xiv + 346 pp., contributors, notes, references, index
Biosemiotics and Hominidae history: Technicity, Animals, and the Limitations of Human Exceptionalism
This article is focused on problematic distinctions of difference among animals in the lineage of great apes. It combines several theoretical perspectives on evolutionary relationships, technological innovation, the development of body parts as tools, and a semiotic interpretation of what André Leroi-Gourhan called technicity. Foundational questions in social theory are developed using biosemiotics, particularly as concerns a materialist understa…
Gattungswesen - The Ecology of Species-Being. Alienation, Biosemiotics, and Social Theory
Anthropos , Seite 515 - 532
Spirits and Exorcism: On the Semiotics of Healing and Recovery
Focusing on the ambiguous and indeterminate relationship between spirit possession and alcoholic spirits, this article shows how biosemiotics provides a way to understand healing and recovery from addiction. The efficacy of treatment for addiction is a spiritual function of social relations anchored in symptomatic diagnosis, rather than in the embodiment of belief as an expression of cultural meaning in ritual forms of treatment. As such, this ar…
Yoga in Asia—mimetic History: Problems in the Location of Secret Knowledge
On one level, and with reference to a specific frame of reference, embodied forms of practice that have come to be associated with Yoga and Taoist philosophy appear to be very similar if not identical in terms of form, structure, and purpose. However, there is no clear-cut history of communication between eastern and southern Asia concerning the exchange of ideas linked to these practices, and where some scholars presume direct, linear exchange, …
The Wrestler's BodyIdentity and Ideology in North India
This book tells the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the insights of anthropology, the book writes an ethnography of the wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of his identity and ideology. Young men in North India may choose to join an akhara,…
The sannyasi and the Indian wrestler: The Anatomy of a Relationship
Indian wrestling (pahalwani) is a disciplined way of life that demands rigorous physical and moral training. In this regard it is analogous to the Hindu life path of world renunciation (sannyas). Here I show how Indian wrestlers use the model of sannyas to help define their way of life. Wrestlers recognize the centrality of the physico-moral body as a defining idiom of identity. Their interpretation of body discipline thus sheds light on general …
The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas
The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics
Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and Militant Hinduism
In the West it is commonplace to regard sport as either an extracurricular form of leisure, or else as a business enterprise. Games and contests of all kinds are a form of distraction; and for some a very lucrative form at that (Smith 1978). Almost by definition sports direct our attention away from 'real life' to some form of fantasy world where there is high drama but little by way of the material or ideological substance of productive, pragmat…
Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India
It is well known that mahatma gandhifelt that sexuality and desire were intimately connected to social life and politics, and that self-control translated directly into power of various kinds, both public and private. Gandhi's enigmatic genius and his popular appeal among India's masses may be attributed, at least in part, to the degree he was able to embody a powerful ideal of sexual self-control that linked his sociopolitical projects to pervas…
Modernity and Identity: Asian Illustrations. Alberto Gomes, ed
The Celibate Wrestler: Sexual Chaos, Embodied Balance and Competitive Politics in North India
L'A. analyse l'interface problematique dans le catch indien (pahalwani, Bharatiya kushti) entre energie sexuelle et celibat. Energie potentielle et self-controle sont intimement lies, et de ce fait un equilibre delicat doit etre maintenu entre les deux. La pratique du catch indien en tant qu'art de la performance est un acte complexe d'auto-developpement ou l'incarnation de l'equilibre permet au catcheur de s'eprouver lui-meme ; son objectif etan…
Gandhi's Body, Gandhi's Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in …
The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. Ashis Nandy
Response to Commentaries
Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India
Many scholars have noted that brahmacharya (celibacy) is an important concept in Hindu notions of male identity (cf. Kakar 1981, 1982, 1990; Obeyesekere 1976, 1981; for comparison, see Gilmore 1990). Although the psychological basis of this concept has been studied, there is very little in the literature on the "medical mechanics" of being and becoming a brahmachari. Nor is there a comprehensive account of the precise relationship between sex and…
Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations
Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations. NICOLE SAULT, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. xiv + 346 pp., contributors, notes, references, index
Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions
Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions. DON BATES, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 369 pp., Illustrations, notes, index
A therapy to live by: Public health, the self and nationalism in the practice of a North Indian yoga society
In this article I focus on the relationship between concepts of self and health in modern North India. Drawing on field research in a popular yoga society, I argue that yoga therapy, as practiced by the Bharatiya Yog Sansthan of Delhi, provides a reconceptualization of what can be meant by public health. Using studies that challenge both the essentialist and epistemological facticity of the self, I show how the discourse and practice of yoga is i…
Heaps of Health, Metaphysical Fitness: Ayurveda and the Ontology of Good Health in Medical Anthropology
Because most scholars take it for granted that medicine is concerned with healing and problems of ill health, the way in which various medical systems define good health has not been adequately studied. Moreover, good health as such is usually regarded as a natural, normative state of being even by most medical anthropologists, who otherwise take a critical, relativist perspective on the subject of illness, pain, and disease. Using the case of Ay…
Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism
"This brilliant and infuriating book is the latest intriguing offering from one of the most original anthropologists working. . . . It offers us unpredictable and illuminating interpretations of classical material."— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Knowing Dil Das: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter
Dil Das was a poor farmer—an untouchable—living near Mussoorie, a colonial hill station in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted with a number of American missionary children attending a boarding school in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with them and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships it made possible came to dominate Dil Da…
Subaltern Bodies and Nationalist Physiques: Gama the Great and the Heroics of Indian Wrestling
Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersec…
Indian Clubs and Colonialism: Hindu Masculinity and Muscular Christianity
Following Edward Said'sOrientalism(1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy …
Celibacy, Sexuality, and Nationalism in North India
Modern Medical Yoga: Struggling With a History of Magic, Alchemy and Sex
The history of modern yoga is rooted in the history of alchemy and the practice of magic in medieval India. In physiological terms it is also intimately linked to tantric ideas concerning the immobilisation of semen. However, modern yoga as a form of practice which emphasises physical fitness, wellness and holistic health, emerged more directly out of the early twentieth-century yoga renaissance. Leading figures such as Shri Y ogendra and Swami K…
Yoga at the Fin de Siècle: Muscular Christianity with a ‘Hindu’ Twist
This paper examines what came to be known as muscular Hinduism and its expression through yoga practices in India. It argues that identifying Anglo-American muscular Christianity as the locus point for the configuration of ideas that link the body to morality is a colonial distortion. Christianity is the primary referent for muscularity at the fin de siècle, but to properly understand muscular Christianity one must think much more broadly about e…
Female Ascetics in Hinduism; The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States; Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal
Female Ascetics in Hinduism. Lynn Teskey Denton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 218 pp.The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. Karen Pechilis, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 260 pp.Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal. June McDaniel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 356 pp
Yoga and fetishism: Reflections on Marxist social theory
Classical social theory - including Marxist social theory - is based on a critique of the relationship between religion and society. The philosophical underpinning of this is the question of consciousness and the projection of consciousness onto things. Drawing on contemporary anthropological and philosophical theories of fetishism, this article engages with Marx's critique of religion and the recovery of social value by way of an analysis of yog…
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