Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Singleton, Mark - 2010

US: Oxford University Press, 2010. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world--practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping mall s--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practi ces, as many of its adherents claim? In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many common ly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (asana) and s uggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is p racticed by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that , contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented asana practice that dominates t he global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising--a nd surely controversial--thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced t oday owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surpri singly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20t h-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does t o any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to ex plain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today. Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as wel.