User talk:User Tammy

Hello Yoga Mat! That is a nice name. What aspects of yoga are you interested in? Mitsube (talk) 00:00, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Yoga Mat. Thanks for the invite. I'd like to contribute something to your yoga project, but to be honest I don't know a great deal about yoga. Also, I'm really busy these days. But if I have time and if I can add something of interest, I shall certainly try. Good luck, anyway, with the project. Sounds very worthwhile. Suddha (talk) 00:59, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:WikiProject Yoga[edit]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Yoga, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Yoga and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:WikiProject Yoga during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. JJ98 (Talk) 00:54, 7 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

discussion on yoga as exercise[edit]

Let's continue to discuss the weasel word/content issues on the the article talk page. I posted something yesterday (and today) and would like to collaborate with you to improve the article.[1] Octopet (talk) 16:18, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Tulāsana for deletion[edit]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Tulāsana is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tulāsana until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on good quality evidence, and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article.

Factual addendum to above template notification: The AfD discussion concerns a total of 58 asana articles. MarB4 •ɯɒɹ• 09:55, 2 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Asana and other Hatha yoga articles[edit]

Hi, I'm not sure how active you may be now, but I see you have edited lately, so I wondered if you'd be interested to take a look at Asana, which I have revised (ok, rewritten) and illustrated? I'm also working on List of asanas - much improved, but with much still to do - and individual asana articles when I bump into them. Any suggestions or contributions would be very welcome. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:08, 4 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, TBH it's not really my area of expertise. I tend to focus on quality issues such as reliability, balance and neutrality in articles rather than producing content. Both articles read quite well although the first line on the Asana article which reads, 'asana is a body posture, originally sitting for meditation, but more generally for hatha yoga or yoga as exercise' it's hard to justify the two latter categories as being more generalized as 'meditation'. I think it should read something like, 'most frequently encountered in hatha yoga or yoga as exercise'.

Many thanks, I'll reword that. I'm reading up on the history, which is proving very surprising. The question of whether we call it "yoga" or something else is rather central, as at the moment the Yoga article is about Yoga (Hinduism) instead of Yoga (postural, modern, hatha, etc), and we basically don't have an article on the second topic at all: Asana covers quite a bit of the territory, but obviously shouldn't (and doesn't) go into the question of approaches, whether pranayama is included, and such like topics. I will put together a Yoga (postural...) article and take things from there. Happy New Year! Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:43, 28 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Reading up on the history also requires reading up on the history of the history (if you see what I mean). The research agenda of Mallinson, Singleton et al for example although notable for Wikipedia purposes is debatable for a few reasons. This piece although a little bit meandering may be instructive in terms of a counter-narrative to the received history of 'Modern Yoga' for example. Terms like 'Modern Postural Yoga' are empty buzzwords. When you look at the taxonomy in this way it means nothing in terms of information science. It was invented by de Michelis/Alter around 2006 (from memory) and is an arbitrary classification and just makes no sense. No one has ever provided a plausible definition of what 'modern' or 'postural' are to be able to create a useful distinction for analysis! I have lots on this in my personal archives but generally don't publish it because the standard of scholarship is so poor in these aspects that it seems to do a good enough job of defeating itself. Bye for now Yoga Mat (talk) 19:08, 28 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, I was away over Christmas and missed this comment. Both your sources are interesting and relevant. I wholly agree that De Michelis's typology is a bit iffy - Singleton thinks so to - and Mallinson has in the past 8 years managed to temper Singleton's PhD iconoclasm with a bit of historical knowledge of how asanas grew throughout the Medieval period, as indeed the article on Modern yoga makes clear. I'll add a note now on De Michelis's typology, just to say that it's her point of view. Thanks for Wood, too, btw. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:54, 8 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

