White people need to stop saying 'namaste'.

[Metaphor]

That's not the only demand from this cultural appropriation mythicist, but it's the first, in this piece:

The yoga class felt strange, as if I had somehow gone there in a misguided attempt to connect with what I thought was a part of my identity. Instead, as the class went on, I felt like an imposter. When the 45 minutes were up, I eagerly tried to scuttle away when I heard the instructor say 'nam-aasss-tay'.

The word was familiar to me. I'm a Hindi speaking Hindu girl from Mumbai. Namaste is my way of greeting Hindi speaking elders in my hometown Melbourne or a way of saying hello to most people back in India. But hearing namaste chanted by the white yoga instructor to a predominantly white class was unsettling. Really? If the yoga class itself wasn't white-centric enough, she really had to place the appropriative cherry on top.

If you don't like white people, stop going to a white yoga class.

First disclaimer. I'm not a yogi. I don't practice yoga to feel #blessed or to find my inner chakra.

That's good to hear, because chakras don't exist.

This is primarily because, as a brown girl raised Hindu, to me practising yoga is much more than regularly attending $20 classes wearing trendy activewear.

Yoga in Hindu traditions is more than physical exercise. It is a multifaceted philosophy, medicine system and way of life. The asanas, or 'poses', that people perform when they go to their local class are one part of several other practices – including mediation, abstention and liberation – that are considered as a philosophical school in Hinduism.

We should care....because why?

That isn't to say somehow that yoga belongs only to Hindus or to all Hindus. There are many caste and class-based critiques of yoga in India and Indian diasporas which say that yoga has often been used as a tool by communities with existing power to project a certain image of what it means to be Indian or Hindu at the expense of minority and oppressed voices.

These arguments aside - it is undeniable that yoga has Hindu roots.

We should care....because why?

The practice of yoga in western countries for white audiences began in the 1960s when Indian yoga gurus sold yoga as a way to fill a perceived gap in their audience's spirituality.

Chiraag Bhaktha, a.k.a Pardon My Hindi, documented a history of yoga products and advertisements from the 1960s to '80s in his installation '#whitepeopledoingyoga', which exemplified the 'white-fication' of yoga through images of Executive Yoga, Unisex Yoga and even Christian Yoga.

Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences – a way to exercise and connect with one's spirituality. Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst. Bhaktha puts it simply in his artist statement:

Why is copying an idea and modifying it morally bad? Are we just supposed to accept that it is?

"The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga's core philosophy and historic practice is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one's ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian tradition."

Though, to this Hindu girl who migrated to Australia in the 1990s, the appropriation of yoga by western audiences goes further. It exists alongside a wider ignorance about Hinduism and South Asian culture which, when you've spent a fair amount of your formative years being othered, can hit home hard.

In many western countries, Hinduism is treated as a mystic and ancient tradition and India as magical - ignoring the fact that Hinduism is a living, breathing contemporary religion practised by millions of people in their everyday lives around the world, including a huge Indian diaspora in Australia.

The history of colonisation in India means that the practice of yoga in countries with colonial ties, like Australia,

Holy shit this is offensive. Australia did not colonise India. Australia was colonised by the same people that colonised India.

can never truly be a friendly exchange.

There's nothing to exchange. Indian people do not own the idea of yoga and they have no more moral claim to it than anyone else.

In fact, during their colonial rule, the British banned certain practices of yoga which they perceived as threatening and 'less acceptable' Hindu practices. As a policy of conciliation towards some aspects of Indian culture was pursued by the British in the later years of their rule, the Brits promoted a re-appropriated more physical 'modern' yoga which is more akin to the postural yoga taught in many classes in Australia today.

We should care....because why?

Given most classes are taught by white women, and most ads you see for yoga classes or yoga wear feature white women, white women have become the embodiment of yoga in Australia. As a Hindu woman, this places me as the "other" in a culture that is mine.

You don't own yoga culture and you have no moral claim to police its use.

