Grant Application to Wasserman Foundation
HS-I and Attachments
1. Renewal Application Not Applicable
2. Purpose of the Study
The aim of this study is to discover why people, who live in the Los Angeles area and practice Yoga, began their Yoga practice. My hypothesis is: while there are many reasons why these people began their Yoga practice, there is a unifying theme among all of these “reasons why.” I propose that the unifying theme is a strong desire to gain a greater sense of control over their lives, and practicing Yoga does just that: it results in increasing the Yoga practitioner’s sense of control over their lives. This unifying theme points toward larger social phenomena that cause these people to feel that they have a lack of control over their lives such as: rapid social change, rapid advances and dependency upon technology, and increasingly stressful lifestyles.
My faculty advisor is Allen Johnson. Participation in this project is voluntary and research participants have the right to review, edit, and erase any audiotapes that are made during their participation.
3. Background
Many current and recent academic, biomedical, and scientific studies look at the efficacy of Yoga as it pertains and correlates to biomedicine. Purely anthropological studies of Yoga are not numerous. Current academics, such as Linda Garro, Arthur Kleinman, and Meredith B. McGuire, have carried out anthropological studies of alternative healing and how they relate to people on macro and micro levels. Although they do not focus exclusively and deeply on Yoga, the concepts that they use set up a theoretical foundation for my research project. Meredith B. McGuire’s, Ritual Healing in Suburban America, studies various types of alternative medicine, and their use by middle-class, suburban Americans. McGuire emphasizes the importance of studying types of alternative medicine within their own context, rather than comparing and contrasting them to biomedicine. She included only a brief section on Yoga in this book.
Older literature, such as Geraldine Coster’s, Yoga and Western Psychology, has aided in my literature review immensely. My hypothesis actually stems from a section of, Yoga and Western Psychology, where Coster states:
“the student of Yoga is a student and not a patient; he approaches the question from the active and not the passive standpoint; he is prepared to work hard at his self-appointed task, to seize opportunities, to take advantage of hints, to try experiments, and above all to admit as a matter of course that the onus of success or failure lies with himself alone (Coster 1974).”
This passage caught my eye because it offers a grand, generalized statement about those people, who practice Yoga, but she only substantiates this statement by giving examples from the nature and original purpose of Yoga. I feel that this statement needs validation and or refutation by interviews and ethnographic accounts of individuals, who themselves practice Yoga. Did these people in fact desire to take an “active” standpoint? Do they in fact want that type of control over their lives, and does the practice of Yoga result in increasing their sense of control?