Selling Gāyatrī: Questioning cultural appropriation of a Mantra

Abstract

Abstract This essay employs the Gāyatrī mantra as a case study to parse out cultural appropriation’s complex entanglements with modern yoga in North America. Public debates on appropriation in North America are largely based on premises of ownership, authenticity, purity, and corruption; however, theoretical arguments of non-essentialisms implicitly undermine accusations of harmful appropriation. Non-essentialisms potentially decompose fixed cultural essences so that intangible cultural artefacts or cultural groups are not subject to properties of authenticity, purity, and ownership. This position a priori blocks the possibility of appropriation (as conceived in popular discourse) because it deconstructs the premises that frame appropriation. This essay considers non-essentialist arguments, as well as several others that conflict with the possibility of harmful appropriation, such as those based on Indigenous agency and contested identity politics within Hindu-American communities. I argue that even though such arguments are substantially important, they are near sighted if weaponised to wholly dismiss the potential harmful effects of cultural appropriation. They overlook many other problems, such as exclusion, neo-colonial extraction, epistemic violence, and lack of representation of marginalised communities. These further issues are entangled with the Orientalist roots of Spiritual but not Religious ideologies.