As South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America (SAAPYA) put it brilliantly in their short film 'We are not Exotic, We are Exhausted', such portrayals of yoga can be ostracising and excluding to South Asians who are trying to navigate a dual Western and South Asian identity, especially in the context of people regularly confusing Hindu and Hindi, white people wearing bindis to bush doofs and t-shirts with images of Ganesh and Shiva on them. It also furthers the economic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers - landing the profits from a practice that has been appropriated from the colonised in the pockets of the colonisers.

"Economic exploitation". Xena have mercy.

Sure, there are yoga teachers in western societies who have studied Hindu teachings in their certified yoga teacher courses. Critically analysing your yoga practice isn't undermining the years these yogis might have spent dedicated to learning this form of exercise, art, lifestyle – whatever it may mean to them. It's about questioning whether your practice of yoga is claiming space away from people of colour to whom yoga is more than a part of their daily routine – it's a part of their cultural and religious identity.

"Claiming space away". Xena have mercy. How can white people doing yoga take space away from you doing yoga? Has somebody put a gun to your head and outlawed what you want to do?

It's about considering whether you can practice yoga without spiritually harvesting

"Spiritually harvesting". Xena have mercy.

a culture and religion that is not yours

That's because culture and religion do not belong to anyone. They're not yours, either.

when you have no deeper understanding, or desire to understand, the historical and social roots of the culture yoga comes from.

We should care....because why?

And it's about considering whether your casually saying a few namastes at the end of your yoga class feeds into the commodification of Hindu spirituality that then makes it OK for people to Instagram memes such as 'Namaste away from me', to publish a yoga book as a white woman called 'Namaslay', and to make people of South Asian and Hindu identity feel exoticised and misunderstood.

Namaslaying it!!

I wish I did yoga so I could get in a pose and instagram this exact phrase to all my white followers.

 

[Toni]

That's not the only demand from this cultural appropriation mythicist, but it's the first, in this piece:



If you don't like white people, stop going to a white yoga class.

First disclaimer. I'm not a yogi. I don't practice yoga to feel #blessed or to find my inner chakra.

That's good to hear, because chakras don't exist.

This is primarily because, as a brown girl raised Hindu, to me practising yoga is much more than regularly attending $20 classes wearing trendy activewear.

Yoga in Hindu traditions is more than physical exercise. It is a multifaceted philosophy, medicine system and way of life. The asanas, or 'poses', that people perform when they go to their local class are one part of several other practices – including mediation, abstention and liberation – that are considered as a philosophical school in Hinduism.

We should care....because why?

That isn't to say somehow that yoga belongs only to Hindus or to all Hindus. There are many caste and class-based critiques of yoga in India and Indian diasporas which say that yoga has often been used as a tool by communities with existing power to project a certain image of what it means to be Indian or Hindu at the expense of minority and oppressed voices.

These arguments aside - it is undeniable that yoga has Hindu roots.

We should care....because why?

The practice of yoga in western countries for white audiences began in the 1960s when Indian yoga gurus sold yoga as a way to fill a perceived gap in their audience's spirituality.

Chiraag Bhaktha, a.k.a Pardon My Hindi, documented a history of yoga products and advertisements from the 1960s to '80s in his installation '#whitepeopledoingyoga', which exemplified the 'white-fication' of yoga through images of Executive Yoga, Unisex Yoga and even Christian Yoga.

Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences – a way to exercise and connect with one's spirituality. Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst. Bhaktha puts it simply in his artist statement:

Why is copying an idea and modifying it morally bad? Are we just supposed to accept that it is?

"The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga's core philosophy and historic practice is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one's ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian tradition."

Though, to this Hindu girl who migrated to Australia in the 1990s, the appropriation of yoga by western audiences goes further. It exists alongside a wider ignorance about Hinduism and South Asian culture which, when you've spent a fair amount of your formative years being othered, can hit home hard.

In many western countries, Hinduism is treated as a mystic and ancient tradition and India as magical - ignoring the fact that Hinduism is a living, breathing contemporary religion practised by millions of people in their everyday lives around the world, including a huge Indian diaspora in Australia.

