Professor Christopher Jain Miller will be presenting a paper titled "Treating Breathing Difficulties in an Indian Asthma Carescape: Care Worker and Patient Re-valuations of a Centuries-old Technology of Self-Purification" at the “De-/valuations in paid care work” Workshop at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, on July 2^nd and 3^rd 2026, organized by Madhurilata Basu, Jürg Bühler, and Sandra Bärnreuther.

 

Miller’s paper presents ethnographic research from the asthma carescape at a yoga institute in Maharashtra, India, based on fieldwork he performed there for his book Embodying Transnational Yoga. It highlights the discourses of both care workers and their patients who use yogic breathing techniques to treat asthma and breathing ailments resulting from air pollution in India's urban environments. 

 

The first part of the paper showcases the emic discourses of trusted care workers who teach residential patients at the yoga institute that their bodies and lungs can be self-purified of air pollutants by using yogic breathing techniques. Care workers glean this self-purifying model of the yogic body from a combination of medieval Sanskrit yoga texts and German Nature Cure philosophy, thereby reproducing historical processes of textual embodiment and German-inspired healing techniques that began in the late nineteenth century in colonial India. This section of the paper further highlights how care workers, rather than questioning the structural injustices and political power dynamics that cause air pollution in urban India, instead focus on treating patients' individual symptoms. While patients at the yoga institute do today find acute breathing relief from yogic breathing, the question remains how performing these techniques in the same polluted air that created their symptoms in the first place could actually improve their asthma in the long-term.

 

To address this question, the next part of the paper draws from the fields of pollution studies and breath studies, highlighting a socially and environmentally entangled model of the human body which, from an etic and scientific perspective, sits uneasily alongside the yoga institute's self-purifying model. This section of the paper then demonstrates how the yoga institute's use of yogic breathing techniques against the effects of air pollution comprises yet another technocratic, neoliberal approach to asthma care that other scholarship considering transnational asthma carescapes has already demonstrated to be operative in other regions globally.

 

Using Achille Mbembe's notion of necropolitics, the concluding section of the paper then emphasizes how the yoga institute's care workers are attempting to help their patients recover agency in their inescapable, air-polluted necro-world through their faith in medieval models of a yogic body which they believe to be capable of self-healing. While patients do find acute relief from yogic breathing similar to how they might in other asthma carescapes transnationally, the paper nevertheless emphasizes the potential vulnerabilities and precarities of patients who adopt yogic breathing as a long-term solution to treating their asthma and other breathing ailments in air polluted environments.