Скачать или смотреть Yoga, Gender and Race in Contemporary South Africa with Firdose Moonda

“Yoga, Gender, and Race in Contemporary South Africa”
Panelist: Firdose Moonda

The documented history of asana yoga in South Africa goes back to the 1960s, when a group of white women from the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal (which used to hold the largest Indian population outside of the subcontinent before being overtaken by the United States) traveled outside the country to the island of Mauritius and the neighbouring state of Botswana to learn from BKS Iyengar. They began to teach in home studios and gradually grew a student base among white female contemporaries, who became the major demographic of yoga practitioners post-democracy and into the modern age. While this is not entirely different from the yoga practicing population in the Global North, in a country where the majority of the population is of colour, it highlights an elitism based on race and class and raises questions about accessibility, inclusion and the wellness gap in a developing country. In this paper, Firdose will consider the practices of health and healing across a range of South African cultures, with a focus on the Indian diaspora and consider to what extent they are represented in contemporary yoga.

Firdose Moonda is a yoga scholar, teacher and sports journalist of Indian heritage, based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a Masters degree in the Traditions of Yoga and Meditation, completed in 2019, and has begun doctortal work provisionally titled Yoga, Politics and Possibilities for Social Justice.
Firdose has presented papers at two Yoga Darsana, Yoga Sadhana conferences. In 2022, Firdose presented early research on the history of yoga in South Africa and in 2023, she took an ethnographic look at finding the brown female body in contemporary yoga. These subjects form the core of Firdose's work, as she aims to combine body politics, feminism and decolonial studies to understand if and how yoga traveled with the Indian diaspora into Africa and what role it plays in the lives of women of Indian heritage today.