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Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores the understudied technique of prāṇāyāma (breath control) within modern yoga research, demonstrating the tensions between the contemporary embodiment of the closed/individualistic medieval haṭha-yoga body and the environmentally entangled body of late necropolitical capitalism.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores the understudied technique of prāṇāyāma (breath control) within modern yoga research, demonstrating the tensions between the contemporary embodiment of the closed/individualistic medieval haṭha-yoga body and the environmentally entangled body of late necropolitical capitalism. It examines two distinct conceptualizations of the yogic body in practice at a yoga center in Maharashtra, India: 1) the self-purifying, self-sacrificial haṭha-yoga body, in relationship to 2) the socially embedded, environmentally entangled body from a social scientific perspective. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017, I illustrate how these two seemingly incompatible models coexist within the context of asthma patients who inhale polluted urban air as part of their asthmatic treatment regimen. The paper includes detailed ethnographic accounts of prāṇāyāma theory and practice at the institute, alongside a social-historical examination of the development of prāṇāyāma in colonial and post-colonial India, particularly in relation to air pollution. Finally, engaging with scholarship in pollution studies, I show that two forms of sacrifice are simultaneously occurring at the yoga institute: one within the internalized sacrifice of the haṭha-yoga body (from an emic perspective), and the other on alter of necropolitical capitalism (using a critical, etic analytical framework).