Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination  (via adailyriot)

Take note white liberals and hipsters in Guelph.

(via sheresists)

I don’t think all yoga is some New Age bullshit. My relatives run a yoga studio just because they fucking like doing. 

(via thatgirlshouldhavebeenamansion)

I don’t think that the author is arguing that yoga, meditation and mysticism is new age bullshit per se, but that how they have been digested by the new age movement has created a load of bullshit consumer products which allow westerners to feel less guilty about their lives. The philosophy of yoga is complicated, beautiful and has been developing for thousands of years. It deserves to be respected and understood, at least in part, in terms of the cultural forces which created it. This is not done by many North Americans who see it simply as a way to exercise and provide instant spiritual gratification.

(via peerpleasure)

To the person who replied above peerpleasure, I think that’s the problem: taking an aspect of another person’s culture because “they like fucking doing.” This attitude reflects a gross sense of entitlement that many Westerners have over other cultures that do not belong to them. I realize that in many cases, discussions of cultural appropriation can require a nuanced position. However, the western way of “enjoying” another person’s culture has been largely unconsensual, and many aspects of these traditions have been removed from their historical and cultural specificity and repackaged to be consumed and commodified for a western audience. Many yoga studios are run by white folks, and are largely inaccessible to people who are not middle class (because it’s very expensive). First of all, it contributes to cultural genocide (because again, what was once a culturally specific practice is turned into something completely different that belongs to white folks), and second of all, it’s another instance in which white folks profit from non-western traditions, whereas the folks whose cultural traditions that they belong to, do not enjoy the same wealth that those western folks do. 

(via sheresists)

The problem with yoga, as I see it, is kind of two fold. On the one hand, it’s very, very good at what The West uses it for. It’s low impact and requires no additional equipment. It’s easily graded and you can do it at your own pace. Also, by it’s very nature it’s quite relaxing, in a way that going to the gym - with all it’s focus on goals - isn’t. It’s just a very, very good all over exercise regime that anyone can do.

However, the problem lies in the way it’s marketed. If I were to start a night class in advanced stretching and positive thoughts, I’d be laughed at, but teach the same stuff as an “ancient Asian meditative practice” and I’ll be knee deep in Yuppies high on Eat.Pray.Love who are willing to spend vast amounts of money to cleanse their chakras and realign their third eye.

I have no problems with the original practises of Yoga, that’s someone elses beliefs and I believe in not being a jerk about another persons belief. But in hijacking those beliefs and distilling them to some namaste “the god within me salutes the god withing you” wank, you lose all the subtlety and meaning behind what is, after all, somebody elses beliefs.

Think of it this way. Lets say somebody in India started selling communion wafers and wine as this great new dieting regime. Just imagine the slogan “GET THE BODY OF CHRIST! WITH NEW COMMUNION WAFERS!”. Now, a diet of Communion Wafers may indeed help you lose weight, and Communion Wine may indeed have great relaxational benefits, but to take those elements of the Christian religion, and strip away all the complicated layers of meaning, and all the history that is involved, and not only to do that but to SELL it, this stuff which is considered sacred to so many, you’d say that’s wrong, right? You’d call bullshit and stage a protest.

Well, it’s kind of the same idea.

(via name-redacted)

Reblogging for AWESOME commentary.

(via tiaramerchgirl)

No, it really isn’t the same.

What would be the same is if an Indian state decided to forcibly conquer the whole of the global North using lots of violence, expropriate huge amounts of profits, force down the prices of local goods, mock and malign the languages, religions, customs, crafts, sports, arts and sciences of those societies, teach all of the people there to hate themselves except a small elite who were trained to serve the imperial state who were trained to be just like their conquerors except inferior cos they’re the wrong colour, create famines in which millions of people die by fucking with the prices of agricultural goods, destroy local industries in order to set up new ones in the imperial capital, and then sell back the industrial goods to the conquered places at higher prices, ensuring ongoing debt, outright kill a bunch of people, forcibly convert people, make their practices illegal, then establish a small elite subculture of people to fetishise those practices and profit off selling them back to white people in an expensive and exoticised package but prevent them from practicing them in their traditional ways. Then it would be like cultural appropriation.

(via ardhra)