UCLA

Mysore Ashtanga yoga is a South Asian postcolonial practice recognized for its universal spiritual and physical health benefits, yet exclusively sought out and accessed by the middle and upper classes. This paper charts the work that a yoga school in the U.S undertakes in response to this apparent contradiction. Drawing on a Peircean semiotic framework, it argues that this work hinges on a semiotic labor of personalization, wherein students are taught to privilege real-time instantiations of an otherwise standardized form, and to use such signs of difference as a means to represent their self-singularity. By teaching students to recognize themselves in a generic form, the school seeks to enable universal access to an otherwise exclusionary institution, and to enact accompanying liberal ideals of self. Far from universal and straightforward as practitioners imagine, however, access and inclusion are ever-shifting targets, the result of a scalar work. Introducing yoga schools as sites of ideological work where late modern assumptions of self, body and material form are put into concerted practice, the paper situates this school’s project of reform within the contradictions immanent to a globalizing modernity.