Yoga originated in the East and was appropriated by the West. It transits between tradition and research, intersects science and religion, oscillating among the profane and the sacred. It has morphed from social invisibility into a mainstream practice. It can be comprehended as a philosophical school, as well as a mind-body practice recognized by the World Health Organization, generating contact zones and symbolic frontiers with different fields of knowledge. In contemporary times it is discussed by the social and human sciences. This essay offers reflections on how yoga has been approached by the fields of health, religion, philosophy, art, education, anthropology, and sociology, and discusses the development of yoga as an object of boundaries.
Keywords: Yoga. Philosophical system of yoga. Symbolic boundaries. Complementary and integrative practices.
Although yoga arose in India as a tradition passed from master to disciple, whose secrets were revealed through initiation and disseminated through a generational chain of instructors and students that kept the tradition alive, in contemporary times this practice has come to assume diverse expressions. The initiatory lineage of yoga still survives in a few strongholds in India and within the New Religious Movements (NRMs) in the West and the East, yet the prevailing trend is toward the professionalization of the practice with a view to guaranteeing a market for its practitioners1.
In a few decades, yoga left social invisibility behind and gained global prominence, forming boundary zones2 with multiple cultures. In the early 20th century, the first unidirectional currents emerged that carried knowledge from India to the West. Today, however, yoga flows through multidirectional and reverse networks, exposing new forms of hypermobility, to the point that American yogis export yoga globally through proselytism, marketing, and seva (selfless service) tourism3.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, just as traditional Indian medicine became a powerful symbol of Indian nationalist identity and of resistance to Westernization4, yoga has been taking on, in India, a role of geopolitical projection led by the prime minister. In his speech at the United Nations in 2015, Narendra Modi declared June 21 the International Day of Yoga5. During the 2019 commemoration of the International Day of Yoga6, Modi emphasized that the practice acts as a unifying force in a world where ideologies of hatred divide brothers, and that this union also extends to all the fauna and flora of the planet.
We consider that yoga, which until recently was more prominent in the fields of religious studies and health, gains a new approach through the survey that Lamont and Molnar7 conduct on boundaries in the social sciences and, in particular, regarding symbolic boundaries, which emerge from relational processes associated with four areas: a) social and collective identity; b) inequalities among social classes, ethnicities, and genders; c) professions, science, and knowledge; and d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries.
In this sense, the aim of this article is to discuss, in an argumentative essay, yoga as a boundary object among fields of knowledge, comparing the aforementioned perspectives7 with some updated data on the production of knowledge about yoga. The article does not aim to conduct an exhaustive survey of the topic in the Capes thesis database, but rather to offer a sampling of a few fields of knowledge. Now, if boundary objects are interfaces that play a key role in the development and maintenance of coherence that runs across social worlds and symbolic boundaries, they in turn allow for diverse configurations (social branding, gender configurations, contestation of the meaning of social barriers). The functioning of yoga within Health, Religion, Philosophy, the Social Sciences themselves, Education, and the Arts, as well as the relationship among these fields, as we develop in this article, reveals a fertile horizon for the production of meanings, distinctions, and specific modes of sharing, restriction, and transformation.
The field of Health took up yoga in Brazil with the inclusion of this practice in the National Policy on Integrative and Complementary Practices8, through ordinances no. 719/20119, no. 145/201710, and no. 849/201711. One of the implications of including yoga in the Unified Health System (SUS) is a reduction in access inequality, since previously the practice was restricted to certain social classes. In addition to its offering within the SUS, the dissemination of yoga has also been occurring across different social classes and ethnicities, crossing social and symbolic boundaries through small civil-society initiatives, as is the case of Yoga Marginal (Marginal Yoga). In a community psychosociology approach, Tainá Antonio Fernandes12 presents yoga in the Baixada Fluminense region as a possible path toward transforming the boundary that intersects the social and health domains. This practice leads its practitioners to differentiate themselves from others through a shared sense of belonging within their subgroup, one of the elements that shape social identity.