The history of colonisation in India means that the practice of yoga in countries with colonial ties, like Australia,

Holy shit this is offensive. Australia did not colonise India. Australia was colonised by the same people that colonised India.

can never truly be a friendly exchange.

There's nothing to exchange. Indian people do not own the idea of yoga and they have no more moral claim to it than anyone else.

In fact, during their colonial rule, the British banned certain practices of yoga which they perceived as threatening and 'less acceptable' Hindu practices. As a policy of conciliation towards some aspects of Indian culture was pursued by the British in the later years of their rule, the Brits promoted a re-appropriated more physical 'modern' yoga which is more akin to the postural yoga taught in many classes in Australia today.

We should care....because why?

Given most classes are taught by white women, and most ads you see for yoga classes or yoga wear feature white women, white women have become the embodiment of yoga in Australia. As a Hindu woman, this places me as the "other" in a culture that is mine.

You don't own yoga culture and you have no moral claim to police its use.

As South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America (SAAPYA) put it brilliantly in their short film 'We are not Exotic, We are Exhausted', such portrayals of yoga can be ostracising and excluding to South Asians who are trying to navigate a dual Western and South Asian identity, especially in the context of people regularly confusing Hindu and Hindi, white people wearing bindis to bush doofs and t-shirts with images of Ganesh and Shiva on them. It also furthers the economic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers - landing the profits from a practice that has been appropriated from the colonised in the pockets of the colonisers.

"Economic exploitation". Xena have mercy.

Sure, there are yoga teachers in western societies who have studied Hindu teachings in their certified yoga teacher courses. Critically analysing your yoga practice isn't undermining the years these yogis might have spent dedicated to learning this form of exercise, art, lifestyle – whatever it may mean to them. It's about questioning whether your practice of yoga is claiming space away from people of colour to whom yoga is more than a part of their daily routine – it's a part of their cultural and religious identity.

"Claiming space away". Xena have mercy. How can white people doing yoga take space away from you doing yoga? Has somebody put a gun to your head and outlawed what you want to do?

It's about considering whether you can practice yoga without spiritually harvesting

"Spiritually harvesting". Xena have mercy.

a culture and religion that is not yours

That's because culture and religion do not belong to anyone. They're not yours, either.

when you have no deeper understanding, or desire to understand, the historical and social roots of the culture yoga comes from.

We should care....because why?

And it's about considering whether your casually saying a few namastes at the end of your yoga class feeds into the commodification of Hindu spirituality that then makes it OK for people to Instagram memes such as 'Namaste away from me', to publish a yoga book as a white woman called 'Namaslay', and to make people of South Asian and Hindu identity feel exoticised and misunderstood.

Namaslaying it!!

I wish I did yoga so I could get in a pose and instagram this exact phrase to all my white followers.

Why is your point of view more valid than hers?

Why should we, or anyone else care about your opinion?

Yoga might do you some good.

 

[Metaphor]

Why is your point of view more valid than hers?

Because I have good reasons for my views, and this woman does not. If she had good reasons for her views, she'd state them. Instead, she simply assumes 'appropriation' is bad and that her feelings are evidence that it is bad.

Why should we, or anyone else care about your opinion?

Because I have good reasons for having them, whereas 'white people doing yoga hurts my feelings' is not a good reason for white people to stop doing yoga. Not understanding anything about the spiritual history of yoga is not a good reason to stop doing yoga.

And having white skin is no reason at all to stop doing yoga, or to refrain from copying yoga and making it your own.

Copying an idea does not erase the idea. If this woman valued the spiritual aspects of yoga, what on earth is she doing in a yoga class led by a white woman who is not Hindu?

Yoga might do you some good.

I strongly suspect the physical aspects of yoga would do an enormous amount of good for me.

But are you actually advocating a white man appropriate Hindu culture by doing something that would benefit him? You're really advocating that?

 

[Jayjay]

I think those who want yoga to remainin authentic should do what the Chinese and other asian immigrants have done with food: despite huge selection of inauthentic "chinese" food for westerners, there are also authentic restaurants for those who prefer them. Everybody wins. I imagine that with the huge popularity of yoga, there is a niche for authentic Hindi yoga as well.

