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Copyright by Rebecca Anne D'orsogna 2013 Copyright by Rebecca Anne D’Orsogna 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Rebecca Anne D’Orsogna Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Yoga in America: History, Community Formation, and Consumerism Committee: Janet M. Davis, Supervisor Robert H. Abzug Carolyn Eastman Nhi T. Lieu Julia Mickenberg Yoga in America: History, Community Formation, and Consumerism by Rebecca Anne D’Orsogna, A.B.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication For Pete and Charlotte Yoga in America: History, Community Formation, and Consumerism Rebecca Anne D’Orsogna, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Janet M. Davis This dissertation explores the ways in which various Western yoga teachers have interpreted and presented yoga to an American audience, and how media outlets have represented those yoga practices to a broader American audience between the 1890s and the 2010s. In particular, the case studies illuminate the ways in which contemporary concerns have influenced how yoga teachers and media reports have framed and responded to yoga practices. In this dissertation, I present a series of Western yoga practitioners that embody the most interesting and distinctive representations of popular understanding of yoga for their individual historical moments. Though the chapters do not reflect a linear development, recurrent discourses concerning Orientalism, post- colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States re-emerge in each chapter as different yoga schools respond to local and global concerns. Through these different vignettes, a trajectory of American yoga as taught and practiced by Westerners in the United States historicizes yoga in ways that are often overlooked in favor of the “timelessness” of the practice. v Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 What is Yoga? ..........................................................................................................3 Methodology and Larger Analytical Framework .....................................................6 Chapter Summaries................................................................................................ 21 Chapter One: ‘Tingley’s Spookery’: The Intersection of Empire Building, Orientalism and Yoga at the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society .................................. 27 A “Virtually Uncontrollable Girl:” Madame Blavatsky and Nineteenth Century Views of Women ................................................................................................... 32 Spiritualism and a Chance Meeting ......................................................................36 “A Sort of Holy Land” ...........................................................................................39 Universal Religious Understanding: Theosophy and The Parliament of the World’s Religions .................................................................................................46 The White Man’s Burden: Colonial Power and Representations of India............. 50 “No Other Aim Than to Render Help to Humanity:” Katherine Tingley and the Founding of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society ..................... 54 The White City: The Founding of Point Loma ......................................................58 Lotus Buds at the Râja Yoga School...................................................................... 62 Tingley’s Spookery and Lotus Buds: Times Mirror Company Libel Suit and the Investigation of Cuban School Children .............................................................. 74 Chapter Two: From the ‘Omnipotent Oom’ to the Clarkstown Country Club: The Changing Business of Yoga from the 1910s to 1930s. .....................................................94 Perry Arnold Baker from Leon, Iowa ....................................................................96 vi Moving East......................................................................................................... 106 Moving Yoga Toward Greater Acceptability ......................................................113 Edith Wharton’s Mahtma at Dawnside: Representing Yoga in Twilight Sleep ...119 Changing Yoga .................................................................................................... 123 Baseball at Night .................................................................................................126 Eastern Philosophy for the Western Mind: Spreading Hatha Yoga Outside the Clarkstown Country Club ....................................................................................128 Chapter Three: Yoga For Americans: Indra Devi’s Domesticating an ‘Authentic’ Yoga Practice............................................................................................................................. 141 Becoming Indra Devi........................................................................................... 144 Traveling through India: Peterson “accepted as a regular member of the household” ...........................................................................................................147 Learning from Krishnamacharya ........................................................................157 Yoga for Americans.............................................................................................. 167 Experts, Efforts, & Consumption: Creating Safe Individualism .......................170 Conclusion ..........................................................................................................187 Chapter Four: The Ananda Village: Yoga and Intentional Communities in the 1960s and 1970s ............................................................................................................................... 190 Nineteenth Century Attitudes in the Mid-twentieth Century ..............................193 The Counterculture Youth’s Growing Interest in the East .................................. 196 India’s Changing Role in the World .................................................................... 198 vii Intentional Communities ....................................................................................201 Paramhansa Yogananda ......................................................................................203 Kriyananda and the Formation of the Ananda Village .......................................207 Anti-Consumerist Attitudes and a Search for Alternatives ..................................212 New Ways of Seeing: The Connection Between Drugs and Yoga in the 1960s .............................................................................................................................214 Yoga, Spirituality, and The “Me Generation” .....................................................218 Anti-Consumerism Impulses ..............................................................................228 Gender and Sexuality at the Ananda Village ......................................................238 Chapter Five: lululemon athletica and Eat, Pray, Love: Constructing Popular Yoga in the 1990s and 2000s ..............................................................................................................246 lululemon Origins & Corporate Mythology ........................................................258 Simulacrum and Cultural Cosmopolitanism .......................................................261 Women: Chip Wilson’s Gross Generalization .....................................................266 Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search ...............................................................274 Eat, Pray, Love, Inc. ............................................................................................ 296 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................299 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................308 viii Introduction In 2013, yoga is a commonplace practice in America. No longer an utterly foreign exercise led by South Asian immigrants or a practice reserved for, what some derogatorily deemed, New Age fadists, yoga in the past twenty years has entered the cultural mainstream. Gyms once dedicated to weight lifting and aerobics now regularly offer yoga classes. Popular films and television have embraced the yoga studio as an appropriate setting for protagonists to chat with their friends. Major clothing brands such as J. Crew, the Gap, Adidas, and Nike have added yoga clothing to their product lines, and specialized yoga companies such as Gaiam, lululemon, and Prana have emerged. As of the end of 2012, around 20.4 million people practiced some form of yoga, and among non-practitioners 44.4 percent of Americans reported to Yoga Journal that they are interested in trying yoga.1 How did the practice of yoga, viewed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as an occult, foreign, and mysterious practice, grow to be a $10.3 billion industry in the United States?2 Contemporary yoga teachers and their followers have oft stated that the appeal of yoga lies in its timeless wisdom that provides an antidote to the modern problems of the twenty-first
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