Between Mother India and Jim Crow with Philip Deslippe
Brad speaks with journalist and scholar Philip Deslippe about the origins of yoga in the United States as a response to the precarity of South Asian lives in 20th century America. "A century ago, students of yoga in the United States, like many practitioners today, believed that they were engaging in something pure, ancient, and Indian. In reality, the yoga they were doing was a bricolage of the metaphysical and mundane presented to them in an exotic, Orientalized package by largely educated and worldly immigrants from India. These teachers were themselves responding and adapting to a nativist and racist climate. Yoga in the United States during the interwar decades is one of many examples of how Asian religions in the United States cannot be fully understood outside the context of Asian American history."
This episode is part of a new series by Axis Mundi Media and APARRI called APA Religions 101. Subscribe here: https://feeds.redcircle.com/581b8afe-eda8-45df-997d-3b22e5b57c64
Learn more about APARRI.
APARRI’s vision is to create a society in which Asian Pacific American religions are valued, recognized, and central to the understanding of American public life. Since 1999, The Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) has been a vibrant scholarly community advancing the interdisciplinary study of Asian Pacific Americans and their religions.
Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi: @bradleyonishi
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Axis Mundi Tens of millions of people practice yoga in the United States today.
It is a billion-dollar industry.
Yoga is often sold as an ancient practice full of wisdom from bygone millennia.
Yoga instructors often introduce Sanskrit words into their practice and provide explanations to their students of the ways that various postures are related to spirituality, wellness, and the overall well-being of their souls.
But what if yoga as we know it is a modern 20th century invention?
And what if it came about not through ancient practices, but because of racism, Jim Crow, and the precarity of being a South Asian human being in the United States in the 20th century?
Today I speak with the journalist and scholar Philip Deslip, who explains how the origins of yoga in the United States were a matter of survival, of adaptability, of good old American innovation, coming from South Asian human beings who saw a pathway to thriving, to living, and to existing in the United States at a time when the country was telling them they weren't wanted.
What's up, y'all?
Brad Onishi here.
Dan Miller is still out with a family emergency.
Everyone is fine, but he just needs a couple more days.
He is away from home and helping just close family members deal with something that's pretty serious.
So today, I want to introduce you to a new series that I've produced with APARI, the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative.
And together with APARI, we are introducing people to Asian Pacific American religions.
And today's episode, I think, is just perfect for those of you who listen to Straight White American Jesus and a way to introduce you to what this series is all about.
I speak with journalist and scholar Philip Deslip about the origins of yoga.
Dan should be back next week for It's In The Code, so if you are waiting for that, don't worry.
He is on his way.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Philip.
See you Friday for the Weekly Roundup.
When people in the United States think about Asian religion, they sometimes think of Bruce Lee.
Or maybe their mind turns to meditation.
Or a highly spiritualized and ancient form of yoga.
Something that surely goes beyond that class at the studio next to Whole Foods.
But Asian Americans are Buddhists, Hindus, Christians.
They're a growing sector of evangelical Christians.
They are Catholic.
They are Dharmic.
They are more than most people expect.
And even though Asian Americans and Asian people in the United States are often invisible to the wider public, if you spend even a moment paying attention, you'll come to an incredible realization.
APA Religions and Practices are everywhere, all at once.
Welcome to APA Religions 101.
A limited podcast series about Asian Pacific religious traditions in the United States and beyond.
We hope you enjoy our conversations and that they are helpful for understanding the vast array of Asian Pacific American religious communities and practitioners in the United States and beyond.
Because if you look hard enough, you'll realize that APA religions are everywhere.
And sometimes, all at once.
Music playing.
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His scholarships appeared at AmerAsia and Japanese Religions, the Journal of Yoga Studies, and many other places.
