2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press
Paul Bramadat, Professor and Director
Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria
When I began my fieldwork for what has since become Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World, to be published in April 2025 with McGill-Queen’s University Press, I was interested in theoretical debates (not uncommon in political science and sociology) related to the tension between the global and the local. In my view, a critical analysis of postural yoga would help me understand better the whereabouts, nature, function, and future, of religious movements in increasingly secular liberal democratic societies.
Thanks to the work of scholars such as Elizabeth De Michelis, Mark Singleton, Anya Foxen, Stuart Sarbacker, and Stephanie Syman, many of us know why and how the main expressions of postural yoga in the West were consolidated about 100 years ago out of a long and messy history of yoga in South Asia. And thanks to the work of scholars such as Andrea Jain and Amanda Lucia, many of us know how about 40 or 50 years ago these South Asian practices and philosophies were absorbed into and altered by the ethos and economy of contemporary North America.
With the voices of these yoga scholars in my head, I went into the field in 2022 after inquiring into the tensions between so called religious and secular features of western societies for two and a half decades. My goal was both modest and grand: to determine whether postural yoga was becoming an increasingly homogenous global commodity, or whether in fact yoga communities were meaningfully inflected by the distinctive national social realities in which they thrived. I figured that a comparison between similar US and Canadian yoga spaces would demonstrate whether these spaces were being colonized by larger hegemonic factors.
These questions still interest to me, and I do occasionally discuss “glocalization” in the book. This neologism is surely one of the academy’s uglier inventions, but one that nonetheless captures well the often counter-intuitive ways individuals and communities join, escape, or get crushed by the neoliberal juggernaut.

In Yogalands Paul Bramadat wrestles with his position as a skeptical scholar who is also a devoted yoga practitioner. Drawing from his own experience, and from conversations with hundreds of yoga teachers and students in the United States and Canada, he seeks to understand what yoga means for people in the modern West.
In this book, I used interviews, focus groups, site visits, class experiences, a survey, a teacher training program, theoretical inquiries, and auto-ethnography, to enter and take readers into the world of postural yoga. My account traces the major fault-lines in yogaland: cultural appropriation; the relationship between yoga and trauma; what we learn from the way yoga shifts between being a religious tradition, a spiritual practice, and a health intervention; the impact of sexual misconduct scandals; the role of political factors in the popularity of modern postural yoga; the power of beauty and charismatic authority; and India as a marker of authenticity throughout North American yoga communities.
The project research assistant and I conducted research in paired cities (Winnipeg and Indianapolis; Vancouver and Los Angeles; Toronto and New York; with Victoria being a stand-alone research site) to see whether these issues were being imagined and dealt with differently in Canada than in the US. A North American survey (N=650) and the existing theoretical and empirical work in yoga studies allowed additional national contrasts.
It turns out that the border did matter, especially when it came to the ways healthcare was imagined in each place and the ways racialization (and relatedly, cultural appropriation) was thematized. Canadians clearly felt more confident about their society’s interests in their wellbeing than Americans did, and this had some impact on the ways postural yoga seemed to be imagined in these two societies. Canadian and American yoga teachers and students also thought somewhat differently about cultural appropriation and racism since, after all, each society has its own ways of constructing race, multiculturalism, and identity.
But the real surprise was how, with some exceptions, these issues were not very prominent in the minds and communities of the hundreds of people we met. It became clear within the first weeks in the field that if I continued to look for (just) national differences in our survey, interviews, and focus group data, the book would be, frankly, quite boring to write and read.
What might have been a great disappointment was, in the end, a real opportunity, though, since at the same time that it became clear to me that the national differences were not as interesting as I thought they might be, I was noticing that teachers and advanced students talked – at length and in brutal detail – about their own wounded bodies and minds, and about the ways their yoga practices offered them distinctive and in some cases the only experiences of wholeness they could find in a world running amok. Another way to put it would be that the borders between one nation and another were less important for the people among whom I practiced than the borders between their mats and an outside world often framed as too loud, fast, and dirty.
The economic and political contexts that most interested me when I was imagining the project continued and continue to be relevant. The challenge is to provide a textured account of the ways postural yoga has become not just a ubiquitous commodity divorced from its rich South Asian social and religious origins and marketed to relatively affluent (and mostly white women) consumers, but also a life-saving physical and spiritual wellness intervention that responds to a world straining under the syndemic of climate change, the COVID pandemic, and right-wing populism in many parts of the world.
If my initial framing questions turned out to be rather specious (though innocently so), there was a second failure, or at least a real pivot. I had planned to indicate both that I am a quite committed asana practitioner (in the Ashtanga tradition) and also that my father was of South Asian descent. I thought it would be important to note these features of my “positionality”, but truth be told, I thought these would have a negligible impact on my experiences and the book itself.

In retrospect, my confidence that I could mention and then compartmentalize these elements was at best very naïve. It is a little embarrassing that I had so profoundly underestimated the impact of being a half-Indian scholar who practices Ashtanga yoga under the hands-on supervision of exacting teachers for about 90 minutes (at 6AM) six times a week. It turned out – why I had not anticipated this is beyond me now – that this coloured the ways people interacted with me, the things I noticed, enjoyed, found irritating, and the conclusions that seemed compelling.
When I finally gave myself permission to include auto-ethnographic content and to use a range of prose styles, I felt a sense of relief. It was not the relief some people might feel from self-indulgence, but rather the relief of authenticity (to use a word I cannot avoid here but generally think is invoked to claim power in disingenuous ways).
Including my own experiences and new modes of writing in my scholarly work just felt right. But the rightness was not just personal; it seemed to me that the analysis of postural yoga in North America – the relevance of the border, the impact of #metoo, the question of commodification – was more cogent and compelling when I did not sequester or diminish the fact that I was viewing those particular bodies from within this particular body (with its own passport, sexual orientation, social class, age, and complexion).
The dilemma faced by the scholar-practitioner became real for me in ways it had never been before. Indeed, I am in the early phases of a subsequent project called We Should Know Better: Western Scholars of Religion Involved in Asian Spiritual Practices, in which I lead an international team of scholar-practitioners (of yoga, reiki, mindfulness, etc.) in a conversation about why we should know better –- thanks to Said, Asad, Lincoln, J.Z. Smith, McCutcheon, et al — but still find ourselves drawn to the traditions we love.
Yogalands is written with both the scholar and the curious non-scholar in mind. Of course, we all hope for this, but I have eschewed some of the conventions of scholarly writing, and I am fortunate to work with an editor and a press interested in bridging the divide between smart practitioners and professional academics. I leave it to others to determine whether I have been judicious in my use of auto-ethnographic techniques and insider yoga-habitus alongside more conventional tools, theories, and intuitions. I am enough of a pragmatist to think that our main job as scholars is to pose good, non-rhetorical questions and then use all the tools at our disposal in answering them. In my case, it was only by changing both the questions and tools that I could provide an adequate account of postural yoga as a cultural commodity, a political tool, a healing modality, and a spiritual path.