Discipline and devotion: The hybridization of gymnastics and yoga in Montreal women’s communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationship of two currently distinct physical cultures –gymnastics and yoga. According to Mark Singleton they have a history of hybridization. He examined the systemization of modern postural yoga in the 1930s at the Mysore Palace, finding it influenced by international gymnastics texts. I identify gymnastics as both template and foil in yoga’s development. I now ask: is there evidence of this hybridization in Montreal community settings? Gymnastics in North America was a pre-existing base for yoga practice’s transcultural integration, with male teachers from South Asia conveying spiritual authority to local female instructors (Anya Foxen 2020). I support these findings with archival evidence from the Montreal YMCA, identifying the introduction of yoga in 1969 by a pioneering female instructor. I present evidence of postural yoga uptake hybridized in non-yoga classes, and its assimilation into local physical culture removed from its Indic contexts. I then examine a contemporary Montreal women’s gymnastics community by ethnographic methods and analyse it through distinctive yogic paradigms. Interviews elicit yogic values of tapas (discipline), and bhakti (devotion). I position this subculture as a contemporary example of ongoing hybridization; women’s artistic gymnastics with a yogic ethos, built on a foundation of ahimsā (non-harming), inclusive of the self
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".