Spiritualities of the Body: Yoga, Spirituality and Health in Italy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I found this to be a compelling article, interesting to read, and very robustly referenced, with relevant and recent literature. There are some minor issues with grammar and sentence structure in a couple of places, including the abstract, but overall, the article is well-written.

I understand from the article that the author looked at three yoga manuals, and the author does a good job of providing context for each of those and their authors, however later in the piece, the author cites from some additional individuals (perhaps from interviews), and I found that I was a bit lost with this part, so perhaps it needed a clearer set-up and additional discussion including in the intro. and conclusion.

Overall, as a scholar in the field, I found this to be important new work about an area of the world that has had little scholarly coverage (as the author indicates), and the innovative contributions to "new spiritualities" and "embodiment" knowledge are both worthwhile. The author could, however, make a clearer case for the broader significance of this analysis -- as in: why might it matter to those outside the yoga studies and new spiritualities fields? What do these findings tell us about ourselves, about spirituality, about embodied spirituality, and about religion and its place in contemporary society? This could be emphasized more clearly. I look forward to reading the final draft!

Ovearall, this piece was compelling and well-written, but there were a few minor grammatical issues that interrupted the flow of communication (i.e.: I had to reread a few times to be sure I'd understood). This first sentence (especially the highlighted part) is an example of one I had a bit of trouble getting through: Modern yoga, a body-mind practice developed in the last hundred and fifty years at the intersection of therapeutic, fitness and leisure and spiritual and religious logics, is experiencing an unprecedented worldwide diffusion, including in Italy.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you so much for your comments and suggestions.

I have attempted to integrate fully all your suggestions in the attempt to strenghten the manuscript.

I hope you will find the new version satisying.

Kindly,

the author.

Reviewer 2 Report

 The strength of the article is the narrow focus on the intersection of body, spirituality, and alternative health, which the article illustrates with its limited source material in a credible way. By this, it offers a promising opening to further study and development of theory within the field of modern yoga studies. Its promotion of practice as the organising principle in the study of religious phenomena, in stead of belief or type of social organisation, is an additional virtue that is not only suitable for the study of modern yoga, but more generally, could be applied as an alternative organising scheme in the study of religions. 

Highlighting areas where the article would require further work before publication: 

First, the selection of three manuals is claimed to "circumscribe how yoga qua health and spiritual resource is currently conceptualised within the Italian yoga scene." This is an extraordinary claim. If it is the case that these three manuals suffice to circumscribe current Italian yoga, an extensive motivation for such a claim would be required. Two of the manuals are written by authors whose lineages are traceable to Sivananda, whereas one is openly bringing in ingredients from outside the South Asian context, by mixing East Asian martial arts concepts and practices with yoga. Generally, the prominent pillars of contemporary yoga, in terms of plain numbers of practitioners and visibility in pubic sphere, consist of lineages traceable to Krishnamacarya and his followers, and to Sivananda and his students. Kundalini yoga is another major brand which is not addressed in the article. Yin yoga could have been discussed. Shortly, the background of the authors of the books raises the question of whether they in fact represent Italian yoga more generally, or whether it is in stead the case that they enjoy popularity as authors, which may not be the same things as representing the yoga as a social phenomenon in Italy. No doubt, books are an important part of a social phenomenon, but it is possible that a random sample of major yoga schools and their practitioners and teachers would point to a pattern with a different kind of lineage related sensibilities. 

If a selection of three manuals, two of which are traceable to Sivananda, and a third clearly moving outside of the South Asian traditional lineages all together, actually is representative of Italian yoga in general, it suggests that Italian yoga may diverge from the global patter, or that the selection is incomplete. If the authors hold that Italian yoga has peculiar characteristics that motivate the particular selection, then that should be spelled out. If, on the other hand, the manual selection, despite its divergence from the lineage-pattern observable in modern yoga more generally, nevertheless illustrates the predominant features of Italian yoga, it would be good to motivate why this is the case. One way of doing it would be to compare the sales figures of prominent popular books, and point out how the combined sales of the selected books is overwhelming in scope (if that is the case), or in terms of societal influence. The first book is currently in its third printing, which points to this direction. One would still need to see the scope of the printings. With the other two books, the article partially relies on the self-reported success of the authors on their own web-pages, which is not a credible motivation for their general impact in Italian yoga. 

One way of going around the task of providing credible evidence about the social impact of the three manuals in Italian yoga is to change the term "circumscribe" to "illustrate". In this case, one might use a selection of the ten or twenty best-selling popular yoga books during the last ten years in Italy, and then show how their most important themes are illustrated by the selection of the three books chosen for analysis. The thematic variation of the three books with health, spirituality and cultural mixing is good, and it is credible that the selection could be representative for a more general pattern in Italian yoga. If this is the case, it would be good to openly explain how the authors arrived at this selection, and how it represents Italian yoga more generally. 

