Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive field research at a school in southern India, I discuss students' responses to a pervasive threat of "deethicalization" by which the poses (asana) they perform are reduced to "mere" physical exercise.

Paper long abstract:

Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of asana (posture, pose) which they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. While these techniques of the self are specified in great detail, the end to which students' efforts are directed is understood in various ways and seems ultimately indeterminate. This ethical project is, in comparison with others, strong on technique but weak on telos. As a consequence, techniques of asana become vulnerable to a kind of "deethicalization" in which they are 'bleached' of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. Based on extensive field research at a school in southern India, in this presentation I discuss responses to this pervasive threat of "deethicalization" and the sense in which it can be understood in relation to processes of commodification and the incorporation of yoga into neo-liberal forms of self-governance. The process of deethicalization is similar, though not quite identical to what Mahmood (2012[2005]) describes as 'the folklorization of worship' in her ethnography of an Egyptian piety movement. One might also think of protestant reform as a response to a perceived deethicalization of the practices of worship in the European middle ages (Weber 1958 [1904-1905], Keane 2007). Generally, it seems, wherever techniques are isolable and detachable from the larger ethical projects within which they are understood to operate, the semiotic process of deethicalization is possible.