“Inhale Deeply”: Exploring Breath and the Contemporary Yoga Body

Controlling and cultivating breath is a central aspect of the bodily techniques of yoga. Situating itself within antropological work on breath specifically and bodily techniques more broadly, this paper explores “breath work” in contemporary yoga. The paper highlights the materialities and bodily materialisations of breath. As one labours to work with and on breath, trying to control that which is constantly escaping the body, breath becomes more and more firmly grounded in the material physiological body and its techniques. However, understandings of breath in yoga are polysemous and demonstrate complex intersecting epistemologies-yogic and biomedical/scientific. Exploring such intersections, the paper asks what really is being “worked on” in “breath work” – gaseous elements, the respiratory organs and the nervous system, or the “subtle” yogic element called prana? And what does such “work” tell us about the location of the contemporary yoga body within larger social contexts?