Selling Yoga looks at how modern yoga developed into the self-developmental products and services that are widely consumed across the world today.
When we think of yoga today, we envision spandex-clad, perspiring, toned people brought together in a room filled with yoga mats and engaged in a fitness ritual set apart from day-to-day life. Their aim is to enhance something they all deem sacred: their bodies. In Selling Yoga, Andrea Jain looks at the development of modern, popular yoga and suggests that its practitioners are strategic participants in the contemporary global market for self-developmental products and services.
Pre-colonial and early modern yoga systems comprise esoteric techniques that aim at transcendent states of detachment from ordinary and conventional life. In contrast, contemporary popularized yoga aims at immediate self-development through the enhancement of the mind-body complex according to dominant health and fitness paradigms. Postural yoga is prescribed not as an all-encompassing worldview or system of practice, but as one part of self-development that provides increased beauty and flexibility as well as reduced stress; it can be combined with various other worldviews and practices available in the global marketplace. However, Jain argues that yoga systems cannot be reduced to mere commodities--that yoga is, in fact, a religion of consumer culture. It functions as a social ritual that removes individuals from everyday life for the sake of self-development. Yoga brands destabilize the basic utility of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that represent the fulfillment of self-developmental needs deemed sacred in contemporary consumer culture.
Andrea Jain's Selling Yoga represents a major new advance in the critical discussion of the history of yoga and its modern constructions in an increasingly globalizing world. The reader is treated to any number of surprises here, from the unexpected importance of a censored and suppressed countercultural reception of yoga and tantra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a stunning embrace of both in the second half of the twentieth century within a new consumerist pop culture. In the process, Jain manages to avoid all of the usual moralisms, political and religious essentialisms, and naive orientalisms, opting instead for an approach that is robustly historical, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply, deeply humane.