 

[Toni]

Because I have good reasons for my views, and this woman does not. If she had good reasons for her views, she'd state them. Instead, she simply assumes 'appropriation' is bad and that her feelings are evidence that it is bad.

She has stated her reasons for her views far more logically and more articulately than you have done. Moreover, she actually understands something about what she's writing about, and is familiar with the history, tradition and meaning behind the practice of yoga. You are too arrogant or too lazy to bother with that. Which makes your opinion less valuable.

Why should we, or anyone else care about your opinion?

Because I have good reasons for having them, whereas 'white people doing yoga hurts my feelings' is not a good reason for white people to stop doing yoga. Not understanding anything about the spiritual history of yoga is not a good reason to stop doing yoga.

And having white skin is no reason at all to stop doing yoga, or to refrain from copying yoga and making it your own.

If you have good reasons, then you have failed to articulate them.


Instead this is just another rant of your cause du jour: Somebody is saying that Metaphor can't do whatever the hell he pleases*

*without being called out on it for his lack of understanding or respect for a tradition.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

That's not the only demand from this cultural appropriation mythicist, but it's the first, in this piece:



If you don't like white people, stop going to a white yoga class.

First disclaimer. I'm not a yogi. I don't practice yoga to feel #blessed or to find my inner chakra.

That's good to hear, because chakras don't exist.

This is primarily because, as a brown girl raised Hindu, to me practising yoga is much more than regularly attending $20 classes wearing trendy activewear.

Yoga in Hindu traditions is more than physical exercise. It is a multifaceted philosophy, medicine system and way of life. The asanas, or 'poses', that people perform when they go to their local class are one part of several other practices – including mediation, abstention and liberation – that are considered as a philosophical school in Hinduism.

We should care....because why?

That isn't to say somehow that yoga belongs only to Hindus or to all Hindus. There are many caste and class-based critiques of yoga in India and Indian diasporas which say that yoga has often been used as a tool by communities with existing power to project a certain image of what it means to be Indian or Hindu at the expense of minority and oppressed voices.

These arguments aside - it is undeniable that yoga has Hindu roots.

We should care....because why?

The practice of yoga in western countries for white audiences began in the 1960s when Indian yoga gurus sold yoga as a way to fill a perceived gap in their audience's spirituality.

Chiraag Bhaktha, a.k.a Pardon My Hindi, documented a history of yoga products and advertisements from the 1960s to '80s in his installation '#whitepeopledoingyoga', which exemplified the 'white-fication' of yoga through images of Executive Yoga, Unisex Yoga and even Christian Yoga.

Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences – a way to exercise and connect with one's spirituality. Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst. Bhaktha puts it simply in his artist statement:

Why is copying an idea and modifying it morally bad? Are we just supposed to accept that it is?

"The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga's core philosophy and historic practice is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one's ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian tradition."

Though, to this Hindu girl who migrated to Australia in the 1990s, the appropriation of yoga by western audiences goes further. It exists alongside a wider ignorance about Hinduism and South Asian culture which, when you've spent a fair amount of your formative years being othered, can hit home hard.

In many western countries, Hinduism is treated as a mystic and ancient tradition and India as magical - ignoring the fact that Hinduism is a living, breathing contemporary religion practised by millions of people in their everyday lives around the world, including a huge Indian diaspora in Australia.

The history of colonisation in India means that the practice of yoga in countries with colonial ties, like Australia,

Holy shit this is offensive. Australia did not colonise India. Australia was colonised by the same people that colonised India.

can never truly be a friendly exchange.

There's nothing to exchange. Indian people do not own the idea of yoga and they have no more moral claim to it than anyone else.

In fact, during their colonial rule, the British banned certain practices of yoga which they perceived as threatening and 'less acceptable' Hindu practices. As a policy of conciliation towards some aspects of Indian culture was pursued by the British in the later years of their rule, the Brits promoted a re-appropriated more physical 'modern' yoga which is more akin to the postural yoga taught in many classes in Australia today.

We should care....because why?

