Yoga, one of India’s most celebrated cultural exports, is an increasingly popular practice around the world. This symposium aims to add scholarly depth to one of the current “hot topics” in contemporary international communities of yoga practice: the cultural politics of the ideal body. This symposium will consider the rise of a body image in the West centered around beauty ideals of a white female flexible body as well as tracing some alternatives to that gendered image. We bring together experts from South Asian studies to anthropology to yoga practice to discuss how yoga has shaped ideas about ideal (and imperfect) bodies in different times and places.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph S. Alter, Yale-National University of Singapore College

“Yoga as Nature Cure: Modernity, Medicine, and the Global Political Ecology of Bodies”

Registration and a full program are available at http://chl.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/658/yoga-and-body-past-and-present-symposium.

Presented by the South Asia Research Institute. Supported by the Research School of Asia and the Pacific, School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.