Main description:

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.

Contents:

Note on Transliteration ; Preface ; Acknowledgments ; Chapter One: Premodern Yoga Systems ; Chapter Two: From Counterculture to Counterculture ; Chapter Three: Continuity with Consumer Culture ; Chapter Four: Branding Yoga ; Chapter Five: Postural Yoga as a Body of Religious Practice ; Chapter Six: Yogaphobia and Hindu Origins ; Conclusion ; Bibliography