Given most classes are taught by white women, and most ads you see for yoga classes or yoga wear feature white women, white women have become the embodiment of yoga in Australia. As a Hindu woman, this places me as the "other" in a culture that is mine.

You don't own yoga culture and you have no moral claim to police its use.

As South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America (SAAPYA) put it brilliantly in their short film 'We are not Exotic, We are Exhausted', such portrayals of yoga can be ostracising and excluding to South Asians who are trying to navigate a dual Western and South Asian identity, especially in the context of people regularly confusing Hindu and Hindi, white people wearing bindis to bush doofs and t-shirts with images of Ganesh and Shiva on them. It also furthers the economic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers - landing the profits from a practice that has been appropriated from the colonised in the pockets of the colonisers.

"Economic exploitation". Xena have mercy.

Sure, there are yoga teachers in western societies who have studied Hindu teachings in their certified yoga teacher courses. Critically analysing your yoga practice isn't undermining the years these yogis might have spent dedicated to learning this form of exercise, art, lifestyle – whatever it may mean to them. It's about questioning whether your practice of yoga is claiming space away from people of colour to whom yoga is more than a part of their daily routine – it's a part of their cultural and religious identity.

"Claiming space away". Xena have mercy. How can white people doing yoga take space away from you doing yoga? Has somebody put a gun to your head and outlawed what you want to do?

It's about considering whether you can practice yoga without spiritually harvesting

"Spiritually harvesting". Xena have mercy.

a culture and religion that is not yours

That's because culture and religion do not belong to anyone. They're not yours, either.

when you have no deeper understanding, or desire to understand, the historical and social roots of the culture yoga comes from.

We should care....because why?

And it's about considering whether your casually saying a few namastes at the end of your yoga class feeds into the commodification of Hindu spirituality that then makes it OK for people to Instagram memes such as 'Namaste away from me', to publish a yoga book as a white woman called 'Namaslay', and to make people of South Asian and Hindu identity feel exoticised and misunderstood.

Namaslaying it!!

I wish I did yoga so I could get in a pose and instagram this exact phrase to all my white followers.

Is this a thing? Is this a nationwide craze? Are white people en masse suffering emotional, physical, mental, financial or spiritual pain and shortening of life? Is there a deep history of Hindu persecution of white practitioners of yoga?



History didn't start last week and the relationships among individuals and between groups is deeper than a single layer.

 

[Rhea]

I agree with Metaphor's take on this. The complaint of "cultural appropriation" confuses me as it seems to insist that culture is somehow made static at some magic moment of awareness and even though it changed massively to arrive at that pinpoint of cultural awareness by that one group, they now want to thing, whatever it is, to become completely unchanged forevermore by anyone else who encounters it, owned by a special people.

And I don't get that.

I do get caring a lot about disrespect and disdain of a tradition. BUt I don't get claiming to own it such that no one else can want to do it, honor it, spread it or wear it because they're doing it wrong. They're doing to it exactly what your ancestors did to it (we know that Homo Erectus did not say "namaste," for example, so at some point someone changed the thing that was used before. And Hindi is not a proto-language, it's a morphed and evolved thing like all the others.

So respect, yes. But I think most yoga places are thinking repectfully when they say "namaste" or even when they just say, "hey these Hindu exercises are really very good for the body (we don't believe in souls) (or we feed our souls elsewhere)." Disrespect would be trying to stamp it out.

Montessori schools come in a variety of flavors and adherences to the original, and they just try to carefully disclaim what level of purity they follow.


So yeah, as JayJay says, go ahead and make a "traditional yoga" studio to bring back the perfect. But the others using it aren't stealing from you because you still have everything you had before - which is a knowledge of the kind of yoga you were taught.

Goddammit, have you seen those Indian people wearing blue jeans, after all!? Appropriating American Culture!!!! And Bollywood!? Seriously!

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I'm waiting for a Zen master to complain about cultural appropriation.

 

[Metaphor]

She has stated her reasons for her views far more logically and more articulately than you have done. Moreover, she actually understands something about what she's writing about, and is familiar with the history, tradition and meaning behind the practice of yoga. You are too arrogant or too lazy to bother with that. Which makes your opinion less valuable.

