One of the primary questions students of modern yoga seek to answer is precisely how the forms of contemporary yoga practiced today are connected to pre-modern forms of yoga developed in India. To begin to answer this question and to formulate new questions, this course will trace some of the historical continuities and discontinuities between pre-modern and modern yoga practices, demonstrating that modern yoga is a complicated, transnational cultural product. We will explore the legacy of the first yoga teachers who brought yoga to America and Europe as well as yoga’s development from a historical, social, and political perspective.

Students will thus take into account current scholarly debates regarding the relationship of transnational yoga to categories such as capitalism, neoliberalism, orientalism, racism, speciesism, gender, cultural appropriation, biopolitics, nationalism, and colonization. Doing so will encourage yoga practitioners to adopt new methodologies concerning the critical study of modern yoga, and will also give them an opportunity to confront and unravel saṃskāras, or acquired mental impressions and social conditionings, related to their inherited beliefs regarding the origins, history, and contemporary practice of yoga. The course is thus simultaneously intellectual as well as, from a yogic perspective, transformational.

Course Details

Learning Area

Yoga, Self-care and Spirituality

Instructor

Christopher Miller, PhD

Christopher Jain Miller is the co-founder, Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute. He completed his PhD in the study of Religion at the University of California, Davis and is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich's Asien-Orient-Institut and Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology where he co-developed and co-runs a remotely available Masters Degree Program focusing on Engaged Jain Studies. His current research focuses on Engaged Jainism and Modern Yoga, and he is the author of a number of articles and book chapters concerned with Jainism and the practice of modern yoga. Christopher is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024), as well as co-editor of the volumes Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Approaches to the Study of Jain Social Engagement (SUNY 2025) and Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington 2020).