Internationally, a Pubmed/Medline search on March 17, 2020, without filters, showed the existence of 5,376 articles on yoga. By comparison, a search using the publication-date filter for articles from January 1, 1950, to December 31, 1990 (50 years) yielded 389 articles on the subject. Given that the database currently offers more than five thousand articles — an increase of 1,382% — we can affirm that yoga has entered its 2.0 phase, with far more diversified studies than those found in the database 20 years ago. It is worth noting the influence that technology has been exerting on the offering of yoga practice. Ranking sites in the fields of Health, trends, and fashion list the top-rated yoga apps of the moment(c).
It is not surprising that there is a growing search for yoga in contemporary society, coined by Han13 as the "burnout society," in which hyperactive individuals are excessively valued, dragging themselves through a productive daily routine while performing multiple tasks, becoming subject to mental disorders and stripped of their capacity for contemplation. Even so, there are those who criticize the excesses of the market-driven aura currently surrounding yoga. Such is the case of Alex Auder14, an American Instagram provocateur who satirizes the wellness industry, its relentless marketing, and the "commoditification of yoga." In one livestream, she appears wrapped in an Ikea rug, saying that "being a curator sponsored by five hundred brands is a lot of pressure. Mercedes gets me to my ayahuasca ceremonies quickly and efficiently, while Coca-Cola keeps me hydrated." [Free translation].
The globalization of yoga has been occurring so rapidly that it has raised discussion about the standardization of the therapeutic practice. The term "yoga therapy" can be attributed to Krishnamacharya in the late 19th century, later developed by the traditional Kaivalyadhama yoga institute in India. Nayyar15, who occupies the more conservative end of the spectrum in this discussion, argues that the West uses yoga as a therapy for physical ailments, while Indians regard it as one of the six philosophical schools of India. Why, the author asks, should Indians adjust their system — extensively tested over the ages — to meet a Western need? At the center of the debate lies the power struggle over the creation of a centralizing, certifying body that would be based in India.
At the other end of the spectrum of discussion surrounding yoga, India's Ministry of Health (Ayush), concerned with standardizing the practice and, above all, its teaching, formed a working group in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), the WHO Benchmarks for Training in Yoga, held in New Delhi in February 2019(d), an event in which one of this article's authors took part. Some of the points debated included: the regulatory approach to the practice in WHO member countries; the disciplines to be included in the curricula of the different training levels (basic, advanced, and postgraduate); and safety issues concerning asanas and breathing practices. The guidelines discussed by this working group of 16 yoga specialists from around the world will be published in a future document. This debate over the standardization of yoga points to narratives of scientists attempting to attribute select qualities to other scientists and to scientific methods, with the aim of marking a rhetorical boundary between Science and non-scientific knowledge.
On the national scene, a pertinent issue is professional regulation. Lamont and Molnár illustrate the way the concept of boundaries has been used to understand how professions distinguish themselves from one another, and whether they should be defined by their specific body of knowledge, belonging to a stage in the development of an occupation, or as an institutional organization that controls access, training, credentialing, and performance evaluation in the field. In the case of yoga, a survey conducted on October 23, 2019, found the following bills pending in the Chamber of Deputies related to the regulation of yoga: Bill 1371/2007 (with eight attached bills), Bill 3204/2012, Bill 939/2015, Bill 4282/2016. Some of the bills attached to the first one address issues specific to physical education professionals. In this way, amid legislative back-and-forth, the attempt by the Federal Council of Physical Education to appropriate the practice of yoga persists — yoga still remaining in a professional limbo, a no-man's-land2, twenty years after the advent of the first bill that attempted to regulate it. Nonetheless, in this regard, the self-regulating character of each group of practitioners is far from negligible, and we also consider it pertinent that the professional category associated with labor rights should have teachers with the most varied backgrounds.
It is precisely because it is not characterized exclusively as a religion that yoga accepts attributions such as tradition, culture, philosophy, and psychology, the most recent being the already-mentioned definition of a mind-body practice. Yoga draws its cosmology chiefly from Samkhya, which is atheistic. Its constitutive elements are: purusha (consciousness) — meaning spirit, the individual essence of being, and primordial substance — and prakriti (matter) — the origin of the phenomenal universe16. However, the mystical language of yoga, which once flowed through retreats, mountaintops, sacred caves, temples, and forests, through which the ancient yogis once wandered, now finds itself confronted by the logic of scientific rationality and the narratives of Western NRMs17. Curiously, as Simões observes, scientific rationality, contrary to what one might expect, has been legitimizing yoga, at least in Brazil, as a new belief system that produces goods of salvation, and has not managed to bring about a process of religious disenchantment of yoga.
