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New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness
Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse ‘energies’, this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously ‘new energy geog...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4352603/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25503269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9315-3 |
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author | Philo, Chris Cadman, Louisa Lea, Jennifer |
author_facet | Philo, Chris Cadman, Louisa Lea, Jennifer |
author_sort | Philo, Chris |
collection | PubMed |
description | Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse ‘energies’, this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously ‘new energy geographies’. It is explained how this account is derived from in-depth fieldwork tracing how practitioners of yoga and meditation find times and spaces for these practices, often in the face of busy urban lifestyles. Attention is paid to the ‘energy talk’ featuring heavily in how practitioners describe the benefits that they perceive themselves to derive from these practices, and to claims made about ‘energies’ generated during the time-spaces of these practices which seemingly flow, usually with positive effects, into other domains of their lives. The paper then discusses the implications of this energy talk in the context of: (a) critically reviewing conventional approaches to studying ‘energy geographies’; (b) identifying an alertness to the likes of ‘affective energies’ surfacing in recent theoretically-attuned works of human geography (and cognate disciplines); and (c) exploring differing understandings of energy/energies extant in geographical studies of health and in step with the empirical research materials presented about yoga, meditation and healthfulness. While orientated towards explicitly geographical inquiries, the paper is intended as a statement of interest to the wider medical humanities. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4352603 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43526032015-03-12 New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness Philo, Chris Cadman, Louisa Lea, Jennifer J Med Humanit Article Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse ‘energies’, this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously ‘new energy geographies’. It is explained how this account is derived from in-depth fieldwork tracing how practitioners of yoga and meditation find times and spaces for these practices, often in the face of busy urban lifestyles. Attention is paid to the ‘energy talk’ featuring heavily in how practitioners describe the benefits that they perceive themselves to derive from these practices, and to claims made about ‘energies’ generated during the time-spaces of these practices which seemingly flow, usually with positive effects, into other domains of their lives. The paper then discusses the implications of this energy talk in the context of: (a) critically reviewing conventional approaches to studying ‘energy geographies’; (b) identifying an alertness to the likes of ‘affective energies’ surfacing in recent theoretically-attuned works of human geography (and cognate disciplines); and (c) exploring differing understandings of energy/energies extant in geographical studies of health and in step with the empirical research materials presented about yoga, meditation and healthfulness. While orientated towards explicitly geographical inquiries, the paper is intended as a statement of interest to the wider medical humanities. Springer US 2014-12-13 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC4352603/ /pubmed/25503269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9315-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2014 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Article Philo, Chris Cadman, Louisa Lea, Jennifer New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title | New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title_full | New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title_fullStr | New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title_full_unstemmed | New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title_short | New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness |
title_sort | new energy geographies: a case study of yoga, meditation and healthfulness |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4352603/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25503269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9315-3 |
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