ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a multi-sited ethnography of yoga that obliges us to look beyond postural (āsana) practice in modern yoga research by introducing three alternative, understudied categories of transnational somatic yoga practice – food, music, and breathing – at three field sites in New York, Hawaii, and Maharashtra. Studying these categories of embodied practice using interdisciplinary methods gleaned from the fields of Indian Ocean Studies, Embodiment Studies, Food Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Pollution Studies reveals portable and transposable forms of what the author identifies as “engaged alchemy.” The author argues that engaged alchemies have been extensively deployed by contemporary disseminators of yoga who have adapted South Asian dietary practices, music, and breathing techniques into contemporaneous worlds of transnational yoga practice both within, but also beyond, the Indian Ocean rim. Using the theoretical notion of engaged alchemy, the author also challenges long-established methodological approaches to the study of yoga within the field of Modern Yoga Studies and argues that research of contemporary yoga systems must consider the flows of yogic influence on both centripetal and centrifugal terms. As the chapter shows, by embodying transnational yoga one embodies manifold contemporaneous cultural and regional influences, but in doing so simultaneously worlds the Indian Ocean globally.
