Professors Christopher Miller and Jonathan Dickstein will both be presenting research on yoga, Jainism, and veganism at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Canadian South Asian Studies Association (CSASA) to be held at York University in Toronto, Canada, on June 11-12, 2026. 

 

The title of their panel, where they join their colleague Professor Shyam Ranganathan (York University), is "Yogic Diet and Foodways: Critical Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Studies."

 

Yogic diet and foodways are categories of yoga practice that have only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. Professor Miller first addressed the topic historically and ethnographically in his book Embodying Transnational Yoga (Routledge 2024), while Professor Dickstein has written about yoga and vegetarianism in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra. Their panel at CSASA seeks to expand considerations of yogic diet and foodways from philosophical, historical, and ethnographic perspectives. 

 

The first paper by Shyam Ranganathan, titled “South Asian Moral Philosophy as the Historical Source of Anti Oppression ethical theorizing: what it teaches us about food and nonhuman animals,” argues that it is a mistake to double down on dietary liberalism and to withhold criticism of carnist diets, instead showing how in the South Asian tradition, freedom for any agent, regardless of biology, is possible in a world of causal oppression, and how theories of dharma and mokṣa were generated to show how this is possible. 

 

The second paper by Jonathan Dickstein, titled “From Harm to Theft: Interpreting Animal-Sourced Foods Through the Lens of Asteya,” examines how appeals to animal consent function to mitigate or obscure tensions between the ethic of nonstealing and dominant vegetarian practices, ultimately arguing that the principle of asteya (nonstealing) more precisely captures the central moral problem posed by extractive processes surrounding dairy, eggs, and honey specifically.

 

Finally, the third paper by Christopher Miller, titled “Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra meets American Countercuisine at Yoga Anand Ashram, Long Island, New York,” presents archival and ethnographic data from a contemporary yoga community in New York where yogic diet and foodways were negotiated amidst the American counterculture. It shows how while the community's members were pursuing isolation (kaivalya) of their higher consciousness (puruṣa) using yogic diet as a foundational ethical practice, they were also, from an etic perspective, expressing proto-neoliberal and eventually neoliberal subjectivity and ways of eating that were adopted during and after the American counterculture.

 

If you are attending CSASA this year, be sure to attend this thought-provoking panel.