TBH, the whole 'Modern Yoga' thesis is a mess, and something to that effect quite early on would be informative I think. I think I still have a personal email in my archive from de Michelis disclaiming the typology probably about 3 years ago and probably is not her view now... not sure. Anyway David Gordon White I think prefers the term 'Big Yoga' and Dr. Anne Koch is working on what I believe to be a very worthwhile body of work analyzing the phenomenon not as a subordinate branch of earlier forms but in terms of a broad, 'cosmopolitan spiritual mood' and (less convincingly IMO) 'Global Yoga'. There is much more work to do here I think because there are so many complex factors involved. From the research I have done, using the word 'Modern Yoga' to designate the social phenomenon I think we are all observing is to advance the individual originator's world view, not as from within an established academic discipline. My research for example shows the demand is also connected to Austen's gothic imaginaries... and much else besides... Beatrix Hauser's 'Bodily Practice in Transcultural Perspective' I think also deflates the idea of Modern Yoga as a reliable object of study... prefering 'Transcultural Yoga'. We have to be careful about recentism here too. Subjects can of course be notably wrong as well as notably worthwhile as the article on say Phrenology will testify to? BFN Yoga Mat (talk) 19:34, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I'm not using De Michelis's term (or her typology, or her argument) other than basically to say she said it (so as to get it out of the way). I'd be happy with any better term, including just "yoga" as millions of people call it nowadays - there is no argument, surely, that yoga is now practised by hundreds of millions of non-Hindus across the Western world, and that they buy billions of dollars' worth of goods and services. Anyway, there is abundant non-academic evidence that that is so. On the choice of terms "big yoga" so far gets very few hits by comparison with a range of popular phrases (from "yoga pants" on in), and "global yoga" gets even fewer (of course, we've now created one more hit...) so I'd say they were non-starters really. Anyway, the article as written is extremely fully cited and is not particularly academic, certainly not one-sidedly so. Hope this helps. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:18, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, but I don't think the overall tone of the article helps as much as it could. I think there are a few things to respond to here. The article as a whole gives the impression that 1) lots of people are designating a variety of activities as a form of yoga (often with adjectives) or other modifiers and 2) the term 'Modern Yoga' has gained sufficient influence as an umbrella term for most of it based on attributes of say, popularity, commerce and (most controversially perhaps) because participants are possibly ambivalent about it's Indian provenance. The issue here (in terms of the Wikipedia article only) I think isn't whether or not lots of people are participating, (because an article stands whether it has sufficient notable sources - not if it is popular - although there is often of course a correlation between the two as research agendas are nowadays skewed in favor of what is called 'impact' hence all the dubious academic research on 'wellness' for example) or whether it is yoga, (which is a complex philosophical question) but how the term Modern Yoga has been used in the sources quoted? In this sense, the article ought to be written in a more encyclopedic style that indicates how the term fails to adequately capture the social realities and therefore perhaps ought to be seen for what it is, a problematic term that is being used quite inconsistently by a few individual scholars with no obvious reference to either European or Asian periodizations? Here is just a taste of the problem of using the term 'Modern Yoga' as a meaningful catch-all from Hauser (2013):

De Michelis’ ideal-typical categories thus have a weakness since they imply a vital difference in approaching yoga as belief system or as a set of physical exercises ...both in the Indian context and in the allegedly secularized, late modern, post-industrial settings where the boundaries between health behavior, self-cultivation, and religious aspirations are increasingly blurred, where there is often no clear line between spiritual practice and psychosomatic self-help. While they exemplify common ways that yoga schools distance themselves from each other (...), they do not help theorize the multiple and competing logics used to interpret and circulate yoga, or the ambivalent manifestations and shifts in overall systemic orientation (its ontological status) that occur while practices and ideas remain. The mimetic process of deciphering and encoding yoga escapes a simplistic dialectic of mind and body, religious versus secular. (...) With regard to yoga in post-World War II Germany, Christian Fuchs identified four periods: (1) the “consolidation” of dispersed individuals interested in yoga from 1945 to 1955; (2) the “institutionalization” of yoga instruction between 1956 and 1966; (3) the emergence and “organization” of a yoga movement between 1967 and 1979; and (4) the “professionalization” of teacher training and quality management between 1980 and 1990.With regard to the United Kingdom, De Michelis distinguished three different time periods: (1) the “popularization” of yoga from the 1950s to mid-1970s; (2) the “consolidation” from the mid-1970s to late 1980s; and (3) the “acculturation” of yoga from the late 1980s to date. These types of regional studies are of great significance since they highlight the social conditions that invited and accompanied the gradual acceptance of yoga in the Western hemisphere. Yoga Mat (talk) 12:05, 15 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, I'll take these into account and read through the article with your thoughts in mind. I'll repeat, however, that I totally agree with the scholars you mention that De Michelis's approach isn't adequate, which I'm relaxed about because the article does not depend on it. The choice of title is difficult because there's another article called "Yoga", the natural title for this article, and all the academic terms are, well, hopelessly academic. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:37, 15 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]