Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture

This book explores how modern yoga became transformed from a largely countercultural phenomenon to a part of pop culture when entrepreneurs became strategic participants in a global market and succeeded in “selling yoga” by establishing continuity between their yoga brands and the dominant demands of consumer culture. Although the book focuses on the most widely consumed yoga systems, those of postural yoga, it compares a diverse array of modern yoga types. The book departs from conventional approaches to the history of yoga by undermining essentialist definitions of yoga as well as assumptions that yoga underwent a linear trajectory of increasing popularization. It uncovers how yoga underwent popularization as a result of factors unique to late-twentieth-century consumer culture and explains how yoga entrepreneurs prescribed the commodities associated with their yoga brands as a part of self-development believed to provide increased beauty and flexibility as well as decreased stress that can be combined with other worldviews and practices available in the global market. Finally, the book evaluates exempla from popularized yoga systems in a way that takes insider perspectives seriously and reveals how they serve as bodies of religious practice when they destabilize the basic utility of commodities and assign to them new, often sacred, meanings.