ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an analysis of the bringing forth and sensual experience of fluids like sweat in the production of 'meaning' in Ashtanga yoga; and more broadly, of how physical fluids and their contextual sensation help shape and articulate a broader yoga aesthetic. It presents micro-logical data assembled during an embodied, sensory ethnographic effort on Ashtanga yoga in the city of Toronto. The chapter highlights how radically contextual research on the opening of the fluid senses in movement/physical cultures provides insight on how the seemingly mundane aspects of the physical help people find beauty, pleasure and interpersonal connection through contextual movement and sensation. Ethnoaesthesia is the study of, and sensibility toward, how the beautiful, artistic, provocative and sensuous aspects of the human condition are centrally experienced and represented through a vast array of everyday physical cultural practices.
