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Joseph S. Alter is an American medical anthropologist known for his research into the modern practice of yoga as exercise, his 2004 book Yoga in Modern India, and the physical and medical culture of South Asia.
He is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.
He is known for arguing, in his own words, that "The invention of postural yoga in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century India is directly linked to the reinvention of sport in the context of colonial modernity and also to the increasing use of physical fitness in schools, gymnasiums, clinics, and public institutions." from Alter further suggests in his Yoga in Modern India that "Yoga was modernized, medicalized, and transformed by into a system of physical culture." quoting Alter 2004, p. 10 He calls the fusion of yoga's subtle body and its yogic physiology with modern anatomy and physiology a "mistake".
Stuart Ray Sarbacker, reviewing the book in History of Religions, found the book illuminating on the historical background of yoga, complete with "acerbic asides, including several humorous references to Yoga Journal and its sociological and ideological placement in American consumer society." In his view, the examples were well-researched and brought to life with suitable photographs.
Cecilia Van Hollen, for The Journal of Asian Studies, writes that the book aims to correct the popular tendency to imagine an Indian, spiritual yoga opposed to a corrupt, materialistic American yoga, by examining what Indian texts from the 20th century say about yoga, and constructing a social history of the subject. In her view, what emerges is yoga "as a transnational system of knowledge and practice that emerged in the interstices of colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and postcolonial Hindu nationalism."
The yoga scholar Mark Singleton calls the book one of the main (early) studies of the development of modern yoga, but not explaining either why asanas were absent at the start of the 20th century, or how they became rehabilitated. Singleton however endorses Alter's methodology, namely to examine modern yoga's truth claims critically while studying the context and reasons for those claims. The scholar Andrea R. Jain broadly agrees, noting that posture "only became prominent in modern yoga in the early twentieth century as a result of the dialogical exchanges between Indian reformers and nationalists and Americans and Europeans interested in health and fitness".
The book won the 2006 Association for Asian Studies' Coomaraswamy Book Prize.
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