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Intimate immensity: Phenomenology of place and space in an Australian yoga community
Author(s) -
PERSSON ASHA
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.44
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , existentialism , phenomenology (philosophy) , ethnography , sociology , space (punctuation) , aesthetics , epistemology , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , sense of place , social science , anthropology , philosophy , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics
This article is a dialogue between Edward Casey's theory of place and an ethnographic case study of Satyananda Yoga practice in Australia. At issue is Casey's claim that embodied being‐in‐the‐world is irrevocably dependent on a sense of place for its own existential coherence and, conversely, that placeless space inspires terror. This claim is partly rendered problematic by the ethnographic material, which details how Satyananda yogis enact a range of meaningful spatial relations through embodied practices to aid the evolution of self. Their emphasis on a consciously mediated balance between “grounding” and “expansion,” or implacement and spaciousness, elucidates the diverse and productive dynamics of embodied configurations of space.