Yoga Museology: Spiritual Citizenship from Our Galleries to Our Streets
From Tarka, By Christopher Rzigalinski
This article is taken from Tarka Volume 6: On Spiritual Citizenship.
Yesomi Umolu, curator and art director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, published “On the Limits of Care and Knowledge: 15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice” on June 25, 2020. One month to the day after George Floyd’s murder, Umolu put out a call to action demanding museums respond to white supremacy. The article asserts dismantling systemic racism means, “go[ing] beyond token gestures of diversity and inclusion and arriv[ing] at a fundamental rethinking of the role of museums.” Umolu continues by advocating, “Museums must practice empathy and close the gap between themselves and their communities; they must provide space for conversations on the issues that matter to the lives of their audiences, neighbors, and employees.”
Museums and cultural institutions were already under scrutiny in major cities like New York, as major tax-exempt institutions refused to serve as polling places. Their denial exacerbated already tense questions as to whether museums enjoying government benefits had a responsibility to serve as civic spaces to their public. At worst, the refusal distanced museums from their stakeholders’ sociopolitical realities. At best, it was a claim of neutrality. But, as the “Museums are Not Neutral” movement argues, claiming neutrality is often more damaging because it ignores the need for “equity-based transformation.”
Museums can become sites of unity and mend these wounds of division through what I term yoga museology. By embodying the moral principles of Patañjali Yoga’s first two limbs known as the yamas, abstentions or moral restraints, and niyamas, ethical observances in one’s personal discipline and practice, museums can establish socially responsible operations that connect with their audiences and neighbors. The five yamas are a code of conduct for how to treat others. Theyinclude ahiṃsā (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (refraining from stealing), brahmacharya (celibacy), and aparigraha (refraining from coveting). The five niyamas are a code of conduct for establishing a moral blueprint of action within ourselves. These include sauca (cleanliness), santoṣa (contentment), tapas (austerity), svādhyāya(study of the scriptures), and Īśvara-praṇidhāna (devotion to God). The yamas and niyamas are the building blocks necessary for spiritual activism.
Yoga teacher and spiritual mentor Hari-kirtana das distinguishes social action from spiritual activism by motive, citing the Bhagavad Gita as instruction: “If we want to turn our social action into spiritual activism,” he writes, “Arjuna is our role model: we can follow his lead up the yoga ladder to higher levels of consciousness and a correspondingly higher level of motivation.” The lowest rung of the ladder is self interest. Pure motivations result in personal equanimity of mind, body, and spirit. Each rung up the ladder expands our reach and our actions take on more import, thereby making the purity of intent more impactful. We move from individual beings to family members, colleagues, community members, compatriots, members of the human race, contributors to the greater good of all living beings, and many steps between. Near the middle of this transformational path to spiritual activism, on the way to our highest level of consciousness, we recognize the lived experience of how we impact the world around us and how it impacts us. This pivotal moment is an opportunity for museums to actualize their potential as zones of “prefigurative politics,” what scholars Mark Chou and Roland Bleiker define as spaces in which subtle forms of protest and ideologies are negotiated before being implemented into everyday life. Yoga museology is a five-part process of reorganizing museum infrastructure that activates galleries as prefigurative political sites to debunk American cultural hegemony, white privilege, colonial legacies, and primitivist attitudes en route to liberation.
