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Deep Cuts: The Vogue-a of Yoga

It's late! But it's here! This month, Anna brings Amber along for an exploration of how yoga came to be what it is today in the United States. 

Iowa Swami Who Beguiled the Jazz Age (The New York Times)

America's First Yoga Scandal (Mental Floss)

Lululemon quarterly sales top expectations, CEO ‘cautiously optimistic’ for rest of 2020 (CNBC)

Decolonizing Yoga: Beyond the Yoga-Industrial Complex (CounterPunch)

An Introduction to Yoga: The Art of Transformation (Asian Art Museum)

The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” (Mother Jones) 

Amber's note: I read this Mother Jones essay after we recorded the episode, because I knew something had been up about the exhibit back in 2013 but was confident I only caught a whiff of the real problems. I don't want my comments in the ep to feel flippant or dismissive of the deeper problems Bhakta describes regarding censorship, appropriation, and ripping artists off financially. If I'm feeling charitable, I'd say these curatorial and marketing calls a swing and a miss on the part of the museum, but history tells us that it's more likely to have been a bit more intentional than that. 

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.