So let me just say, Philip, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
We're here to talk today about your article between Mother India and Jim Crow yoga in the United States during the interwar decades and you really do provide us a kind of really fascinating and I think important insight into the history of yoga in the United States but beyond that a history that really challenges black-white binaries, Christian-non-Christian binaries and our understanding of
Asian Americans throughout the country at various points in its history.
So I want to jump right in.
You begin the article by talking about the kind of conventional wisdom of how yoga became popular in America.
So I know you're going to challenge that conventional wisdom and you're going to tell me why that conventional wisdom needs to be challenged.
But would you tell everyone listening what is that conventional wisdom so we know as we get started?
So the conventional wisdom is that yoga becomes popular in the United States with the hippie counterculture in the late 60s early 70s and Preceding that, there's only a handful of important significant figures.
Swami Vivekananda, Yogananda from the Self-Realization Fellowship, but then there's nothing until the late 60s.
What I would argue is that this is a kind of feel-good conventional wisdom.
So America In a sense liberalizes its immigration policy in 1965.
It only really takes effect a few years later.
So this is a kind of feel-good story.
And you see this in many histories of yoga and religion in the counterculture.
America liberalizes its immigration policies and then kind of as a treat.
People from Asia come over.
We're recipients of their ancient wisdom.
And I think it also makes sense in the fact that many people of that era, these baby boomers, they're the ones writing that history or they are the ones instructing the people who write that history.
And it feels good.
You know, we're rewarded for liberalizing our laws.
And there's a kind of conventional wisdom, you know, before then, could people from Asia come over?
Maybe not.
And that story, I think, picks up on a trope that's like, hey, there's a lot of hippies.
They're interested in things beyond the traditional American landscapes, quote unquote.
And that includes an interest in Buddhism, an interest in Hinduism.
Oh, yoga.
This is cool.
And very much part of a countercultural revolution of people in the 60s who had long hair and were attending Woodstock and the Summer of Love and so on and so forth.
However, you have the data to tell us This is not, this conventional story actually doesn't hold up.
So take us back a few decades and tell us what you found in compiling just thousands of pieces of data on this topic.
So, I mean, I think a generous person would say that I'm a thorough researcher.
I think a less generous person would say I'm kind of obsessive and weird.
So a long time ago, over a decade ago, I started getting curious about the early history of yoga in the United States.
And so I started hopping on these online historical newspaper sites and I just got obsessive.
I thought, well, why wouldn't I look for every mention of yoga or Swami or yogi?
I didn't stop when I kind of realized that this would mean thousands and thousands and thousands of display advertisements.
So what I did little by little over the course of years is that I would take advertisements and then I would take the data out of them, extract the data.
And I created a giant Excel spreadsheet of doom where there's the name of the person, the date, the location, the longitude, the latitude, the title of what they're offering.
And this allowed me to have a very Kind of large base for starting to think about what yoga was.
I think now I'm close to about 7,000 different lectures and classes and I was able to map it out.
I'm able to see it chronologically.
The other thing that I was looking at while I'm doing this research is more anecdotal data.
As I mentioned in my piece, a lot of these teachers who are around in the 20s and 30s, they didn't leave institutions.
There's no repository of early yoga.
So you kind of find it where you can find it.
So I interviewed surviving relatives, relatives of their students.
You have magazine pieces, you have archival evidence, and you have really rich anecdotal evidence that pops out.
And one of my kind of research models is one of my advisors at UCSB, David Gordon White, and he does a thing that I really love, which is if we take wildly different sources, what are they all saying together?
Are they all pointing in the same direction?
And that's what I was trying to do with the data from advertisements and these other forms of evidence.
What are they all saying?
And they kind of work in concert.
You know, when you see trends in data, That opens your eyes to look for evidence.
And when you see evidence and you don't really know what to do with it, that primes you to start looking at data in a new way.
So all of this data, the Excel spreadsheet of doom, what it told me was there's this huge boom in yoga that happens after 1923.
And there are dozens and dozens of teachers who, when you see where they're traveling and what they're doing, they're following the same model.