The same goes for the selection of the interviews. The article presents no information about the sampling strategy nor the representativeness of the sample. The sample may not be representative for Italy, although it may have strategic value in illustrating the manuals. In the article, however, the authors present no details about how they arrived at the selected quotes from the interviews. In other words, it is unclear whether the bulk of the interviews in fact work as a means of triangulation to confirm the pattern perceived in the manuals. 

The wording needs to be careful in spelling out that this section is even less about circumscribing Italian yoga, and it is not necessarily sufficient to verify the conclusions regarding the books. That said, it certainly helps to illustrate the more general themes that one is likely to encounter in Italian yoga. As it stands now, there are issues of reliability. It is possible that a different sample of practitioners would yield different results. Here, with reference to the typology of De Michelis (2004) of modern yoga, one might expect that practitioners of TM might give answers that diverge from the pattern where the practitioners body stands in the focus. Also, the method for analysing the manuals, while claimed to be rooted in discourse analysis, is not clearly spelling out how the analysis took place, what was left out and why. A similar issue about the analysis of the interviews: it is not clear how the interviews were analysed, what was left out and why, and whether or not the interview analysis proceeded by discourse analysis, or by some other method. That said, the selected wordings of the respondents manage to illustrate the themes chosen for the article rather well, and as such, constitute an explication of contemporary Italian yoga, which for all practical purposes sounds credible, but the representativeness of the sample and the analytic process could be explicated in more detail.

The article claims to use yoga schools' websites as source material. In the article, it seems that in stead of sampling several yoga schools, there is only material from one schools which is the school of the author of one of the books. This will not work as a means of triangulation, which is perhaps also not the purpose. Now, however, the value of including one school is unclear. I suggest either to remove reference to yoga schools websites, or alternatively, add a broad sample of major schools, selected for instance by numbers of visitors or some other criterion that motivates why the selected schools are representative of Italian yoga. 

A second problem with the article is related to the theory of modern yoga. The article relies on the theory promoted by De Michelis (2004), which uses a theoretically and historically rooted typology of types of modern yoga. The article leaves out two prominent types of modern yoga in De Michelis' typology, namely the meditative and denominational types. Related to this, the focus on the body as the central locus in modern yoga makes a lot of sense in asana-based practices, which all of the three manuals, and probably all interviewees stand for. However, the body is not a self-evident locus of neither practice nor experience in the denominational or meditative types, which are not represented in the text. Either the authors should narrow the scope of their investigation to only the asana-based types, or broaden the scope of their investigation by for instance bringing in followers of TM, Kriya-yoga, ISKCON,  etc. I would suggest the former strategy, and modification of the theory. De Michelis, in stead of defining the theoretical background, could in stead be used as the starting point for a further theorisation, where the focus is narrowed to those forms of modern yoga that have a clear emphasis on physical practice. As it stands now, the theoretical problem of the article can be boiled down to the following quotes: 

"Health is here invariably associated with an experiential understanding of spirituality, that is, the idea that the spiritual framing and promises of yoga are, in contrast to those of traditional religions, to be directly experienced and accessed through the work on one’s own body, for instance through postures (āsana), breathwork (prāṇāyāma) and meditation (dhyāna), among other techniques." 

The problem with this is that traditional dhyana is not a "bodily" practice in the sense that in stead of focusing on the body, in its classical formulations dhyana stands for a practice where bodily focus is no longer experientially present, as explained in Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (3.1-2). As such, dhyana does not differentiate between modern yoga and meditation- emphasising religions such as Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, or the practice of prayer and contemplation in semitic religions. 

“The yogic body is therefore the principal object of contemplation, practice and study of all schools and styles of yoga in both Eastern and Western cosmologies” (Mora, Berry and Salen 2018, 178). 

This is at odds with de Michelis that was quoted in the beginning of the article. The yogic body is not the principal object of contemplation in all forms of modern yoga. Moreover, the three manuals are hardly sufficient to confirm the thesis by Mora et al. That said, it is clear that the three popular books chosen for analysis are heavily centred around body, and there are many other such manuals.

In the above, I have highlighted both the value and contribution of the article, and the areas where further work would be required. 

The English is clear and understandable, but would benefit from professional language editing by a native speaker.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you so much for your careful, insightful and detailed review.

In the revised version of the manuscript I have attempted to account for each and every single suggestions you provided. I believe this helped to clarify both some methodological as well as theoretical aspects of the paper.

I am truly greatful for your review as, hopefully, was instrumental in further unpacking some aspects of the paper about which I didn't fully felt confident about.

Naturally, I remain available for further changes if you judge them necessary.

Kindly,

the author