This practice, as defined by Jung, is the psychology of the Hindus, empirical and existential in nature; a mechanism in which the ego is transcended and replaced by a universal consciousness16. On November 4, 1938, Jung delivered lecture II on yoga18, in which he stated:
We are inclined in Europe to think of Yoga as a kind of acrobatics but it is really principally philosophy […]. Yoga is the oldest practical philosophy of India; it is the mother of psychology and philosophy which are one and the same thing in India. It is impossible for anyone to be a philosopher there, till he has undergone the spiritual development of Yoga18.
As we can see, yoga slips between boundaries much like a chameleon, carrying within it elements that, for some, carry a more religious, philosophical, or psychological character. Even so, its mythical origins and its relationship with divine beings continue to serve as strong points of reference for the sacred and for spiritual practices. In this regard, see the description of the first painting in the Yoga and Art section.
In March 2020, while surveying the academic output on yoga in Brazil, we observed that the 181 theses and dissertations in the Capes database were not defended in philosophy programs, but elsewhere. What accounts for this absence? First, on the national scene, the convergence between philosophical traditions other than those produced in Europe is still recent, with the exception of certain initiatives such as: the Journeys in Oriental and Intercultural Philosophy (USP), the Colloquia on Oriental Philosophy (Unicamp), and the Latin American Association for Intercultural Philosophy (Alafi). A second reason, linked to the first, is that such efforts have not yet reached the curricula, and this epistemological absence displays all the properties of a boundary: visibility, durability, salience, but also permeability — properties that the philosophical aspects of yoga likewise share.
According to Aristotle (384–322 BC), the three major branches of philosophy are Theory, Praxis, and Poetics. Mathematics, Logic (analytics), Physics, and Metaphysics (ontology) fall under Theory, while Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric belong to Praxis, and the book Poetics is devoted to the study of Tragedy. When we look for the place of yoga within India's official philosophical schools and try to define "the six Darshanas," presented in celebrated pairs that address the ultimate nature of reality (Nyaya and Vaisheshika, Samkhya and yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta), we can say that Nyaya contains logic and analytic philosophy; Vaisheshika deals with the ultimate, atomic nature underlying the construction of consciousness; Samkhya explains the originary relations and developments between consciousness and matter; yoga contains contemplation and meditation; Mimamsa (Purva-Mimamsa) contains the hermeneutics of the Vedas; while Vedanta (Uttara-Mimamsa) contains the essence of the Vedas. The most salient difference between Samkhya and yoga is that yoga is practical and depends more on realization than on understanding, whereas Samkhya enumerates and explains the workings of the world from the union of the principles of purusha and prakriti. It should of course be borne in mind that this is a propaedeutic distinction.
Each school has a historical timeline of themes, works, and authors that is notably more complex than these two tables presented here for comparative purposes16. The Yoga Darshana as synthesized by Patañjali19, linked to the Samkhya of the Vyasa tradition, and the later Vedanta of Shankaracharya are, nevertheless, the most prominent branches of orthodoxy. Even so, within Tantra and Buddhism there are their own conceptions of yoga, found in texts from the most diverse lineages. It is thus evident, as outlined above, that philosophical content is present in traditions of both Greek and Indian origin. To what extent, then, can yoga be considered a philosophy, and philosophy be considered a yoga?
Yoga will be philosophy when it deepens the investigation of Being, its foundations, and its connections beyond common sense, through a radical will sustained by practice. At the same time, it can be said that philosophy becomes a yoga whenever it is taken up in an existential, pragmatic, and soteriological manner. We thus emphasize the strong connection between national communities and spatial boundaries, in which actors engage in dialogue and produce the knowledge that feeds their research.
A first connection, quite present in yoga training and specialization courses, consists in presenting the Ethics of yoga, grounded in the Yamas and Niyamas as Patañjali presented them in the Yoga Sutras19. However, the non-philosophical approach often leads to mistaken notions of heteronomy, in addition to omitting the complex relationship between religious and non-religious ethical codes at work in subjects who experience multiculturalism.
