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
Andrea R. Jain is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
"Selling Yoga provides important and insightful answers...This book
should interest scholars of religion, spirituality, and cultural
change, as well as yoga practitioners. It will help these audiences
better understand where yogic practices come from and how they are
a unique product of contemporary Western culture, the politics of
religion, and our economic
system."--Sociology of Religion
"Jain's Selling Yoga is about much more than the title might
suggest...it is also a carefully argued and exceptionally sensitive
and insightful account of the relationship among the body,
spirituality and branding on the one hand and, on the other, the
politics of knowledge associated with the embodied fetishization of
cultural heritage and identity... This book provides us with a new
and sophisticated appreciation for the complex modernity of yoga
in
forms of branded practice that connect body and soul... [and]
reflects a deep sensitivity toward all forms of practice."--Nova
Religio
"This book is an eminently timely--and needed--examination of the
current explosion of yoga in contemporary culture and how people
might understand it....Jain's research is outstanding, and her
insights are compelling....Highly recommended."--CHOICE
"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." --Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Esalen: America and
the Religion of No Religion
"Jain does a tremendously thoughtful job weaving together multiple
threads that spin the web of [Modern Postural Yoga]. She coherently
covers scholarly histories of yoga, finds fascinating links between
MPY culture and consumer culture, and examines complicated
questions regarding MPY s status as a spiritual practice or body of
religious practice. Her
writing style is sophisticated but quite accessible, perhaps
expanding her readership to include practitioners and teachers
aswell as academic students and scholars. Finally, Jain offers a
perspective on religion and commodification that challenges the
notion that consumerism negates truth or legitimacy when it comes
to religious and/or spiritual cultural products, perhaps inviting
other cultural wares into the conversation." --Journal of Religion
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