In this lecture, Joseph Alter, professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, presents an answer to the question of why the practice of yoga postures and breaking exercises came to be understood within the framework of Nature Cure in modern India. The focus is on the correlation between purification and embodied perfection, and the way in which impurity is understood to be problematic for health, as well as for the development of transcendent consciousness. CAS Speaker Series. Thursday, April 23, 6:30 p.m., Humanities 150.