Year: 2020
Type: book-review
Abstract: Andrea Jain's book is located within the corpus of scholarly work that has emerged over the last two decades around the phenomenon of 'modern Yoga'.The central problematic this literature seeks to address is the emergence of Yoga as it now exists in such contexts as Yoga studios across the world.There are two aspects to this work: one is to demonstrate the break between premodern and modern forms of Yoga, and the other is to examine the global processes whereby the latter has come to function the way it does.In doing this, various analytic possibilities have been brought to bear on the question of 'modern Yoga', and the book also reflects on the ways in which we might define religion, and the extent to which modern forms of Yoga can be called religion.Jain's work, coming after various authors have already set out the broader narrative of what is termed modern or 'postural' Yoga, is able to explore one significant aspect of the history of Yoga in detail: its journey from being an 'elite' 'counterculture' activity for the first several decades of its existence in the West to becoming a popular and easily accessible experience today.In doing this, Jain utilizes the idea of 'continuity with consumer culture'.Selling Yoga is remarkable for its ability to bring conceptual clarity not only with the study of 'primary' material, but also in the analysis of and response to secondary literature.The first chapter of Jain's book surveys 'premodern yoga systems' in an attempt to demonstrate how premodern Yogis of any persuasion were 'hardly the images we tend to envision when we think of modern practitioners of Yoga' (p 19).More significantly, this chapter puts forth one of the central theses of Jain's argument -that premodern Yoga was different from contemporary versions because it grew in a different context, which is to say, what has been common to Yoga across centuries has been the fact that it has understandably always been determined by changing sociocultural circumstances.
Source: Summerhill
Author: Awasthi, Tarinee
Institution: Jawaharlal Nehru University
Language: English
Topic: Indian and Buddhist Studies
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7220177567