Consuming Yoga: Promotional Culture and the Media Representation of Yoga A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Drexel University by Danielle Marie Greenwell in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2017 © Copyright 2017 Danielle M. Greenwell. All Rights Reserved. iii Acknowledgements I am most grateful to my dissertation advisor, Douglas Porpora, PhD for his support and respect throughout this process. I also would like to thank my dissertation committee: Ernest Hakanen, PhD, Wesley Shumar, PhD, Emily West, PhD & Mary Spiers, PhD for their advice and feedback. Thanks to Myles Ethan Lascity, PhD for his ongoing support and friendship throughout graduate school and to the other doctoral students in Culture, Communication, and Media at Drexel. Thanks to Emily Queenan, MD for being a voice of sanity and helping me wade through some of the more suspect “scientific” claims made by the yoga community. Thanks to Cyndi Reed Rickards, PhD for her teaching mentorship. Thanks to my yoga teachers. Not only did they guide me through years of practice – from beginner to teacher – but started me on this process of inquiry. A special thanks to my yoga bestie, whose early morning texts helped me get out of bed and to class and to the other highly inquisitive minds that have practiced alongside me through the years. Finally, thank you to my mother, father, brother, and grandparents who were completely unsurprised when I decided to start a PhD program because they have never doubted my intellectual ability. Thank you to my maternal grandparents who will never know that I finished a PhD, but who constantly encourage me to read and explore. Thank you to my friends who have supported me through this process and to Dave for always challenging me – I love you. iv Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................1 Chapter 2. An Ethnography of Yoga Teaching Training .......................................43 Chapter 3. Yoga Journal & the Shift of Yoga Culture in the United States ..........63 Chapter 4. Depictions of Yoga on Television and in Movies ..............................121 Chapter 5. Being Your Best Selfie on Instagram .................................................151 Chapter 6. Interviews with Yoga Practitioners ....................................................209 Chapter 7. Conclusion ..........................................................................................249 LIST OF REFERENCES .....................................................................................257 APPENDIX A: Survey Instrument ......................................................................277 VITA ....................................................................................................................279 v LIST OF TABLES 1. Principles in the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali Related to Interviews ...........224 vi ABSTRACT Consuming Yoga: Promotional Culture and the Media Representation of Yoga Danielle M. Greenwell Supervisor: Douglas Porpora, PhD The practice of yoga has gone through a resurgence and geographical shift in the past hundred years. In the Western world, and to some extent in India, yoga has been decontextualized from its spiritual, religious, and even cultural history. Yoga is often paired with unrelated traditions to create a collage of spirituality based on the needs of the individual. This syncretic borrowing has become the norm for many practitioners who may or may not realize they are participating in this decontextualization and accept teachings about yoga that are historically inaccurate. Modern yoga has taken on certain traits and values which can be thought of as the image or style of yoga. Many of these traits have no historical or religious basis but are seen with frequency in mass media and social media. This dissertation looks at the current cultural meaning of yoga in the United States. It demonstrates how yoga has been used in mass and social media and what messages are conveyed when people conspicuously consume yoga as a practice or by carrying products related to yoga. It explores whether the shift in yoga has harmed the practice or the people who practice yoga. vii 1 CHAPTER 1: Introduction Let me begin with three stories that will illustrate some of the thematic points I will cover in this dissertation. Story 1: It is early January and I am sitting in the yoga studio ready to begin the adventure of teacher training. After our morning class I grabbed lunch and brought it back to the small waiting area inside the studio. In the tradition of yoga I practice, we start with an immersion – which is 50 hours of classroom time prior to the start of teacher training. In the coming months, I would then actually learn to break the practice into teachable components and create classes. That 50 hours meant that our group knew each other quite well and often we would chat between sessions or over lunch about our personal lives and things we were learning. Today we started with a typical yoga class, had an hour break for lunch and were waiting to go back into the classroom. A woman parks next to me on the floor and opens up her lunch. She remarks that she was “soooo bad” over break, eating sugar and gluten and all kinds of stuff over Christmas break. Another woman chimes in and the group begins to do that thing women do when they get together post-holidays: compete over who needs to exercise or diet more. They talked in morality terms of good and bad, right and wrong. Though I have probably witnessed that conversation hundreds of times among close friends, family members and even strangers, it was confusing to hear this at a yoga teacher training. These powerful women were self-deprecating. In immersion, 2 they had all been so nurturing towards each other and themselves and this type of language seemed out of place. Story 2: All yoga teacher trainings attempt to study well known religious texts of India in addition to the physical practice. In my teacher training, we all bought the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhavagad Gita but only delved into the Yoga Sutras. Other trainings might incorporate larger portions of the Mahabharata (from which the Gita is taken) but we breezed over these ancient texts so that we knew what they were but not what they cover. Instead, my teacher would reference stories from the Gita when appropriate and she paraphrased the entire Mahabharata during the training. What people might not realize is that translation into English is heavily imbued with interpretation; the philosophy of the translator may have more to do with how the text is read than one might realize. Because we all had different copies of the Sutras , these differences became quite apparent when we began studying the Sutras in depth. Sutra , generally translated as aphorism, is a small saying that is meant to be unpacked. Patanjali would have been great on Twitter. Midway through our teacher training we began to look at the Yoga Sutras in depth and reading from them in groups of three or four students. Some students were more interested than others in reading the ancient texts. Many students basically checked out during this period and seemed entirely disinterested. As an academic and someone who studied ancient texts during my undergraduate religious studies degree, these texts and their interpretations are fascinating. We were instructed to apply the Sutras to our lives – which in my opinion is the wrong way to go about a textual analysis – which led to even 3 more interpretation and frustration. It is tough enough to interpret an author, but to interpret a collection of sayings that was likely esoteric at the time into any sort of modern language is a challenge. One student, after pouring over the text, innocently asked our teacher whether yoga was a religion. My teacher noted that of course yoga comes from Hinduism and other eastern religions but that Americans often practice it without bringing in religious elements. She gave examples of people of all different religions who practice yoga, but may or may not adopt other parts of the tradition. The student still seemed puzzled so another student spoke up. “Well – it’s more like a philosophy than a religion, it’s not like they fought wars over it or anything.” I was flabbergasted. While we were not studying the Bhagavad Gita in this training, we had gone over the basic story behind it and this was from someone who had taken more than one yoga teacher training. How could this student not realize that the Gita is about Arjuna’s moral quandary of whether to kill his relatives on the battlefield. Krishna is making the case that this is a ‘just war’ but nonetheless it is a war in which many characters are slain. Okay, maybe the person thought that it was an allegory and not a real war and was not knowledgeable about wars that have been fought in India. But to delve a bit deeper into the comment - is the requirement of a religion that a war must be fought over it? I can see why – given the history of the crusades and jihad and the present state of Israel – that is a tempting assumption. However, at the risk of sounding like a conservative commentator: what is it that has made religion so distasteful in American society that it would be equated with war? 4 The first student seemed satisfied with this answer. While I certainly have no idea what was going on inside the student’s head – my educated guess based on that student is that she was wondering whether she could hold Christian traditions or beliefs while still studying yoga. We soon abandoned the texts in favor of more asana practice. Story 3: Part of my research involved interviewing yoga practitioners about their practice, what led them to yoga and how they relate to the ‘stuff’ of yoga. The interview process was quite fun and I got to know some interesting people. I met up with one of my interviewees at her office.