Modern Postural Yoga and the Health-Spirituality-Neoliberalism Nexus

The practice of yoga has become an integral part of practitioners’ lifestyles, spirituality, and therapeutic paths across the world, not to mention institutional and governmental interventions of pedagogical, rehabilitative, and political nature in settings as diverse as schools, hospitals, and prisons. While social science literature has explored some of these areas of analysis, we currently know little about how particular conceptions of health and wellbeing, of the sacred, and of the economic-political continuum overlap, diverge, and reciprocally influence each other, in reference to yoga and beyond. Using the example of “modern postural yoga”, this paper aims to provide a preliminary account of what we term the Health-Spirituality-Neoliberalism Nexus, that is, of the manners in which different “social fields”, such as the medical/therapeutic, the spiritual/religious, and the political/economic fields, are partly governed by the same practical-discursive logics and display profound “symbiotic relationships”. More specifically, this paper elucidates how specific health discourses centered around practitioners’ self-care, self-responsibility, and self-control dominate, not only the medical/therapeutic field, but also the landscape of contemporary spiritualities and the widespread neoliberal ethos that characterizes the current social, political, and economic model of Westernized societies. Here, the categories of physical and psychological health, the idea of a fulfilling spiritual life, and economic success display deep “elective affinities” that we seek to uncover mobilizing a series of foundational sociological concepts such as the Bourdieusian notion of “field” and a Foucaultian reading of “biopolitics” and “governmentality”.