The second connection we now point to concerns the question: how, and to what extent, have free thinkers developed their philosophical communications regarding the spiritual foundations (and spiritual practices) that shape and transcend them? Yoga in the work of the philosopher Vilém Flusser is a particularly important connection in this regard. With the difficult, self-imposed mission of helping to save Western thought from extinction, Flusser produced a cautionary work titled "Doubt" (A dúvida)20. Starting from a reflection on doubt as a historical philosophical problem — from Descartes, with an authentic faith in doubt, which culminates in the nihilism in which everything is nothing — the philosopher seeks to minimize the damage not only of nihilism but also of what he calls empty talk and pride, both of which undermine genuine philosophical discussion.
The method used by Flusser is an unusual procedure for philosophical work, in the strict sense of the term. Namely: the exercise of concentration according to "An Introduction to the Secrets of Yoga"20 (p. 31). Now, in yoga, concentration is one of the modes of meditation known by the Sanskrit term dharana. In the Yoga Sutras, Patañjali defines it as the fixation of the mind on a territory19. The starting point was the exhaustive analysis of doubt. Then, following this preliminary exercise of concentration, came a shock in the face of a revelation:
From an existential point of view, a single effort to concentrate according to the rules of yoga is worth a thousand treatises by Nietzsche or Bergson. It illuminates, in a flash of immediate experience, that which Nietzsche and Bergson, inter alia, intend, perhaps without knowing it20. (p. 33)
This comparative and laudatory revelation regarding yoga, made at the expense of the works of distinguished philosophers, is followed by an account of a considerable difference in understanding between the practicing and the non-practicing reader, together with a deepening of the descriptive narrative of personal practice. He then offers us an allegory: that of the beads of a necklace, drawing on imagery to try to capture a little more than words alone could convey. In it, yogic concentration shows not merely how one thought arises and is followed by another, but also fosters a deepening of consciousness within the dynamic of observation and creation.
This, however, is not the only conclusion Flusser reaches through the practice of yogic concentration. Held to the scope he declares for his work, yoga helps him gain the insight to keep creating with thought and thereby redirect the course of Philosophy. Put another way, the philosopher Flusser shows that there is a better place for thought than empty talk and arrogance.
Flusser undoubtedly brings an important reflection on yoga and Philosophy. Above all, by taking it strictly as a practice, without resorting to or anchoring himself in its religious aura. He not only includes yogic meditation in the work in which he discusses the direction of Western Philosophy and the essence of language, but also shows, in an unprecedented way, the place of this experience in the construction of his thought.
Returning briefly to the dynamic between the philosopher's spiritual background and the work itself, it is worth noting that in "Doubt," Flusser's appropriation of dharana leads him to reaffirm his oldest spiritual references. It is as if he were saying: I have my own cultural heritage. I accept the experience of yogic concentration, and it brings me discernment, enthusiasm, and even usefulness, but this is not a matter of supplanting one mode of spirituality with another. The philosopher does not return to the theme of concentration as he moves through later chapters, but instead invokes and evokes Greek and Hebrew references20.
Within the symbolic-boundary dynamic between yoga and Philosophy, we highlight the interplay of presence and absence. That is to say: despite the philosophical content of yoga, Brazilian research on this practice is not developed within Philosophy programs. The philosophical system and ethics of yoga appear more often in yoga training courses than among philosophy professionals. The subject (yoga), the author (Flusser), and the work (A dúvida) remain on the margins of official philosophical disciplines. Nevertheless, as we have seen, not every philosopher confines himself to upholding a single tradition while remaining silent about the importance of the others.
At the National Museum in New Delhi, India, a place where one would theoretically expect to find a major exhibition of works on yoga, we found few with this theme. Among them, however, is the painting titled "Dakshina-Murti Shiva Worshipped by Devotees," from the late 18th century(e), which depicts the moment when Brahma's four sons arrive at Mount Kailash and ask Shiva to teach them the path to salvation. In this painting, from Tanjore, in a mixed Mysore style, executed in paper mounted on wood, Shiva is depicted as an instructor of yoga, wisdom, music, and the fine arts. Below the throne on which he is seated appear small figures, all male, wearing loincloths and turbans, explicitly practicing asanas.
