Selling yoga: from counterculture to pop culture

Abstract

Among her research interest she lists "religion under neoliberal capitalism," "the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion," as well as "theories of religion" (andreajain.com).It is the first of these broad themes that determines her scope of research on modern yoga.Her study offers a particular hermeneutics of modern yoga, interpreting it in terms of free market economy.Unlike some of the most influential yoga researchers, Jain is not an avid yoga practitioner, having attended all but one semester-long postural yoga class as a university student (ix).This positioning has a dual implication: on the one hand, it allows for an external, seemingly unbiased perspective on yoga and for interpreting it in etic terms.On the other hand, however, it renders the experience of being a part of a modern yoga milieu inaccessible-a fact that bears on the author's construal of the studied phenomenon.As I will argue later, Jain's yoga is somewhat reified-described in terms of a malleable object transformed by external influences, such as consumer culture, rather than a social phenomenon whose changing qualities emerge from the experiences and interactions of people-instructors and practitioners.Selling Yoga is a thorough study, foregrounding the author's main argument against a comprehensive review of academic knowledge of yoga available at the time of the book's composition.It is also polemical in character, with the author arguing for her

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