Mediating yoga: An exploration of the cultural translation of yoga in the UK through its popular representations (1955-1975)

Crisp, Simon (2025) Mediating yoga: An exploration of the cultural translation of yoga in the UK through its popular representations (1955-1975). Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.

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Abstract

This thesis uses media representations of yoga during a phase of its popularisation in the UK (De Michelis, 2004) to examine the processes of its cultural translation as a transcultural practice. Located at the intersection of yoga studies and media and cultural studies, it considers the contextual (re)creation of yoga as the product of a series of overlapping and competing understandings. Using a discourse-theoretical analysis approach (Carpentier & De Cleen, 2007; Van Brussel et al., 2019) and the framework of cultural translation (Maitland, 2017), such understandings of yoga emerge as the result of a complex interplay of discourses and relationships rather than attempts to replicate a pre-existing practice. This approach, in turn, enables the work to address issues relating to yoga’s appropriation and commodification from a new perspective.

Based on a study of media texts and archive materials relating to yoga from 1955 to 1975, the thesis draws out a series of key ‘discursive contours’ as used by Bowman (2021). These are used to interrogate how representations of yoga in the UK were shaped in part by colonial and orientalist discourse, media engagement, the contextual understandings and experience of yogis, and commercial interests. These representations are triangulated with ethnohistorical interviews with practitioners from the period and their personal collections, conceptualised within a (yoga) community archive ecology model. This allows the research to challenge and/or corroborate the mediations of yoga, not in terms of whether they were factually accurate, but as important discursive texts themselves.

It is argued that the cultural translations of yoga which permeated, and the way yoga came to be understood in this period, were never intended to be a facsimile or replication of a pre-existing South Asian practice (even if they suggested they were), but contextual creations built upon discourse, experience, and cultural needs. Therefore, the value of researching such varied representations comes not from questioning what aspects of yoga they focus on or omit but what they can reveal about the contextual time and space of their creation. This thesis will be of interest to those researching the transcultural movement of cultural practices or forms, and exploring the dynamics of power, which can play a role in shaping how something is understood and developed within that process.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Dates:	Date Event 27 January 2025 Accepted
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Yoga, Media representation, Media, Cultural translation, Popular culture, Cultural appropriation, Commodification, Tradition, Orientalism, Transcultural, UK.
Subjects:	CAH00 - multidisciplinary > CAH00-00 - multidisciplinary > CAH00-00-00 - multidisciplinary CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-06 - cultural studies CAH24 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01-05 - media studies
Divisions:	Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media
Depositing User:	Louise Muldowney
Date Deposited:	26 Feb 2025 12:05
Last Modified:	26 Feb 2025 12:05
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16181

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