They are going from city to city, sometimes for a week, sometimes for several months.
They're offering free lectures that then lead into a paid series of courses of instruction, and occasionally this leads to one-on-one dyadic services.
And they're all over the country.
It's not just the West Coast.
It's not just major cities like New York and Chicago.
It's basically any city or town that has more than 50,000 people, with one major exception.
They're not really in the South at all.
You have a few kind of exploratory lectures in places like Virginia and New Orleans and Kentucky, but that's it.
They don't go to the South.
And that really kind of primed me to start asking questions about why, what was going on.
So to sum up, I think we've already had a major blow to the conventional story.
If yoga became popular in the 1960s, you would expect it to be popular in places where you have bastions of liberalism and progressivism and hippie culture, San Francisco, maybe some upstate New York places such as Woodstock or the Hudson Valley, right?
But your research shows us that when we look at these decades, 20s, 30s, 40s.
We're finding people in Omaha.
We're finding people in the Midwest.
We're finding people all over.
So I think that's really important.
It really changes our conception of yoga as it developed in the United States.
I think one of the big questions you just teased is, okay, yoga is not limited to certain places.
It's all over the country, except What is the Jim Crow South?
So what did you discover when you started to look into why these itinerant traveling yogis, leaders, teachers, were not going to the South for any extended periods of time?
So one thing to just foreground that is going through the evidence, it's clear that these traveling teachers, they knew of each other, and in many cases, they knew each other directly.
So if there are patterns, these are not just a coincidence.
It's not an accident.
When I contacted the descendants of some of these teachers, and you would see the boxes of stuff that they kept, Yoga teachers are totally keeping an eye on their colleagues and their competition.
How are they advertising themselves?
How are they structuring their lectures?
And in some cases, we have direct correspondence.
They are writing to each other.
I'm going to Cincinnati.
Where should I teach?
I'll trade you my mailing list if you share yours with me.
Um, so these patterns are not just, it's not speculation.
There's, there's a good reason for thinking that there's shared reasons behind them.
It's, it's almost like IG influencers today being like, Hey, you come on my channel and I'll come on yours.
I mean, there's a kind of collaborative influencer kind of situation happening.
Absolutely.
And I'd love to get back to that because it seems like these yoga teachers extend themselves into other forms of American religion with the same kind of model.
It helps us to have a yogi from India come and it helps the yogi from India to be able to give lectures at a liberal Christian church, a spiritualist center, a new thought, positive thinking group.
So to get back to your question about the South, there is a story of race and citizenship that both puts these yoga teachers all over the country and keeps them out of the Jim Crow South.
So in 1923, 1923 is this very important, pivotal year for the history of yoga in the United States.
There's a Supreme Court case involving a man named Bhagat Singh Tend and citizenship at this time was held for quote free white men and people of quote African nativity.
And South Asians really confounded the American understanding of race at this time.
People, popularly, at a local level and then at a legal level, didn't know what to do with South Asians.
Are they black or are they white?
In some cases, people looked at phenotype and skin tone.
If South Asians have dark skin, they must be black.
Other people were seeing it in terms of geography.
If they're from India, they're Asian, so maybe we think of them like we think of the Chinese and the Japanese.
Some people bought into the racial science of their day, which said that people from India, at least northern India, were of Aryan descent, and so they must be Caucasian, and therefore they must be white, and there are some Theories of race during that time that said people from India were more white than white Americans because of this Aryan descent.
So these play out in a whole host of different ways in the United States.
And there really isn't a consensus.
So many South Asians are black in one context, they're white in another, and they're just a giant question mark in others.
For questions of citizenship, this is a question that needs to be answered.
To qualify for citizenship, are these South Asians black or white?
And the courts don't have any agreement.
There are fascinating cases where Judges and lawyers try to argue that South Asians are like Jews, they're like Armenians, they're like Zoroastrians and from Iran.
