America
How US transformed the meaning of yoga
Washington, May 1
With over 20 million people
in the US practising yoga and spending $10.3 billion a year on yoga
classes and products, it has become associated less with spirituality
and more with medicine and fitness, says a study.
The study by a
California-based university argues that the shift in the meanings is due
to the changes in how yoga gurus are trained, market contests among
different meanings and the distinct branding practices of small and big
players in the market.
"Over the three decade analysis of the
yoga market we found that it was decreasingly associated with the logic
of spirituality and increasingly associated with the medical and fitness
logics," said study co-author Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, assistant
professor at the Chapman University's Argyros School of Business and
Economics.
"Commercialisation also emerged and yoga became
increasingly commoditised with the rising coverage of yoga brands, gear,
clothing, and retreats," Coskuner-Balli noted.
The researchers found that today 20.4 million Americans practise yoga -- up from 4.3 million in 2001.
They
spend $10.3 billion a year on yoga classes and products, including
equipment, vacations and media -- constituting an increase of 80 percent
in just four years.
The US yoga market density has been
increasing with yoga enterprises rising from 14,058 to 26,506 and the
number of employers increasing from 58,525 to 112,890 during the
2004-2013 period, the findings showed.
"What we discovered was
that the US yoga market delineated itself not only in the different
types of yoga that emerged, but also in the logic behind why people do
yoga," Coskuner-Balli said.
The researchers gathered data via
archival sources, netnography, in-depth interviews and participant
observations to examine how the meaning of yoga transformed in the past
three decades.
Sources trace the beginning of yoga in the United
States to Swami Vivekananda's speech representing Hinduism at the first
World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.
During the
first half of the 20th century, yoga was construed mainly as a spiritual
practice linked to mysticism, magic, and asceticism with
religiophilosophical underpinnings and an emphasis on Raja yoga (the
mental science) rather than Hatha yoga (physical yoga), the study
pointed out.
The study was published in the Journal of Marketing.