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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores touch as a modality of knowing the body otherwise in the post-colonial spiritual-health practice of yoga. Pulling our attention, touch disrupts Cartesian accounts of mind and body and liberal ideals of self-sovereignty, pointing up the body’s relationality in-worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores touch as a mode of attending to and experiencing the body otherwise in a postcolonial spiritual-health practice. Drawing upon fieldwork beginning just prior to and following the coronavirus pandemic at a Los Angeles-based school for Mysore Ashtanga yoga, I discuss how touch was reconfigured across distance and technological mediation as the school shifted from in-person to zoom for practice. This sudden “breakdown” (Zigon 2007) to the spatiotemporal norms of yoga constituted a transformation to my own and my informants’ modes of attention, enabling a heightened reflexivity and desire for the no-longer actual. That is, touch’s absence foregrounded its presence as a trace of the body’s relationality, connectivity and affectivity. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of embodiment (Al-Saji 2010; Csordas 1990), this paper proposes touch as an Otherwise to Cartesian modes of knowing—scopic, auditory and linguistic—that objectify the mind, body and self. I consider it a mode of attention that is both constituted by social space and disruptive of subject-object, active-passive dichotomies: affectively pulling the body toward intersubjective worlds, touch points up the body’s unavoidable relationality and coexistence. Yet not all touch solicits attention: what is registered legible as touch demonstrates the partiality of the lived body as a tactile field.