The 'tradition and meaning' behind yoga is totally irrelevant. I have no moral obligation to learn the 'tradition and meaning' behind an idea to copy it.

Indeed, do you think this woman would be satisfied if people did learn the 'tradition and meaning' and then rejected the parts they didn't like? I very much doubt a proclamation like 'I have copied the physical aspects of yoga but I don't believe the hocus pocus spiritual stuff', would go down well.

I like the harmonies in a lot of Catholic hymns and occasionally sing them, even though I don't believe a word of it.

If you have good reasons, then you have failed to articulate them.

Instead this is just another rant of your cause du jour: Somebody is saying that Metaphor can't do whatever the hell he pleases*

*without being called out on it for his lack of understanding or respect for a tradition.

Of course I can do whatever the hell I please with my own mind and body. I do not have to offer good reasons or any reason at all.

 

[Toni]

I agree with Metaphor's take on this. The complaint of "cultural appropriation" confuses me as it seems to insist that culture is somehow made static at some magic moment of awareness and even though it changed massively to arrive at that pinpoint of cultural awareness by that one group, they now want to thing, whatever it is, to become completely unchanged forevermore by anyone else who encounters it, owned by a special people.

And I don't get that.

I do get caring a lot about disrespect and disdain of a tradition. BUt I don't get claiming to own it such that no one else can want to do it, honor it, spread it or wear it because they're doing it wrong. They're doing to it exactly what your ancestors did to it (we know that Homo Erectus did not say "namaste," for example, so at some point someone changed the thing that was used before. And Hindi is not a proto-language, it's a morphed and evolved thing like all the others.

So respect, yes. But I think most yoga places are thinking repectfully when they say "namaste" or even when they just say, "hey these Hindu exercises are really very good for the body (we don't believe in souls) (or we feed our souls elsewhere)." Disrespect would be trying to stamp it out.

Montessori schools come in a variety of flavors and adherences to the original, and they just try to carefully disclaim what level of purity they follow.


So yeah, as JayJay says, go ahead and make a "traditional yoga" studio to bring back the perfect. But the others using it aren't stealing from you because you still have everything you had before - which is a knowledge of the kind of yoga you were taught.

Goddammit, have you seen those Indian people wearing blue jeans, after all!? Appropriating American Culture!!!! And Bollywood!? Seriously!

But Metaphor's 'take' seems to be to hold other people's perspective in disdain and disrespect--without actually taking the time and effort to actually..learn something about the other person's point of view and why they might see things the way that they do.

As far as people still being able to have what they had before: that's not really true, as cultural beliefs and practices become mainstreamed and sanitized and Disney-fied for mass appeal, they often crowd out the authentic in favor of a shallow, plastic version. Market forces can drive out what is authentic in favor of what has the most mass appeal. And then when the fad dies, there can be little left of the authentic to reclaim.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Cultural appropriation? Why should anyone care? It should be an individual choice.

 

[Metaphor]

Is this a thing? Is this a nationwide craze?

Is what a nationwide craze?

Cultural appropriation mythicism is not a 'craze', in the sense that a large number in the population believe the arguments of the mythicists.

But cultural appropriation mythicism is certainly crazy. And mythicists scream about entitlement when they are the ones who refuse to share ideas they did not invent and that do not belong to them; the mythicists are the ones with a sense of entitlement.

Are white people en masse suffering emotional, physical, mental, financial or spiritual pain and shortening of life? Is there a deep history of Hindu persecution of white practitioners of yoga?

I did not use the word 'persecution'. I am not persecuted if entitled Hindu women publish articles in mainstream newspapers whingeing about wicked white people copying stuff she copied from someone else.

History didn't start last week and the relationships among individuals and between groups is deeper than a single layer.

I don't have relationships with groups, nor do I have relationships with dead people I've never met.

For example, I don't have a 'relationship' with the gay community. There are individual queer people I love and some I loathe and they're not mixed up in my head as some kind of generic 'community'.

