Selling Yoga

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Selling Yoga : from Counterculture to Pop culture
AuthorAndrea R. Jain
SubjectModern yoga
GenreSociology of religion
PublisherOxford University Press
Publication date
2015
Pages240

Selling Yoga : from Counterculture to Pop culture is a 2015 book on the modern practice of yoga as exercise by the scholar of religion, Andrea R. Jain.[1]

Background

Since

Mark Singleton's 2010 book Yoga Body, the origins of the modern practice of yoga as exercise have been debated by scholars of religion. Singleton examined its origins in the physical culture of India in the early 20th century.[2][3]

Andrea Jain is a scholar of South Asian Religions and yoga at the

Indiana University School of Liberal Arts. She gained her bachelor's degree in 2004 at Southern Methodist University; and then a master's degree in 2009, a graduate certificate in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in 2010, and her PhD that same year, all at Rice University. She is editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.[4] She contributed the essay on modern yoga to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.[5] In 2015 she published the book Selling Yoga : from Counterculture to Pop culture.[1]

Book

Synopsis

Further information: Yoga in advertising

Jain prefaces the book with a personal note in which she explains how she came to research the subject, and records that despite her name she is not a practising

Jain
.

The book is introduced with an account of premodern yoga systems. It then examines the role of yoga in western

Hindu nationalist
claim that modern yoga has Hindu origins; Jain illustrates the weaknesses in both types of claim.

The book is illustrated with a small number of monochrome photographs.

There is an academic bibliography and a detailed index.

Reception

The anthropologist Joseph Alter, reviewing Selling Yoga in Nova Religio, writes that the book is about much more than just the selling of yoga, covering in "a carefully argued and exceptionally sensitive and insightful account" both yoga's combination of the body, spirituality, and branding, and the interaction of politics with "the embodied fetishization of cultural heritage and identity."[6]

Maya Warrier, reviewing the book in the

Sir John Woodroffe were all countercultural, appealing to westerners with "unorthodox" religious views.[7]

Jaime Kucinskas, reviewing the book for

callisthenics and modern medicine.[8]

In reviewer Kimberley J. Pingatore's view, yoga practitioners are predominantly female, young, affluent, fit, and white, something not wholly taken on board in Jain's book.[9]

Kimberley J. Pingatore,

Elizabeth De Michelis, and Hugh Urban. Pingatore argues, too, that Jain "ferociously" deconstructs the East/West, Us/Them dichotomised understanding, in Chapter 3 showing that modern yoga systems grew "in response to transnational [consumer] cultural developments". On the other hand, Pingatore observes that while Jain argues that modern yoga defies attempts at definition or regulation, and disagrees that it is spiritual, she claims that it is a "body of religious practice". Pingatore remarks the absence of gender in Jain's account, writing that this is surprising given that yoga practitioners are predominantly female, young, affluent, fit, and white.[9]

References

  1. ^ a b Jain 2015.
  2. doi:10.7825/2164-6279.1469
    .
  3. ^ Singleton 2010.
  4. ^ "Andrea R. Jain". Indiana University. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  5. ISBN 9780199340378
    .
  6. doi:10.1525/nr.2016.19.3.111
    .
  7. S2CID 146823827
    .
  8. doi:10.1093/socrel/srw036
    .
  9. ^
    S2CID 147571747
    .
  10. ^ Pingatore, Kimberley J. (December 2015). Bodies Bending Boundaries: Religious, Spiritual, and Secular Identities of Modern Postural Yoga in the Ozarks. Missouri State University (MA Thesis).

Sources

  • Jain, Andrea (2015). Selling Yoga : from Counterculture to Pop culture. Oxford University Press.
    OCLC 878953765
    .
  • OCLC 318191988
    .

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Selling_Yoga&oldid=1192320665"