Abstract
Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos. But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Our analysis of yoga between 1975 and 2016 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose.
Highlights
Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos
As we scoured the Yoga Journal archives, we found evidence of new cultural codes and market templates being adopted by members of the yoga movement and yoga entrepreneurs
Movements that are opposed to markets—rather than those trying to extend or change markets—offer fertile ground for studying how certain movements can reconcile with opposing value systems
Summary
To answer our research question, we studied how the ascetic, spiritual, and anti-consumerist yoga movement transformed into an $80 billion global market. Our analysis of major newspapers and journals reveals the emergence of clear links between yoga and health, including mental health and physical therapy This association with health had not originally been a core aspect of the yoga movement, as Judith Lasater explained to us: ‘‘In 1976, I was asked to teach a yoga class to people with back pain. CorePower’s co-founder described the chain as the ‘‘Starbucks of Yoga’’; with over 200 locations in 23 U.S states and Washington, DC, the ‘‘fitness empire’’ churns out thousands of ‘‘certified’’ yoga instructors per year (Hines, 2019) Resistance to this dramatic marketization of yoga came from the thenoutnumbered core movement members, the HAF, and even the Indian government, which created a database of 1,300 yoga postures believed to be documented in ancient Indian texts (Sinha, 2011). Our model shows the interactive and complex relationships through which both movement outsiders and insiders exercise agency to make syncretization possible
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