Cancel everything
The CBC did a story on the “no yoga for you!” situation at the University of Ottawa, so we no longer have to rely on the right-wing tabloid the Ottawa Sun.
Jen Scharf said she’s been teaching a free yoga class for the university’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, which is run by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa, for the last seven years.
It’s free, and it’s for students with disabilities…so you’d think it would be an all-around good thing, wouldn’t you?
When she checked back in with the centre in September, she said she was told by them the class wouldn’t be happening because some students and volunteers were uncomfortable with the “cultural issues” involved.
“I guess it was this cultural appropriation issue because yoga originally comes from India,” she said on Sunday. “I told them, ‘Why don’t we just change the name of the course?’ It’s simple enough, just call it mindful stretching.… We’re not going through the finer points of scripture. We’re talking about basic physical awareness and how to stretch so that you feel good.
“That went back and forth… The higher-ups at the student federation got involved, finally we got an email routed through the student federation basically saying they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it, so we’re going to cancel it for now.”
Well great. Let’s just cancel everything, to be on the safe side. If there’s ever any doubt or ambiguity, just err on the side of cancellation. Cancel all the talks, all the books, all the lectures, all the movies, all the conversations, all the ideas. They all have the potential to go wrong, so it’s better to do nothing. Nothing at all.
Cultural appropriation is when a culture that’s seen as an oppressor borrows or steals elements of a culture they’re oppressing. Scharf said there is also concern over yoga instructors who claim to be experts in the more spiritual aspects of yoga, but aren’t.
“I’m not claiming it’s anything more than a physical practice within that class,” she said. “There’s been so much positivity and so many people positively helped by this, and that’s part of the reason why I’m fighting so hard to keep it.”
She clearly doesn’t understand the “when in doubt, cancel it” principle. She thinks that because it was helping people, it should continue. We’d all better shun her.
In a French-language interview with Radio-Canada, student federation president Roméo Ahimakin said there were no direct complaints about the class, more general questions about the issues and ideas around it.
Ahimakin said they suspended the class as part of a review of all their programs to make them more interesting, accessible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of students.
Good thinking. He gets the principle. Cancel everything in order to make it more good things.
[A]t the Hindu Temple of Ottawa-Carleton, one husband and wife said they didn’t have an issue with what they’ve seen around the community and didn’t agree with the idea that non-Hindus teaching yoga is culturally insensitive.
“In Hindi ‘yog’ means to unite. To unite with who? With your true self. That’s what yoga is. Here we tend to relate it with the postures but it’s not just postures… and it has nothing to do with religion,” said Girija Waghray, who’s been teaching yoga around Ottawa for more than 10 years.
“It’s basically focusing on our health. By calming our mind, our mind becomes positive.”
Dilip Waghray said he’s been practising yoga for 50 years and while he’s uncomfortable with how it’s been commercialized in the West, he chooses to focus on the benefits it’s having.
Ah no, that’s the shortsighted “don’t cancel everything” view, which ignores the need for safety and mental purity. Benefits are just grubby material things, what we’re after is perfection and purity, which can be attained only through 100% cancellation.
Is the claim that only people of Indian origin can teach yoga properly? What about a westerner who studied yoga from a young age? (And how do they compare to a western-born child of Indian immigrants who learned yoga in adulthood?)
And why is it wrong to teach the exercises of yoga outside of the religious context? Either exercise works or it doesn’t.
OTOH I would love seeing more Spanish teachers who are native speakers. In my kid’s school the Japanese teacher, the Mandarin teacher and the French teacher are native speakers, but to my knowledge none of the5 Spanish teachers are native speakers and that isn’t optimal for the students.
Are they students at a university? – cultural appropriation from 12th century Paris
do they wear clothes? – cultural appropriation from ancient Greece
travel on buses? – cultural appropriation from 19th century Europe
travel by car? – cultural appropriation from 19th century Germany
use medications? speak English? speak French? I could go on…….
where does the nonsense stop? At least they’re not yet burning the place down as they did when I was a CS student in Montreal back in the late sixties. Back then the protest was against the war in Viet Nam – which Canada was not involved in.
sailor 103:
Not to mention Algebra – cultural appropriation from Persia. We’d better stop teaching the students algebra? (I have a number of students who probably would love that!)