My favorite example is someone tried to argue that, compare South Asians to hypothetical Martians.
They don't know what to do.
So, Bhagat Singh Tind is one of these people who gets bounced back and forth.
He gets citizenship, loses it, gets it again, loses it a second time.
And his case appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decides that he is not white and he is not eligible for citizenship.
And they further decide that all South Asians are not eligible for citizenship.
And this has a whole massive cascading effect.
So this means that since they are ineligible for citizenship, South Asians are now subjected to pre-existing laws that were set up against Japanese Americans.
They're not able to own land.
They are not able to, under the law, marry white American women who have citizenship.
If they do, under the law, these women should lose their citizenship.
There's also a wave of denaturalization proceedings against about 60 to 70 South Asian Americans who had already won their citizenship.
When you take your oath and become an American citizen, you have to reject your previous loyalties.
So these men, they're referred to in newspapers as men without a country, they deny their previous British uh loyalties to the british and their indian citizenship then they have their american citizenship taken away so they are they have no citizenship so what do you do if you are an educated south asian american during this time you lost your citizenship you don't have the rights of a citizen you don't know if you can leave or come back uh what many of them do is
they remake themselves into yoga teachers into spiritual lecturers there is such a prevalent stereotype in the united states that all people from india must be involved in mysticism and psychic powers and magic There are great examples in memoirs where, you know, people are just approached.
South Asian Americans are approached on the street.
When are we meditating?
Can you heal my sick mother who's 500 miles away?
Can you find lost jewelry?
So it's a very easy role for them to walk into.
Now that same racial ambiguity in the courts.
Are South Asians black or are they white?
That plays out in other venues in the South.
Another thing that I found from this giant spreadsheet of doom is that these yoga teachers are overwhelmingly having their lectures and courses in hotels.
And during the early 20th century, there's a rise in what is known as the Main Street Hotel.
Every city of any size is going to have some of them exist today.
Most of them have been converted into apartment buildings.
They're hotels in the middle of a town.
Everyone knows where they are.
They have bigger meeting rooms for lectures.
They have smaller rooms for those private courses of instruction.
If you're traveling, these hotels already cater to traveling salesmen, so they have all the amenities that you would need.
But in the Jim Crow South, you can't stay at those hotels if you're black.
And there's also the more kind of informal harassment of these yoga teachers being arrested or intimidated by local police, often on anti-fortune-telling statutes, sometimes for being salesmen who are operating without a license.
And it seems very clear that they are, they run into trouble in the South because of the perception that they are black.
And so it's not worth the trouble.
They avoid the South.
And there's an interesting kind of counterpoint to this with African-American stage magicians.
Many of them adopt a kind of Hindu persona.
They wear robes and turbans.
They change their names.
They're a prince.
They're a Raja.
And they can perform in the Jim Crow South.
As Hindus, as South Asians.
So it's a weird ambiguity that cuts both ways.
One of the figures that I looked at, Yogi Hari Rama, who has his own fascinating backstory, he is allowed to stay in a hotel in Texas while he's giving his lectures and his classes on the condition that he wears his robes and turban at all times in the hotel.
And the management says, you know, if you're wearing this, our patrons won't be confused.
They won't think that we let a black man stay at our hotel.
So this is fine.
There's so much here that really, I think, explodes.
Maybe that's the wrong word, but it complexifies the black-white binary.
And I guess maybe what I should say here is not explodes, but it really shows the fluidity of South Asian people within that binary, on that spectrum, in ways that are really confusing and strange.
I mean, what you describe there is, If you're a person without a citizenship, if we can revoke your citizenship in one of the very few instances in this country, a black person has more rights, right, than the person who's been deemed Asian, South Asian, because there's no eligibility for citizenship.
And yet you might be somebody who's already renounced your citizenship in the country of your origin or from which you came.
That is one aspect.
Another aspect is, of course, everything you just talked about.
As long as you code yourself as Hindu, You're allowed to stay at our hotel.