Turning now to the West in search of connections between yoga and art, at the height of the counterculture, in 1967 the Beatles released the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," on whose cover appear the faces of four important yogis: Sri Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895), Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936), and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952)21. It was only on June 9, 2013, however, that the first major exhibition of artworks on yoga emerged, titled "Yoga: The Art of Transformation," at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.(f), which was later shown at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014, and whose content was subsequently published in book form(g). The collection consisted of ten photographs of the work "Bahr al-Hayat," a Persian book published around 1602 that illustrates yogic postures for meditation, as well as sculptures, illustrated manuscripts, court paintings, photographs, books, and films on loan from 25 museums and private collections in India, Europe, and the United States.
Initiatives by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), in Sydney, Australia(h), have offered the public contemporary exhibitions on yoga. In 2016, this art institution exhibited the works of Anna Philips, a New Zealand artist based in Australia, trained in both Visual Arts and yoga. A similar example, aiming to merge the experience of hatha-yoga practice with the contemplation of works of art, occurs at the Brant Foundation, located in Connecticut, United States, which offers yoga-and-art immersion experiences within its galleries(i).
In databases offering some free illustrations, such as rbgstock, Pixabay, and Flickr, among others, photographs of human figures practicing asanas are increasingly giving way to illustrations created with digital tools. The more stylized images are available for purchase on Shutterstock and Pinterest: illustrations of chakras, mandalas, asanas, mudras, and cosmic settings. It is worth noting that, on Society6, these artistic illustrations of yoga are classified as "Yoga Art Prints," and even include some by the artist Huebucket depicting animals practicing yoga(j).
Other noteworthy developments involve the publication of books and articles on the subject. In 2011, the book "Art & Yoga: Kundalini Awakening in Everyday Life"22 was published, offering guidelines on how to produce art and practice yoga by combining the two practices in a complementary way. Franklin23,24 published two academic texts, the first on the yoga of art and the creative process, the second on contemplative approaches to art therapy, incorporating Hindu and Tantric yoga traditions, as well as Buddhism, into clinical and yogic practice.
In Brazil, there are still no explicit manifestations combining yoga and art in museums and art galleries, even though yoga is metaphorically referred to as "the art of living" and "the age-old art." In 2017, Nunes published the book "Yoga, Arte e Liberdade" (Yoga, Art, and Freedom)25, in which she states:
Nowadays I also see yoga as art. The art of enabling a person to recognize beauty within themselves. And as resistance. Resistance to a disenchanted view of life. In this, art and yoga walk together, fulfilling very similar personal, social, and sacred functions25. (p. 19)
We agree with Nunes and cite the words of the French thinker, yogi, and painter Serge Raynaud de la Ferrière on the relationship between yoga and art, when he states:
Yogis are priests without an altar, or rather, they uphold the "Temple of God" directly; artists are likewise priests who enact mystical union — their mass is different, just as the liturgy changes from one sect to another: they follow the ritual of music, painting, or poetry, guided by their inspiration26. (p. 178) [Free translation]
Although yoga has not yet entered national art galleries, interesting academic materials have been produced on the subject. A search of the Capes thesis and dissertation database in April 2020 revealed the existence of 14 studies involving yoga — eight doctoral and six master's works — carried out between 2008 and 2019 in the field of Performing Arts, Theater, and the Arts.
The fact that actors and dancers seek out the practice of yoga suggests that the elements of flexibility, concentration, and meditation the practice provides may play an important role in preparing these professionals for the stage, in addition to adding a spiritual dimension. It is possible that a new field of study is emerging — that of Yoga & Art — in which the boundaries are not yet as clearly demarcated as in the hard sciences. Even so, the examples mentioned above point to the presence of relational processes operating through institutions and contexts, allocating cognitive authority and material resources for their production and documentation.