 

[Metaphor]

But Metaphor's 'take' seems to be to hold other people's perspective in disdain and disrespect--without actually taking the time and effort to actually..learn something about the other person's point of view and why they might see things the way that they do.

Except I know about her point of view because I read her article. I simply do not believe that yoga can be spiritually useful (because there are no spirits) and I do not believe that an ethnic group can own an idea, nor that I have a moral obligation to heed the gospels of the self-ordained prophets of the ethnic group.

As far as people still being able to have what they had before: that's not really true, as cultural beliefs and practices become mainstreamed and sanitized and Disney-fied for mass appeal, they often crowd out the authentic in favor of a shallow, plastic version. Market forces can drive out what is authentic in favor of what has the most mass appeal. And then when the fad dies, there can be little left of the authentic to reclaim.

First, this implicitly assumes that having mainstream appeal is less good than being 'authentic'. Please show your work. Mainstream appeal means it appeals to more people than it otherwise would, and therefore can be of more benefit than it otherwise would.

Second, I don't believe you anyway. I can't take away, I cannot drown out, anybody's religious belief by merely not believing in the same stuff. And even if I could, I'm still entitled to believe whatever I want.

 

[bigfield]

But Metaphor's 'take' seems to be to hold other people's perspective in disdain and disrespect--without actually taking the time and effort to actually..learn something about the other person's point of view and why they might see things the way that they do.

He has presented an argument as to why the claims of cultural appropriation are fallacious.

If his argument is unsound, then show how that is so.

Claiming that he 'seems' to be disrespectful and disdainful doesn't mean a damned thing because it's nothing more than a tone argument. This board is full of atheists who are disdainful and disrespectful of the religious all the time, and fuck anybody who is offended by that.

 

[whichphilosophy]

But Metaphor's 'take' seems to be to hold other people's perspective in disdain and disrespect--without actually taking the time and effort to actually..learn something about the other person's point of view and why they might see things the way that they do.

He has presented an argument as to why the claims of cultural appropriation are fallacious.

If his argument is unsound, then show how that is so.

Claiming that he 'seems' to be disrespectful and disdainful doesn't mean a damned thing because it's nothing more than a tone argument. This board is full of atheists who are disdainful and disrespectful of the religious all the time, and fuck anybody who is offended by that.

I don't find this. Most Atheists are very tolerant but of course they can be a good source for religious jokes.

 

[Frikki]

That's not the only demand from this cultural appropriation mythicist, but it's the first, in this piece:


If you don't like white people, stop going to a white yoga class.

First disclaimer. I'm not a yogi. I don't practice yoga to feel #blessed or to find my inner chakra.

That's good to hear, because chakras don't exist.

This is primarily because, as a brown girl raised Hindu, to me practising yoga is much more than regularly attending $20 classes wearing trendy activewear.

Yoga in Hindu traditions is more than physical exercise. It is a multifaceted philosophy, medicine system and way of life. The asanas, or 'poses', that people perform when they go to their local class are one part of several other practices – including mediation, abstention and liberation – that are considered as a philosophical school in Hinduism.

We should care....because why?

That isn't to say somehow that yoga belongs only to Hindus or to all Hindus. There are many caste and class-based critiques of yoga in India and Indian diasporas which say that yoga has often been used as a tool by communities with existing power to project a certain image of what it means to be Indian or Hindu at the expense of minority and oppressed voices.

These arguments aside - it is undeniable that yoga has Hindu roots.

We should care....because why?

The practice of yoga in western countries for white audiences began in the 1960s when Indian yoga gurus sold yoga as a way to fill a perceived gap in their audience's spirituality.

Chiraag Bhaktha, a.k.a Pardon My Hindi, documented a history of yoga products and advertisements from the 1960s to '80s in his installation '#whitepeopledoingyoga', which exemplified the 'white-fication' of yoga through images of Executive Yoga, Unisex Yoga and even Christian Yoga.

Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences – a way to exercise and connect with one's spirituality. Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst. Bhaktha puts it simply in his artist statement:

Why is copying an idea and modifying it morally bad? Are we just supposed to accept that it is?

