The ‘Body at a distance': language, authority and community in the digitalization of postural yoga

This article shows that the progressive online transposition of yoga teaching has exacerbated tensions and ambivalences inherent in the processes of inclusion, dissemination and consumption of contemporary yoga with regard to three pivotal and interwoven aspects where practitioners’ bodies are crucial: the verbal instructions used by teachers, which in online pedagogies become the primary means of transmission of specific ‘body techniques’ and forms of ‘body work’; their authority and legitimacy, simultaneously hindered and reinforced by the online format of classes; and yoga communities, articulated around the co-construction of virtual communities, recasting processes of exclusion and forms of privilege around new communitarian aspirations. Relying on ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers, the article interrogates these dimensions introducing the concept of the body at a distance, as the locus of implementation and experience of the practice of online yoga. This body, the article shows, becomes the sociocultural arena where pressing biopolitical instances of self-care, processes of knowledge transmission and communitarian ideals are ineluctably privatized within the confines of one’s own home