Another field in which yoga has been applied with interesting and promising results is Education. One strand of this application in early childhood is known as Educational Yoga and takes place in Rio de Janeiro, involving, in addition to psychomotor development, laughter yoga, dynamic meditations, and relaxation techniques(k). Meanwhile, a project by Unesp teaches yoga to children in municipal schools in Bauru(l), and there are reports of other schools using yoga and meditation to increase students' concentration27, as a resource for artificially trying to control children's restlessness in schools without resorting to medication28.
Ferreira-Vorkapic et al.29 analyzed the evidence on yoga interventions regarding academic, cognitive, and psychosocial benefits, such as psychological well-being, attention, and memory. Barranco-Ruiz et al.30 produced a systematic review of mind-body therapy-based interventions for improving Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), one of the most common psychiatric disorders among children and adolescents. The results of both studies suggest, respectively, that yogic interventions in schools have effects on both psychological status and cognitive function.
According to Khalsa and Butzer31, research on the effectiveness of applying yoga to improve mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral characteristics in school settings is a recent but growing field of study. Piagentini and Camargo32 found that yoga improved the behavior, emotion, concentration, socialization, and problem-solving ability of the students studied, as well as reducing violent actions and behaviors among all of them. It is worth noting that, if Sociology is committed to analyzing how the self is shaped by class differences and produced on the basis of boundaries and differences, then yoga, from an educational perspective, may play a role in the socialization of children and adolescents of different ethnicities, emphasizing the function of relationality in the definition of identity.
In order to identify further research on yoga and Education within the national context, a search was conducted in the Capes thesis and dissertation database in April 2020, revealing the existence of 18 works involving yoga defended in the field of Education — 13 dissertations and five theses, produced between 2000 and 2019. Among these, two studies by the authors Soares and Tura deal with performing and visual arts, respectively. Interest in applying yoga in Education encompasses not only the pursuit of movement harmony and bodily control, but also the pursuit of the self, along with ethical principles and values.
A search of the Capes thesis and dissertation database (April 2020) in the fields of Anthropology and Sociology related to yoga produced a result of 14 works — four doctoral and ten master's — produced between 1999 and 2018.
Since it is impossible to comment on every study within this limited space, we selected two works that engage with the scope of this article. The first is "Yoga na Laje: Ganga Deságua na Rocinha" (Rooftop Yoga: The Ganges Flows into Rocinha)33, which applies a critical lens to public security and cultural policies, as well as to media narratives that, in metaphorical fashion, expose the bodies of community residents. This work ended up inspiring the Projeto Treino na Laje (Rooftop Training Project) in the Sabim community, in Capão Redondo, São Paulo34.
From the perspective of Lamont & Molnár7, this would represent an attempt to dissolve institutionalized social differences, moving beyond the symbolic boundaries that create conceptual distinctions. If symbolic boundaries divide people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and belonging, the practice of yoga may be serving as a tool to achieve that goal, with sessions taking place both in the Rocinha community and in Capão Redondo.
The second work worth highlighting is "Uma Antropologia de Incertezas entre a Biomedicina e a Eficácia das Práticas de Yoga e Meditação no SUS" (An Anthropology of Uncertainties between Biomedicine and the Efficacy of Yoga and Meditation Practices within the SUS)35, because it engages directly with the inclusion of yoga in the SUS, as mentioned earlier. The study reveals a crossing of paradigms, a confrontation of knowledge and legitimacy among the health professionals themselves who work in Basic Health Units (UBS), relegating the practice of yoga to the status of secondary care. It thus becomes clear that care, in addition to being marked by medical hegemony, is crossed by assertions, tensions, and ambiguities. The concept of boundaries is once again applicable here, according to Lamont & Molnár7, because it captures the process of "relationality," both in the field of social and collective identity and in the field of professions, science, and knowledge. The boundaries that arise from social and collective identity, in this study, reveal pressures to evaluate one's own group positively (physicians), while maintaining and acquiring superiority over another group (other health professionals). With regard to the field of professions, the concept of boundaries is useful for understanding how professions have distinguished themselves from one another — in this case, the hierarchy of functions within a UBS and the empowerment of physicians36 — and how professions compete with one another for jurisdictional monopolies over the legitimacy of their specialized knowledge, thereby constituting a system of professions in constant flux.
