Bodies in yoga: tangled discourses in Canadian studios.

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a one and a half-year ethnographic study conducted in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The research focused on participants' experiences of their bodies in the context of yoga as a health practice-specifically how they conceptualised their musculoskeletal bodies in this practice through ideas of systems, fragments, and materiality. It argues that participants' larger narratives about health and healthy bodies inform how yoga as a health practice is embedded in discourses of body work where yoga, health, and particular notions of bodily-ness become a project for the transformation of the self into a particular idea of what a body is or should be.