"The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga's core philosophy and historic practice is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one's ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian tradition."

Though, to this Hindu girl who migrated to Australia in the 1990s, the appropriation of yoga by western audiences goes further. It exists alongside a wider ignorance about Hinduism and South Asian culture which, when you've spent a fair amount of your formative years being othered, can hit home hard.

In many western countries, Hinduism is treated as a mystic and ancient tradition and India as magical - ignoring the fact that Hinduism is a living, breathing contemporary religion practised by millions of people in their everyday lives around the world, including a huge Indian diaspora in Australia.

The history of colonisation in India means that the practice of yoga in countries with colonial ties, like Australia,

Holy shit this is offensive. Australia did not colonise India. Australia was colonised by the same people that colonised India.

can never truly be a friendly exchange.

There's nothing to exchange. Indian people do not own the idea of yoga and they have no more moral claim to it than anyone else.

In fact, during their colonial rule, the British banned certain practices of yoga which they perceived as threatening and 'less acceptable' Hindu practices. As a policy of conciliation towards some aspects of Indian culture was pursued by the British in the later years of their rule, the Brits promoted a re-appropriated more physical 'modern' yoga which is more akin to the postural yoga taught in many classes in Australia today.

We should care....because why?

Given most classes are taught by white women, and most ads you see for yoga classes or yoga wear feature white women, white women have become the embodiment of yoga in Australia. As a Hindu woman, this places me as the "other" in a culture that is mine.

You don't own yoga culture and you have no moral claim to police its use.

As South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America (SAAPYA) put it brilliantly in their short film 'We are not Exotic, We are Exhausted', such portrayals of yoga can be ostracising and excluding to South Asians who are trying to navigate a dual Western and South Asian identity, especially in the context of people regularly confusing Hindu and Hindi, white people wearing bindis to bush doofs and t-shirts with images of Ganesh and Shiva on them. It also furthers the economic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers - landing the profits from a practice that has been appropriated from the colonised in the pockets of the colonisers.

"Economic exploitation". Xena have mercy.

Sure, there are yoga teachers in western societies who have studied Hindu teachings in their certified yoga teacher courses. Critically analysing your yoga practice isn't undermining the years these yogis might have spent dedicated to learning this form of exercise, art, lifestyle – whatever it may mean to them. It's about questioning whether your practice of yoga is claiming space away from people of colour to whom yoga is more than a part of their daily routine – it's a part of their cultural and religious identity.

"Claiming space away". Xena have mercy. How can white people doing yoga take space away from you doing yoga? Has somebody put a gun to your head and outlawed what you want to do?

It's about considering whether you can practice yoga without spiritually harvesting

"Spiritually harvesting". Xena have mercy.

a culture and religion that is not yours

That's because culture and religion do not belong to anyone. They're not yours, either.

when you have no deeper understanding, or desire to understand, the historical and social roots of the culture yoga comes from.

We should care....because why?

And it's about considering whether your casually saying a few namastes at the end of your yoga class feeds into the commodification of Hindu spirituality that then makes it OK for people to Instagram memes such as 'Namaste away from me', to publish a yoga book as a white woman called 'Namaslay', and to make people of South Asian and Hindu identity feel exoticised and misunderstood.

Namaslaying it!!

I wish I did yoga so I could get in a pose and instagram this exact phrase to all my white followers.

You are a huge fucking SJW.

 

[Will Wiley]

Some people think "yoga" is from Africa not India. Others that what we call "yoga" really owes its debt to British gymnastics and calisthenics.
One thing we know is that ol' Patanjali doesn't know anything about what we call yoga today.

 

[Tigers!]

I'm waiting for a Zen master to complain about cultural appropriation.

And lets not mention "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". That's cultural appropriation!

 

[bigfield]

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Tubgirl?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I'm waiting for a Zen master to complain about cultural appropriation.

Ya, that's the frigging issue, isn't it? If they're going to just accept this shit in such a calm and unruffled manner, people are going to assume that they find it acceptable. They need to freak the fuck out a bit more.