Spirituality Studies 11-2 Fall 2025 83 Rachel Brown Received October 2, 2025 Accepted October 3, 2025 Keywords Yoga, yoga studies, spirituality Rachel Brown, Ph.D. is Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, and Assistant Teaching Professor in Anthropology and Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research addresses lived and embodied religion with a special focus on how food practice reveals the intersections of identity, politics, and belonging in contemporary society. Rachel has published multiple journal articles and book chapters on food and migration/ minorities, Muslim integration in France and Canada, the experience of minority religious communities in the Pacific Northwest, religion and popular culture, and research positionality and knowledge production. Her email contact is rachelbr@uvic.ca. orcid.org 2 Reading Yogalands from a Scholarly Critic’s Perspective The first time I read the manuscript, I was a well-entrenched critical outsider to yoga (this was before I took up my dedicated, most-mornings-for-around-an-hour, strict-ish Ashtanga practice). Reading Yogalands from this perspective drew me to particular arguments and approaches that provided fodder for my broader thinking about things like positionality and knowledge production, the way people engage with the category of religion in their everyday lives and in their everyday bodies, the ways we as scholars of religion deal with magic when we encounter it, the prevalence of cultural appropriation in spiritual practice, and how to offer critique with care in our writing. From this perspective, Bramadat offers a masterclass in method and theory in the study of religion and spirituality, and provides a road map for many of us to follow. One of the major contributions of the book is how Bramadat provides insight on how to engage with our various positionalities effectively in our scholarship. As he writes in the conclusion of the text, while there is “more openness to multiple perspectives in universities now than ever before, a strong suspicion about subjective data remains” (Bramadat 2025, 193). Bramadat faces this wariness head on and does not keep his reflections on positionality to one paragraph, or one footnote, in the opening pages as so many do, but weaves these reflections throughout the whole book. One way that he helps to temper some of the suspicion is that he is critical about all of his insider identities – that is, he judiciously reflects on his yoga insider identity but also his scholarly insider identity, his half Indo-Trinidadian identity, his white passing identity, his male identity, etcetera. In my own work on positionality and knowledge production I reflect on how, like butter and sugar in a warm pan, there are various insider/outsider identities that we are constantly melting together. We often think that the insider/outsider debate is restricted to just religious/spiritual identities, but we are constantly negotiating and walking about in bodies that hold various levels of insider and outsiderness. In Yogalands, Bramadat reveals how we can, and should, bring these identities into the field.
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