Freedom Inside?

Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State

Farah Godrej (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

358 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-007008-3 (ISBN)

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An estimated forty million people in the United States regularly practice yoga, and as an industry it generates over nine billion dollars annually. A major reason for its popularity is its promise of mental and physical well-being: yoga and meditation are thought to be spiritual paths to self-improvement. Yoga is also widely practiced in prisons, another large business in the United States. Prisons in all fifty states offer yoga and meditation as a form of rehabilitation. But critics argue that such practices can also have disempowering effects, due to their emphasis on acceptance, non-judgment, and non-reaction. If the root of suffering is in the mind, as the philosophy behind yoga and meditation suggests, then injustice (including mass incarceration) may be reduced to a mental state requiring coping techniques rather than a more critical mindset. Others insist that yoga can heighten people's attention to structural violence, hierarchy, racism, and inequity. In fact, some of history's most radical activists, including M.K. Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, traced their ethical and political commitments to their grounding in yogic or meditative traditions.

Yoga and meditation programs no doubt offer crucial respite for those who are incarcerated, but what sort of political effects do they have? Do they reinforce the neoliberal logic of mass incarceration which emphasizes individual choices, or can they assist marginalized people in navigating systemic injustice? Drawing on collaborations with incarcerated practitioners, interviews with volunteers and formerly incarcerated practitioners, and her own fieldwork with organizations offering yoga/meditation classes inside prisons, Farah Godrej examines both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation. Freedom Inside? reveals the ways in which incarcerated persons have used yogic practices to resist the dehumanizing effects of prisons, and to heighten their awareness of institutional racism and mass incarceration among poor people and people of color. Godrej argues that while these practices could unwittingly exacerbate systemic forms of inequity and injustice, they also serve as resources for challenging such injustice, whether internally (via the realm of belief) or externally (through action). A combination of ethnography and political theory, Freedom Inside? reimagines the concept of "resistance" in a way that considers people's interior lives as a crucial arena for liberation.

Farah Godrej is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi's political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political theory. She also studies contemporary issues such as environmental justice, food politics, and mass incarceration. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline, and her research has appeared in many journals, including Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory & Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity.

Section I

1. Introduction: Why Prison Yoga and Meditation?
2. Who Was I?: Scholarship, Personal Narrative, and the Testimony of the Unprotected
3. Yoga and Meditation: Historical and Contemporary Debates

Section II

4. The Total Institution: The World of Mass Incarceration, Prisons, and Population-Control
5. "Rescued by Prison" or "Drinking the Kool-Aid?": Practicing Yoga and Meditation While Incarcerated
6. Mindfulness Meditation in a Men's Detention Facility

Section III

7. The World of Prison Volunteers
8. "Making them Better Human Beings" or "Stirring the Pot"?: Interviews with Volunteers
9. Yogic Philosophy, Nonviolence, and Resistance in a Women's Prison, co-authored with Reighlen Jordan and Maitra
10. Conclusion

Erscheinungsdatum	10.05.2022
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	159 x 241 mm
Gewicht	635 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-19-007008-0 / 0190070080
ISBN-13	978-0-19-007008-3 / 9780190070083
Zustand	Neuware