Yoga Comes to American Physical Education: Josephine Rathbone and Corrective Physical Education P a t r ic ia V e r t in s k y 1 School of Kinesiology University o f British Columbia Around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century yoga took on an American mantle, developing into India’s first “global brand" of physical culture. Physical educa­ tors became implicated in this transnational exchange adopting aspects of yoga into their programs and activities, though there has been an insufficient attempt to piece together the sum and pattern of their intersecting influences. This paper explores how adopted Eastern cultural practices such as yoga gained traction on American shores and entered the fabric of everyday and institutional life, in­ cluding the curricula of higher education in the late nineteenth and early de­ cades of the twentieth century. It then describes how American physical educa­ tor Josephine L Rathbone came to draw inspiration and knowledge from Indian gurus about the yoga postures she would incorporate in the first and rather significant program o f corrective physical education at Teachers College, Colum­ bia University during the 1930s and 1940s. As an early pioneer of the evolu­ tion o f Ling's medical gymnastics into a therapeutic stream o f physical activity which formed an important branch o f physical education, Rathbone was in­ strumental in maintaining a critical link with physical therapy and medicine, 'Correspondence to [email protected]. facilitating transnational connections and networks while pushing open a ¿loor to mind-body practices from the east. Her project was a small but illuminating aspect o f the shifting spaces o f "bodies in contact” in cross-cultural encounters and complex imperial networks emerging from "modernities" in both East and West. W h e n J o s e p h in e R a t h b o n e , A s s is t a n t P r o fe ss o r in the Department of Health and Physical Education at Teachers College, Columbia University set up her course in “Methods of Relaxation” in 1939, her stated aim was to assist her pupils to restore their lost vitality and play a larger role in the future of Western culture. Americans, she under­ stood, were plagued by chronic fatigue in an over-stimulating, rapidly industrializing world and hence unable to relax and regenerate their energy. To counteract this damage her plan was to instruct her pupils in methods of conscious relaxation. “No educational program to offset tension is complete,” she said, “without training in how to consciously relax. Energy does not beget energy.”1 What seemed a little unusual for the times, however, since it alerted both the local and national media to comment upon it, was that Rathbone brought an Indian yogi into her classroom to demonstrate yoga poses as effective methods of relax­ ation. This example of “export brand” yoga supported by a discourse of “spiritualized” relaxation, according to Mark Singleton, owed its origin to “an amalgam of proprioceptive therapies, early humanistic psychology and a variety of Western esoteric speculations.”2 More immediately, in the case of Josephine Rathbone, her approach to the therapeutic and educational aspects of yoga was supported by her familiarity with physiologist and physician Edmund Jacobson’s well-known views on progressive and differential relaxation about which she had learned at Columbia University’s Teachers College and during her recent travels to India to study yoga with Swami Kuvalayananda.3 One can see how relax­ ation therapy and modern yoga emerged in the West at roughly the same moment in history as modern psychology and its popularizers “in an age of both unprecedented tech­ nological advancement and growing nervous disease.”4 Annie Payson Call termed this perceived subjectivity to nervous exhaustion "AmericanitisP Relaxation through activities such as yoga, she believed, might ease the strain of such a condition; it could simulta­ neously restore the productive labor and efficiency of the American worker. Interest in activities such as yoga, however, extended well beyond worries about relax­ ation and “Americanitis.” It was part of a burgeoning interest in a broadening archeology of physical culture practices that were circulating globally during the early decades of the twentieth century, animated by colonial struggles against imperial administrators and na­ tionalist discourses as well as through the rise and expansion of new technologies, indus­ try, and commodity culture.6 Both the study and the practices of movement and form were being extended as never before by a diverse range of practitioners, and the cutting edge of modernity embraced both a growing interest and enthusiasm for aesthetic and expressive movement styles as well a search for ways to address the kinesthetic and reha­ bilitation demands of industrial efficiency, mechanization and the military. The result was a cat’s cradle of sports, gymnastics, dance and drill, an amalgam of cultural borrowing and cultural imperialism where physical educators, body builders, boy scouts, military offi­ cials, health reformers and many others adopted specific features of physical culture to achieve their own ends.7 Modern postural yoga was one component of these transnational physical cultures, becoming adopted by the West in its search for physical and spiritual renewal while simultaneously serving to reignite nationalist struggles in colonial India by blending with a Muscular Christianity-inspired Indian physical education.8 Among the complex discussions around the intricacies and reinterpretations of differ­ ent approaches to yoga teachings and practices, (for it is a story which can be read many different ways),5 are a number of popular culture stories and lively histories about how yoga took on an American mande at the turn of the twentieth century and grew in influ­ ence as “it intersected with Freemasons, hypnotists, vaudeville actors, modern dancers and Gilded Age families.”10 Not surprisingly, given their special interest in healthy bodies and movement, physical educators were also implicated in this transnational exchange of physical activity practices though there has been insufficient attempt to trace their intersecting influences. David Brown and Aspasia Leledaki point out that unlike information regard­ ing the spectacular diffusion of modern Western sporting forms, there remains a paucity of research literature studying physical culture and the particular ways in which move­ ment forms such as yoga came to occupy legitimate socio-cultural spaces in Western insti­ tutions, especially in the curricula of schools and universities.11 Adopted Eastern cultural practices such as yoga, they point out, entered the fabric of everyday and institutional life while attracting relatively litde socio-political recognition or resistance. They take the view that the Western adoption of such movement approaches might usefully be described as cultural forms of invented tradition, forms that Eric Hobsbawm maintains emerge notice­ ably during periods o f social change but which can be examined as both macro and micro level phenomena.12 Furthermore, they (and others) advise against an overzealous use of Orientalism as an explanatory device: “Sufficient numbers of cultural exchanges have taken place both formally and informally for us to suspect that cultural blending of thought and practice is embedded (to various degrees) in the invented traditions emerging from ‘mo­ dernities’ in both East and West.”13 In this paper I explore how yoga gained traction on American shores in the late nine­ teenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries and was adopted by physical educators in order to illuminate shifting spaces of “bodies in contact” in cross-cultural encounters and complex imperial networks.14 I discuss the ways in which American physical educator Josephine Rathbone came to draw inspiration and knowledge from Indian gurus about the yoga postures she would incorporate in her program of corrective physical education at Teachers College, Columbia University during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular I exam­ ine how, as an early pioneer of the evolution of Ling’s medical gymnastics into a therapeu­ tic stream of physical activity which formed an important branch of physical education, Rathbone was instrumental in maintaining a critical link with physical therapy and medi­ cine while pushing open a door to mind-body practices from the East.15 Yoga Comes to America—“From the East, the Light” Popular literature would have it that yoga was thrust upon America by a series of gurus and yogi adventurers who preyed upon wealthy and influential people seeking vital­ ity in relaxation, relief from melancholia and a path to a better life. Robert Love, for example, shows how Iowa-born Pierre Bernard, “the Great Oom,” packaged a brand of yoga for Americans at the turn of the twentieth century that was adopted by Wall Street barons and Gilded Age heiresses, some of whom would bankroll his expansive and luxuri­ ous Ashram in upper New York State—the first in the nation.16 As the New York Herald punned at the time: There are scores of men and women, perhaps hundreds, well known in New Yorks fashionable circles, who have taken up Yoga in their ceaseless efforts to do something—well something different!. .. [Y]ou might see “My Lady” clad in the loosest of flowing robes, sitting on the floor for hours at a time in some ridiculous posture, gazing intently at the tip of her nose.17 Bernard had learned the postural moves of hatha yoga from an Indian