Shaping models of social relations through yoga practice

Matylda Ciolkosz

You can watch the recording of this event on YouTube .

---

Over centuries, yoga has been embedded in changing social contexts. In a sense, history of yoga and yogic practices can be viewed as a history of responding to these contexts by negotiating social and personal boundaries. This applies as much to the austerities of ancient renouncers as to contemporary asana practices in Western yoga studios.In her talk, Matylda Ciołkosz will discuss how different techniques of the body applied during asana practice may influence the way practitioners understand and enact social relations. She will explain how movement and touch applied on the mat may influence relations off the mat both between co-practitioners and between practitioners and instructors. Her main case studies will be three systems of modern postural yoga - Viniyoga, Iyengar Yoga, and Ashtanga Yoga of K. Pattabhi Jois.

This event will be bookable via our Eventbrite page.

Speaker Biography

Matylda Ciołkosz is an assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of Religions, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her academic interests focus on the role of embodiment in the formation and transformations of religious systems. In her methodological approach, she combines the tenets of enactivism with cognitive linguistics and phenomenology.She is currently working on a monograph summarising her longtime research into modern postural yoga.