Race and Yoga (now Critical Yoga Studies)

On the Swahili Island of Lamu, Kenya, global wellness discourses intersect with long-standing Islamic traditions of bodily care, ritual purification, and spiritual discipline. This article examines the introduction of yoga as both a development intervention and a spiritual offering in a historically Sufi Muslim community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the Lamu Yoga Festival and beyond, I analyze how yoga is promoted, practiced, and reinterpreted through the intersecting lenses of gender, race, and religion. While yoga is often framed by organizers as a path to empowerment and stress relief, some local participants engage with it selectively, drawing instead on Islamic practices such as wudhu, salah, and dhikr as embodied techniques of healing and divine presence. Through attention to everyday encounters – in classrooms, on beaches, and in mosques – I trace both the appeal and ambivalence of yoga’s arrival in Lamu. In exploring these frictions, I theorize Islamic bodily practices as counter-histories of wellness and highlight the moral economies embedded in global wellness humanitarianism. Wellness in Lamu, I argue, is not simply gifted or received; it is interpreted, reframed, and morally negotiated in place.