If people perceive you as black, you're going to run into issues, which of course brings back into into relief the entire black-white binary of the Jim Crow South and how it operated cruelly against black people.
So there's so much here that really complexifies that.
I'm wondering if we can bring in more of the religious dynamic here and talk about the ways that Some of the traveling teachers and yogis interacted with Christianity, tried to perhaps code Christianity as part of themselves, as not, the ways that people were able to kind of fit the idea of Hinduism or of a yogi within a Christian framework, or maybe they were not.
How did all of that play out according to your research?
Well, you know, once we understand that these yoga teachers are People who are remaking themselves to make a living.
In some cases where I was able to interview descendants, it very much is a typical immigrant story.
Many of them are making a living and sending money back home to support their families or either in India or in the US.
And then also when you realize the kind of harassment that they are going through in different venues, I think I also need to add that they're also being surveyed by British intelligence during this time because they see them very rightly, I would argue, as a kind of propaganda wing for India independence, which many of them are lobbying for in their lectures.
You realize the kind of very sensitive terrain that they are having to negotiate.
So, one answer to the religion question is they put it to the side.
They very much advertise themselves and what they are teaching as not religious or not in conflict with anyone's religion.
I think this is a way of diffusing threats.
We're not here to denounce Christianity.
That kind of diffuses a lot.
It also, in a very practical sense, it keeps their market wide open.
You know, they are offering what they claim to be very practical benefits to what they are teaching.
Like so much today, do you want to be healthy?
Do you want to look younger?
Do you want to have better relationships?
Do you want to draw more opportunity to yourself?
Many of them, like Yogananda, advertise their lectures as not conflicting with anyone's religion.
I guess it doesn't matter what your religion is.
It's also interesting to look at the backgrounds of these yoga teachers.
They are coming from, in a sense, very different backgrounds, but also very similar backgrounds.
These teachers include Zoroastrians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, but also they are almost overwhelmingly educated.
They come to the U.S.
already speaking English.
Almost all of them have some kind of university education, either in India or in the US, which makes sense.
You know, one of the figures that you don't see is you don't see any translators in all of these lectures and classes because they're all speaking English to their audiences.
In fact, they're advertised as speaking English.
So in a way, their lectures and classes attest to the kind of Normative Christianity, the kind of Christian dominance in the U.S.
It's nothing that they are going to push back against, or they're just going to defer to.
No conflict with Christianity.
There's another aspect to that, which I found very interesting.
So in that spreadsheet of Doom, where you have all the lecture topics, you can kind of very quickly see what are they lecturing on.
The vast majority of these traveling teachers are lecturing on topics that are related to Christianity.
In some cases, they are making direct appeals to normative Christianity in the U.S.
In a lot of other ways they are appealing to a kind of mystic Christianity that is popular in the time.
They are filling this space that is opened up by more esoteric and occult ideas of Christianity.
There's a prevalent opinion during this time, there still is, that maybe Jesus spent his early years in India, or maybe after the crucifixion he lived and he wandered over to India and he spent time there, and they are more than happy to talk about that.
They also appeal to Christianity while pushing back against Christian missionary efforts and kind of the derogatory view of Christian missionaries towards India by talking about Jesus and Christianity as a matter of consciousness, Christ consciousness.
And some of these lecturers very directly push back against Christian missionary efforts.
I'm getting tongue-tied on this.
By saying that the missionaries aren't doing good in India and calling out the hypocrisy of Christians in the United States, I think one of the most interesting and powerful examples that we see, and this goes right to early yoga during this time and questions of race and culture and citizenship, Catherine Mayo comes out with a book called Mother India and is just this
Horrifying acerbic attack on India.
She basically says that India is a horrible backward civilization, and thank God the British are there to keep it from being even worse than it is.
And what many of these traveling lecturers do, since they already have this wide-ranging mobile platform that they are using, is they push back against her.
