Due to technical difficulties, please view Dr.Patrick McCartney's presentation today via yogascapes in japan's facebook page  via the link https://www.facebook.com/yogascapesinjapan/videos/1934830923493670/?notif_id=1524899657493205&notif_t=live_video_explicit

In the presentation I'm giving tomorrow, I start by asking this question: "How is legitimacy acquired, negotiated, contested and expressed within the transglobal yoga industry?" To answer this, I will talk about many things, but they all seem to boil down to  this graphic above, which essentially is the abstract distillation of my 450p dissertation into one slide. 

Info about the presentation: 

 Will hopefully be streaming live via this link between 4pm-5.30 GMT+9 Saturday 28 April 2018 from Kyoto, Japan.

Am delighted to share that this article of mine is now freely available from the open access journal Ethnologica Actualis.

Below is my updated resume for presentation at the World Sanskrit Conference, which is happening in Vancouver in July.

From within the global wellness industry, this suspicious and critical explication focuses on drawing together the tacit social, political and theological parameters involved in creating unlikely alliances between global yogis and Hindu supremacists. The commodification of yoga rarefies utopian-inspired, yoga-related memes to widen symbolic valency. This leads to porous boundaries across the heterotopic spaces within Yogaland’s social imaginary consumption-scape. And allows for seemingly incommensurable worlds to merge, which can potentially lead to unsuspecting global yogis, who turn to yoga through the anti-modern impulse, to learn more about the wellness benefits of yoga-inspired lifestyles to become unwitting supporters of Hindutva. While not suggesting a conspiratorial cabal, in a seemingly independent, yet commensalic way, this occurs through shared reliance on the Sanskrit episteme and the Romantic-Orientalist-colonial-imagined, utopian-inspired narratives that are promoted by the global yoga industry, the Indian government’s ministries of tourism, health and yoga, and the Hindutva parivar, which promote a “yogic” or “Vedic way of life” as superior to all other lifestyles.
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Yet, we do not seem to consider the implications related to how global yogis, who take their leisure/lifestyle seriously, imbibe dogmatically theological propositions related to the history and authenticity of yoga, which has real world implications for marginalized groups in India. Therefore, who, or what, is a yoga fundamentalist? And, why should we care?

It has taken a few months but finally this article is now published. I was invited to write up a less academic article about my project related to 'Sanskrit-speaking' villages in India. This is a project that I've worked on in an oblique way over the past 10 years or so. I hope to do more work on this fascinating phenomenon. 

Also, here is another article that I published on Medium. It is also a reflective piece on my journey over the past 10 years or so. It is in some ways the background to the article above, which is the background to the academic articles I've published about these villages. 

If anyone is interested, the Kobe Yogafest is on tomorrow. I'll be heading down there to check it out, maybe take a class or three. Here is the information about it, if you'd like to know more. 

As spring gets into top gear, there seems to be a lot more on offer. There is SUP yoga on all weekend at Lake Biwako. And in a couple of weekends there is a yoga festival in Nagoya. 

I woke up today to find out that, for whatever reason, the website address has been changed from https://yogascapesinjapan.com/ to https://yogascapes.weebly.com/ - I have written to weebly and await a response. Thanks for your understanding. 

It sounds like the start to a good joke, doesn’t it? However, it’s not. At least, not yet...to get to the punch line you'll have to click here.

On 28th April I'll be joining Dr Jason Birch for an afternoon of talks related to our respective studies of yoga. All the information can be found here, if you'd like to attend this free event. I hope to record this event and post it later.