Laura von Ostrowski

Laura von Ostrowski

Book launch:
A Text in Motion. The Yogasūtra as a Practice Element in Ashtanga Yoga – a Historical, Religious-Aesthetic and Ethnographic Study

Is yoga gymnastics, spirituality, philosophy, or religion? There exists a long discourse on "yoga philosophy" referring back to the Yogasūtra of Patañjali, an ancient Indian text primarily devoted to meditative and soteriological contents, which significantly contributed to shaping the answer to this question. Within the 21st century global yoga community, the same text acquired a new scope of meaning, oriented towards everyday life’s practicality, as Laura von Ostrowski’s new book, “ A Text in Motion. The Yogasūtra as a Practice Element in Ashtanga Yoga – a Historical, Religious-Aesthetic and Ethnographic Study ,” shows.

The author’s research field, detailed in localized case studies, covers German and global Ashtanga Yoga. Based on a multi-methodological and multi-perspective approach, the book does not only analyze historical, textual, and expert knowledge to sharpen its analysis of the contemporary stance on the Yogasūtra. Equal weight is given to an ethnographic and religious-aesthetic analysis of so far neglected lay as well as practical understandings of the text. This innovative methodology paints a prismatic and detailed picture of the late modern reception of an ancient paradigmatic yoga text.

Responding to the book will be: Dr. Philipp Maas (Indology), Dr. Beatrix Hauser (Religious Studies) and Dr. Lina Aschenbrenner (Religious Aesthetics). The panel’s interdisciplinarity allows for a broad exchange between different academic perspectives on a same theme, an endeavor which lies at the very heart of von Ostrowski’s book.

Laura von Ostrowski studied Indology, Religious Studies and Romance Studies at LMU Munich and received her PhD in Religious Studies from LMU. From 2015-2018 she was a fellow of the DFG Research Training Group "Presence and Implicit Knowledge" at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. Since 2018 she has run a yoga school in Munich and works as a freelance cultural worker. On her German blog yoganerds.de she writes about her research.

Dr. Lina Aschenbrenner is a postdoctoral fellow at the religious studies department at the University of Erfurt (Germany). Her research centers around bodies and embodiment, aesthetics, affects and experience, and the critical study of religion

Dr. Beatrix Hauser is a senior lecturer at the University of Bremen. Her research centers around the anthropology of the body and religion, performance studies, gender, transcultural flows and entanglements, and South Asia.

Dr. Philipp André Maas is currently a research associate at the Institute for Indology and Central Asian Studies, University of Leipzig. His research centers around South Asian cultural, religious and philosophical history with a special emphasis on the early classical and classical period, including early classical Āyurveda, pre-classical and classical Sāṅkhya-Yoga, classical Nyāya philosophy from various perspectives and with various methods, as well as the methodologies of text genealogy, textual criticism and editorial techniques.

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