ABSTRACT
Anthropologists of tourism are increasingly turning their attention to embodied tourist experiences and as such this chapter focuses on embodiment through the lens of yoga holidays. Based on participant observation and extensive interviews with British and North American yogis in Northern Italy, this chapter examines the overlapping motivations for practising yoga and for travelling. Yoga retreats are heavily marketed as healing holidays, where one can de-clutter the mind and balance the body. The health benefits that are sought after by practising yoga overlap with generalised notions about why travel is deemed healthy in its own right, by combining medical anthropological understandings of embodiment with tourism studies.