In this article, we sought to reflect on how, and in what sense, yoga is a boundary object. We consider that a large part of the constitutive elements of the relational processes of symbolic boundaries identified by Lamont & Molnar apply to yoga. First, by not being tied to a single specific field of knowledge, yoga forms multicultural contact zones, prompting an exchange of knowledge and practices, linking fields of knowledge and professions, and evidencing inter/transdisciplinarity. Second, yoga offered within the SUS breaks down barriers between social classes and ethnicities.
Yoga promotes body-mind health and discernment through the radical investigation of being and the nature of reality, energizing the social and collective identity of its practitioners. Given this, presenting itself as a boundary object is due, in part, to the complexity of its definition and to the multiple applications it serves.
Finally, the actors of yoga (teachers, students, and institutions) are multiplying and negotiating specific demands and needs, such as public policies, academic curricula, standardization of services and teaching, and the appropriation of yoga by professional councils — at times competing for space, at times cooperating.
Both authors actively participated in all stages of the manuscript's preparation.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en).
(c) Best Yoga Apps of 2019. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/top-yoga-iphone-android-apps.
(d) Working Group Meeting for Benchmarks in Training in Yoga. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/moayush/posts/who-working-group-meeting-for-benchmarks-in-training-in-Yogathe-world-health-org/2795531750672068/
(e) National Museum, New Delhi. Dakshina-Murti Shiva worshipped by devotees. Tanjore, Mysore mixed style, South India, late 18th century. Paper mounted on wood, 46x36cm. Acc. No. 81.369.
(f) The World's First Exhibition on Yoga in Art. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/the-worlds-first-exhibition-on-Yoga-in-art-photos-99277116/
(g) Yoga: the art of transformation. Smithsonian Libraries. Available at: https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_1015031
(h) Yoga@The Gallery. Available at: http://sherman-scaf.org.au/idea/Yoga-scaf/
(i) Yoga at the Brant Foundation. Available at: https://brantfoundation.org/programs/Yoga-art/
(j) Cocker Spaniel Yoga. Available at: https://society6.com/s?q=Cocker%20Spaniel%20Yoga&context=Cocker%20Spaniel%20Yoga
(k) Portal Yoga Educação. Available at: http://www.Yogaeduc.com.br/proposta
(l) Unesp project teaches yoga to children in municipal schools in Bauru. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAxQhcvEJZc
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O yoga partiu do Oriente e foi apropriado pelo Ocidente, transita entre a tradição e a pesquisa, intersecta a Ciência e a Religião, oscilando entre o profano e o sagrado. Vem deixando para trás a invisibilidade social para se tornar uma prática comum. Pode ser compreendido como escola filosófica e, ao mesmo tempo, uma prática mente-corpo reconhecida pela Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) delineando, assim, zonas de contato e fronteiras simbólicas com vários campos do saber. Na contemporaneidade vem sendo discutido nas áreas das Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Este artigo ensaístico traz reflexões sobre como o yoga vem sendo abordado pelos campos da Saúde, Religião, Filosofia, Arte, Educação, Antropologia e Sociologia, e discute o desenvolvimento do yoga como objeto de fronteiras.
Palavras-chave: Yoga. Sistema filosófico do yoga. Fronteiras simbólicas. Práticas integrativas e complementares.
El yoga partió de Oriente y fue apropiado por Occidente, transita entre la tradición y la investigación, realiza una intersección entre la ciencia y la religión, oscilando entre lo profano y lo sagrado. Ha dejado para atrás la invisibilidad social para convertirse en una práctica común. Puede comprenderse como escuela filosófica y, al mismo tiempo, una práctica mente-cuerpo reconocida por la Organización Mundial de la Salud, delineando de esa forma zonas de contacto y fronteras simbólicas con varios campos del saber. En la contemporaneidad se ha discutido en las áreas de las ciencias sociales y humanas. Este artículo ensayístico brinda reflexiones sobre cómo el yoga ha sido abordado por los campos de la salud, religión, filosofía, arte, educación, antropología y sociología y discute el desarrollo del yoga como objeto de fronteras.
Palabras clave: Yoga. Sistema filosófico del yoga. Fronteras simbólicas. Prácticas integradoras y complementarias.