Premodern and early smooth yoga contain innovations with quite a lot of goals, from turning inward searching for the real self, to turning outward for divine union, to channeling physically power in pursuit of sexual excitement. Early smooth yoga additionally encompassed countercultural ideals and practices. by contrast, this present day, smooth yoga goals on the enhancement of the mind-body advanced yet does so based on modern dominant metaphysical, future health, and health paradigms. accordingly, yoga is now part of pop culture. In Selling Yoga, Andrea R. Jain explores the popularization of yoga within the context of late-twentieth-century client tradition. She departs from traditional techniques via undermining essentialist definitions of yoga in addition to assumptions that yoga underwent a linear trajectory of accelerating popularization. whereas a few stories trivialize popularized yoga platforms by way of decreasing them to the mere commodification or corruption of what's perceived as an in a different way fastened, real process, Jain means that this dichotomy oversimplifies the heritage of yoga in addition to its meanings for modern practitioners.
By discussing a big selection of recent yoga varieties, from Iyengar Yoga to Bikram Yoga, Jain argues that popularized yoga can't be dismissed--that it has a number of non secular meanings and capabilities. Yoga manufacturers destabilize the elemental software of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that characterize the success of self-developmental wishes frequently deemed sacred in modern buyer culture.
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