And one of the most common counter-arguments they make against Mayo is, look at the United States.
If we are so backward, why don't you ask African Americans what life is like for them in America?
And they see racial injustice in the United States as the most damning counterpoint to claims of white Christian American superiority.
This fits into a larger pattern of Asian Americans who are persecuted in the 20th century United States and the 19th century United States, basically turning the tables on their Christian accusers and saying, if this is such a Christian nation, why does it look like this?
And so there's a larger history there that fits in, especially with Katherine Jen Lum's account and her book Heathen.
All right, so just fascinating ways that the folks that you're discussing, the teachers, the yogis, the people who remade themselves as immigrants trying to find any niche possible in the United States to make a living, to be safe, to have some kind of career, some kind of way to essentially survive here.
You know, these folks are It's fluid when it comes to the racial binary in ways that are often cruel and entail suffering.
They're also doing a delicate dance with Christianity as the dominant religion of many of the places they're in.
I just have to say this, there is a comparison here with the ways that many East Asian immigrants were often one of the only ways that they could make a living.
Or one of the ways that they had been sort of instantiated in the United States is by making food from their country, right?
So when people think about the Chinese restaurant in every town across the United States, it's not an accident and it's also just one of those situations where Folks remake themselves in the United States as people who own a restaurant.
That's not necessarily why they came here or what they did in their previous life, but that's perhaps one of the only options available to them in 1920s America or 1890s America or going forward.
So anyway, just needed to get that comment in there because there's just a lot of trends here.
Go ahead, please.
I mean, you make a great point.
I'm glad you brought up the American Chinese restaurant, because as most of us hopefully know, the food that you're going to get in an American Chinese restaurant is not the food that you're going to get in China.
And what these Chinese American restauranteurs are doing is they are giving a general American audience what they're hoping for, but not in a way that challenges them.
It's going to be, as anyone who's suffered through Mexican or Chinese cuisine in the Midwest knows, it's not going to be too spicy.
It's not going to be too different.
It's not going to be weird.
It's going to be just like you like it, but people still get the satisfaction of going out for Chinese dinner or going to a Mexican restaurant.
And I think that's what these yoga teachers are doing.
In many cases, it's a fascinating case of them taking aspects of the American metaphysical tradition, Representing it to an American metaphysical audience, but doing it in such a way so that their American audience feels like they're accessing ancient Indian wisdom.
In some ways, it It shows the limits of American engagement with other cultures, but it also shows that Orientalism and stereotypes is not a set thing.
People are still able to, in some limited ways, use it and manipulate it to make a life for themselves.
And just a note here, if you're listening and you know of a good restaurant in the Midwest that serves food, Chinese food or Mexican food, different than Philip is describing, please email Philip and let him know so he can create another spreadsheet of doom.
OK, so that will be his next project.
Come after me in the Yelp comments.
I'm ready.
All right.
Well, I'm glad we got to this place because my last question is really on the legacy of this kind of this movement or this tradition of itinerant teachers and yogis, because today so many Americans practice yoga.
I will say that I am a person who's attended yoga class in the past, and what I often find there is what you describe in your work, and that is a bricolage of the metaphysical and the mundane.
What I find in most American yoga classes, you know, postural yoga, stretching and so on and so forth, is a mix of, hey, you're welcome.
This isn't too weird.
Don't worry.
Come on in.
You don't need to be scared.
Come on in here.
Yeah, wear your yoga pants, quote unquote, and get your mat and don't be intimidated.
Everyone can do this.
But we're going to use some Sanskrit terms.
We're going to have some music playing or some images that make you feel as if you are doing something exotic or something that is Asian or Indian or ancient or metaphysical.
Can you talk about how we get to the present day in terms of that paradigm and how it's an inheritance of everything you've talked about today?
Yeah, so there are scholars of modern yoga, Elizabeth D. Michaelis, Mark Singleton, Joseph Alter, and others who have talked about this thing that happens in India in the late 19th, early 20th century.