I think it’s tacitly acknowledged in social justice circles that cultural appropriation is only bad–or even a thing at all–when non-white culture is being appropriated by white people. Probably has something to do with kyriarchy and punching up/down.
So none of the things Sailor1031 mentions really count. White people who wear Dia de los Muertos “sugar skull” makeup for Halloween, on the other hand, should be prosecuted in the Hague.
I do have an issue with Yoga teachers who regurgitate half-digested and probably mostly misunderstood philosophy, but it doesn’t sound like Scharf is one of them. And if someone really objects to “Yoga” (especially if they are actually experts), what’s wrong with the “mindful stretching” class?
Or should we just stop doing any kind of exercise that was invented elsewhere? Isn’t it desirable to show there are things and ideas we value in other cultures?
There’s a German saying: (he) who does nothing, makes no mistakes. I guess people are simply too scared of putting a foot wrong…
Ok,ok, If the Tokyo symphony reverts to a five note scale and eschews all Western classical music, I promise never to adopt a single Yoga position unless that position is sometimes inadvertently used during sex.
John @#6: resisting a Shivasana joke.
Modern Yoga is, in part, an adaptation of British Army fitness exercises devised during the colonial period, and rebranded by Indian Nationalists to include a quasi religious aspect. This was swiftly exported to the US where modern Yoga became hugely popular.
Arthur, link? Not doubting, just very interested yet too lazy to google [insert embarrassed smiley face]
Oh great doG pan: my point was that these canadian students lives are nothing but an amalgam of appropriations. Nothing they do or say or wear or eat is original to them. Hell even if they eat nothing but poutine it’s just an appropriation from downtrodden and underprivileged Quebec. And if you think that the cultures of 12th century France or 19th century Germany are the same as the culture of SJWs in North America in the 21st century, well then……
I’d just like to point out that the Sun got it right.
Yes. Exercise and anything else invented elsewhere, or invented in North America by minorities (eg jazz, rock n roll.)
We should all be culturally pure. Doesn’t that sound like a good thing?
Uh Oh…I made a vegetable curry this weekend. To whom should I send my official letter of apology?
Well, I came across this while browsing a series of links on another topic:
http://www.citynews.ca/2015/11/23/yoga-instructors-call-u-of-ottawa-class-cancellation-ridiculous-shameful/
And this quote stood out to me somewhat:
“I think (the cancellation) is outrageous,” Emma Damas, a yoga instructor with YYoga Queen Street West told CityNews. “There are spiritual elements in things like kickboxing and martial arts and they are still being taught.”
If only I could figure out what makes kickboxing and yoga different somehow, making a yoga class more of a target. Like, maybe, the characteristics of people who instruct and enrol in yoga classes might be on average a bit different than those of the kickboxers, to serve as the basis for some kind of …double standard. Thinking hard….oh, I really can’t figure it out. /s
Delft #5
“(he) who does nothing, makes no mistakes.”
She who does something, is always making a mistake. And must be stopped or punished.
I guess we’ll have to take the banjos out of bluegrass.
About the dubious origins of Yoga @8 @9 : it’s come up on B&W before, see: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/how-%E2%80%9Chindu%E2%80%9D-is-yoga-after-all/
Short version: almost all of the modern repertoire of yoga exercises trace back to an instructor called Krishnamacharya at the Mysore palace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; said palace also had a fully equipped Western-style gymnasium and the maharaja was a keen innovator with interests in both traditional and Western physiculture. Iyengar learned his yoga here. The plethora of poses with Sanskrit names and supposed traditional benefits are largely unattested before this.
There are also other local roots, for example the up-dog and down-dog postures can be found in a wrestling exercise, the dand or “Hindu pushup”, traditional in Pehlavi wrestling.
Well it’s been nice, but we have to stop all this cultural mixing shit. Never learn anything from elsewhere, it’s the only way to keep them
purefrom being appropriated.Jesus fucking christ these liberal airheads are amazingly illiberal.