The Ideas of God, Good and Evil in the Refigured Yoga Practices in Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires city (Argentina)

SAIZAR, MARÍA MERCEDES

Antrocom Online Journal of Anthropology

Anthropology amd Community Association.

Año: 2011 vol. 7 p. 251 - 262

1973-2880

Summary Yoga is a widespread therapeutic option; it is the most popular among the oriental rooted medicines, what is more, is accepted and recommended by biomedical doctors like a complementary medicine. Currently, in a context of alternatives therapies offer, yoga appears like one of the disciplines which certain individual uses at least once in their ways of health search. The variety of options, cost and modality of the practice, the appropriation and acceptance on part of dissimilar groups, the proposal of a delicate physical exercise of the body, the compatibility that users find between their system of beliefs and the proposals of this discipline with the possibility of enjoying their benefits without adopting a new life-style, has positioned the practice of yoga as a popular choice and possible way of initiation in other searches associated to the context of the New Age. In this sense, from the point of view of the social actors, yoga is understood as a medicine that include very diverse practices, from a diet to the handling of the altered states of consciousness, from the mobilization of energies through the accomplishment of asanas to a very disclosed and well-known technique as gymnastics yoga. The process of appropriation of the Eastern practices, including yoga, has implied a phenomenon of re-meaning of the main concepts and Eastern structures of thought - aura, chakra, atman, purusha, karma, Brahma, dharma- in terms of values, categories and western experiences of the religions and philosophical currents, those that add essential dichotomies to these conceptions like good and evil, sin and punishment, spiritual and material, radically transforming the Eastern knowledge. In this opportunity, our interests focuses on investigate the slight knowledge of God, Good and Evil, that emerge from such appropriation processes that cross the yoga practices, conceiving it like a totality, in the context of the alternative practices and the phenomena of New Age. The present paper is based on field work’s material from extensive and open interviews to users and specialists of yoga in Buenos Aires, as well as from observation and participant observation in different yoga’s centers in period 2003-2009.