It's often referred to as the Hatha Revival or the Hatha Renaissance.
So what you have is you have a handful of key reformers who are taking pre-existing yogic postures and yogic practices, and at a very certain specific time and place, they are combining these elements with other forms.
Western bodybuilding, Swedish gymnastics, medical science.
Some of them are even going to the U.S.
and coming back.
So you have this synthesis that is happening at this time.
And it takes a little while for the Hatha Revival to start spreading around the world.
So the people that I'm looking at in the 20s and 30s, they are operating in the U.S.
before the reforms and the changes of the Hatha Yoga Revival really take hold around the world.
At this time, pardon the pun, ideas of yoga are flexible.
Yoga can be a lot of things to a lot of different people.
But starting in the late 30s and the early 40s, Yoga as we know it today really takes hold.
Yoga as a scientific and a rational physical process, largely postural, also including breath work, to make the body healthy and strong, to provide practical benefits, buttressed by medical science, That really comes to the United States and it never goes away.
It's still there.
So in some ways we can look at these early figures as parallels to what we see today.
Just like you mentioned, that same kind of appealing to American audiences while appealing to Mystic India.
They're even operating in many ways on the same kind of business model.
When I broke down how they're making money, how much people are paying, It's pretty much identical to the cost of weekend workshops today.
You're going to spend around $200 to $300 to do that weekend retreat just like you would back in the 20s and 30s.
Even the demographics are almost identical.
I was shocked.
As a little corollary to the spreadsheet of Doom, there's like The kid brother to the spreadsheet of doom where I went through photographs and mailing lists to break down who are attending these things.
And after about 3000 different people, the demographics are almost identical to the surveys done in 2010 and 2020 by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance.
Then, as now, about three quarters of your class are going to be white women.
They're going to be educated.
They're going to be middle class.
It's the same thing.
But I think there's an important difference.
You know, we started our conversation talking about this romanticized late 60s narrative of, you know, America gets liberal, it opens itself up, and then the gift of yoga comes to the U.S.
I think more and more as yoga has become popular over the last decade or two, people have started to ask harder questions about appropriation, about race, about commercialization.
And I think this early history is a really powerful addition to that conversation.
It offers a very kind of informative and troubling alternative history that maybe yoga first arrived in the United States because of how illiberal we were about immigration, that it was formed by race, and that orientalism and people struggling to survive is kind of there from the very beginning.
Such a stunning takeaway, Philip, and one that I just I really appreciate.
And I think it's one that we can think about when we think about Asian American history and Asian American Pacific Islander religions in the United States is do those things manifest themselves in our cultural landscapes, in our religious landscapes, in our economic landscapes because of how open the United in our religious landscapes, in our economic landscapes because of how open the United States is to other cultures or are they the result of basically American culture and society saying you from this part of the world are only allowed to exist in
You can only appear on our landscape if you appear as the traveling yoga teacher who has wisdom from the ancient to share with us or if you can cook us delicious and cheap food or if you can provide us really Uh, uh, uh, luxurious sushi or so on and so forth.
You know, there's, there's, there's so many ways that what you just said, I think is really a wonderful takeaway from our conversation.
And I really appreciate it.
Uh, well, thank you for taking the time Philip.
Thank you for, uh, the work that you've done in this area.
Your spreadsheet of doom is an example to all emerging scholars of religion for the kinds of dedication it takes to do this kind of work, and honestly, the fruits that come of it.
So we appreciate you, and we'll look forward to more work in the future.
Great.
Thanks for having me again, Brad.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to APA Religions 101.
For more information about this series and other research-based podcasts connecting the ivory tower to the grassroots, go to www.AxisMundi.us.
For more information about Apari, go to apari, A-P-A-R-R-I dot org.
There you'll find grant opportunities, yearly conferences, and other gatherings surrounding Apari religions and the scholars who study them.
