Embodying Transnational Yoga Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation

Introduction. Engaged Alchemies: New Approaches to the Study of Contemporary Yoga; Chapter 1. Patanjali and Arjuna meet American Countercuisine: Yogic Diet and Selfless Service at Gurani Anjali’s Yoga Anand Ashram, Long Island; Chapter 2. Yogananda’s Sacred Music in Paradise: Ukuleles and the Unstruck Sound at Polestar Gardens, Hawaii; Chapter 3. Internalizing the Sacrifice in a Sacrifice Zone: Situating Purifying Prāṇāyāma in Pollution at Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute, Lonavala; Conclusion. Future Directions for the Study of Yoga; Index

Biography

Christopher Jain Miller is Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Arihanta Institute, San Jose, USA; Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology, Los Angeles, USA; and Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut, Zürich, Switzerland.

“This passionate book combines inspired philosophical insight and critical commentary on a range of experiences that constitute transnational yoga. Based on years of participant observation in the United States and India, Miller’s intimate understanding of embodied practice provides a new, multivalent understanding of yoga in personal and social experience.”

-- Joseph S. Alter, author of Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy

"Miller’s transnational, multi-sited ethnographic research issues a clarion call for more attention to the deeply embodied ways of living and worlding in yoga communities. Including chapters on dietary practices, mantra (chants) and kīrtan (sacred music), and prāṇāyāma (breathing exercises), this wonderfully conceived book is a vital reminder of all that yoga is beyond āsana (yoga postures)."  

-- Amanda Lucia, author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals

"[This book] offers a rich ethnographic exploration into the global dissemination of yoga, arguing that we must look beyond the prevalent focus on yoga postures to comprehend yoga’s contemporary transnational resonance fully. Through insightful case studies centered around food cultures, musical forms, and respiratory practices, Miller’s interdisciplinary work reveals crucial processes of embodied transformation that empower yoga teachers to insert their ideological frameworks across diverse geographic and cultural contexts. This groundbreaking book issues an urgent call to widen the scope of modern yoga scholarship by amplifying marginalized facets of practice and adopting more inclusive theoretical frameworks. [... it ] issues a much-needed call to move beyond narrow āsana-centric perspectives in modern yoga research by widening attention to understudied practices that shape contemporary yogic embodiments. Through illustrative case studies deftly fusing sharp cultural analysis with ethnographic storytelling, Miller’s book demonstrates why yoga scholarship must amplify marginalized practices, voices, and contexts to foster more accurate, inclusive understandings of transnational yoga. Overall, Miller’s new understandings could expand methodological approaches in modern yoga studies to move beyond just āsana and consider more holistic bodily practices. Also, it provides a conceptual model of “engaged alchemy” that blends transnational flows and frictions with somatic transformation that could be utilized in interdisciplinary explorations of contemporary transnational yoga."

-- Agi Wittich, Yoga Research

"Embodying Transnational Yoga will prove highly beneficial for scholars examining transnational religious movements  and serves as a source of encouragement and guidance for emerging scholars interested in Yoga Studies. Overall, the book provides a compelling account that will inform and inspire both scholars interested in the anthropology of religion and South Asian religions, as well as Yoga practioners interested in eating, singing, and breathing within transnational yoga communities."

-- Katie Khatereh Taher, McGill University

"This book’s study of largely unexplored embodied aspects of transnational yoga practice (eating, singing, and breathing) is a valuable contribution to the field that shows how even as modern forms of yoga change within new cultural locales, and even as they cater to trends, expectations, and motivations of specific target audiences, they nonetheless retain their distinctness as 'yoga' and continue to hold the potential for spiritual transformation."

-- Patton Burchett, College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA

"Embodying Transnational Yoga demonstrates that 'it is possible to study yoga in a way that is simultaneously critical and sympathetic' (153). Christopher Jain Miller broadens what counts as yoga in religious studies research, [introducing] new methodological and interdisciplinary approaches…[while] foregrounding the body, positionality, and relational understanding of social and ecological environments…The writing is both scholarly and accessible, making the book suitable for undergraduate classrooms, graduate seminars, and yoga teacher training."

-- Samantha Griggs, independent scholar,  published in Reading Religion (March 2026).