Abstract
Cultural hybridization indicates mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables and produces. Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines how hybrid cultural products strive for legitimacy in the context of yoga. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice that emerged as yoga was reconfigured through dialectical exchanges between India and the West and acquired new forms and meanings in the geographical and cultural sphere of the United States. The findings reveal a series of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to advance moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy for American Yoga, accompanied by identity, ownership, and authenticity centered tensions. We illustrate reterritorialization as a legitimation process mediated by strategies of market actors and identify unique outcomes in legitimation of hybrid cultural products drawing from polar perspectives on hybridization.
Introduction
The satirical video “If Gandhi Took a Yoga Class” depicts what the famous Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi would think if he attended a yoga class in America today (CollegeHumor, 2015). In the video, Gandhi is startled by the ambiance of the studio, filled with the cinnamon stick aroma of Yankee candles and music by Coldplay, and warmed up to a high temperature. During class, the instructor corrects Gandhi’s terminology of the pose urdhva mukha svanasana as up dog, advises him to pick up the pace to burn carbohydrates, and recommends wearing a lycra top, while Gandhi tries to explain his traditional attire of dhoti (a long white strip of cotton wrapped around the body). As students chat enthusiastically about new classes like yogalates (fusion of yoga and pilates), Gandhi picks up the decorative statue of Krishna (a Hindu deity) and offers US$10 to anyone who can guess whom the statue represents.
Evident in Gandhi’s reaction, yoga has changed radically through dialectical exchanges between the Western world and India over the last century and a half. The manifestations of yoga in the modern and postmodern world are as much a result of yoga’s dissemination in the Western world, as they are of transformations of yoga within India itself through encounters with the West and modernity (De Michelis, 2004, 2008; Singleton, 2010). In fact, contemporary scholars propose the use of the plural word yogas to capture the multiplicity of interpretations of yoga today (Singleton and Byrne, 2008). The tongue-in-cheek video described above presents a snapshot of the hybrid cultural product of “American Yoga,” an increasingly popular phenomenon that fuses ancient physical yoga poses and spiritual aspects of the practice (e.g. mantras such as self-transformation) within the Indian tradition with the Western physical exercise culture, popular music, and English script (Cushman, 2000; Powers, 2000). Representative of a purist view on this hybrid product, Gandhi is bothered by how American Yoga is so different from its traditional form and practitioners are unaware of the core tenets of the original practice. This purist stance negatively contrasts American Yoga against the presumably more authentic, single form of classical/Indian yoga, if one such form ever existed (Liberman, 2008). For those who practice yoga in the United States, the class depicted in the video is likely to be a familiar scene. Today, 20.4 million Americans practice yoga and spend about US$10.3 billion a year on yoga classes and products (Yoga Journal, 2012). Reflective of this high demand, a celebratory approach considers American Yoga as creative and imaginative and praises its syncretism with therapeutics, New Age spirituality, and physical fitness (Hoshour, 2013).
We focus on the emergence of American Yoga to examine how cultural products created via comingling of people and cultural elements from different territorial locations strive for legitimacy. In today’s global consumptionscape, cultural practices are constituted by multidirectional flows of people, technology, financial capital, mediated images, and ideas (Appadurai, 1990). In line with this disjunctive order of the global cultural economy, research on the consequences of globalization has increasingly shifted attention away from the perspective that globalization produces cultural uniformity to one that emphasizes cultural heterogenization (Robertson, 1992; Wilk, 1995). The concept of cultural hybridization captures this latter view, indicating mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables through processes such as migration and increased worldwide communication (Kraidy, 2005; Tomlinson, 1999). Canclini (1995: xxv) describes hybridization as “socio-cultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, previously existing in separate form, are combined to generate new structures, objects and practices.” The notion of hybridization is linked to two key underlying conditions of globalization: deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These concomitant processes capture “the movement by which one leaves a territory,” immediately compensated by another being, object, and/or system standing for that lost territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 508). Specifically, deterritorialization refers to: an appropriation process, a cultural pattern that is taken from its social context and applied to a new one in a different physical space, whereas reterritorialization denotes the making of this cultural pattern one’s own by producing a local form in this new society and geography. (Yazicioglu, 2010: 240)
Hybridity: The issue of legitimacy
The impact of globalization on consumer identities, experiences, and practices is multifaceted. Robertson (1992) uses the term glocalization to capture simultaneous presence of universalizing and particularizing tendencies regarding the effects of globalization. A number of marketing studies examined complex outcomes of global flows including reappropriation of yoga in India (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012), reterritorialization of rock music in Turkey (Yazicioglu, 2010), creolization of youth culture in Denmark and Greenland (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006), and domestication of marketing education in Peru (Denegri-Knott et al., 2013). These studies evidence new cultural expressions that emerge via encounters of local and global influences and attest to what scholars theorize as hybridization of global culture (Canclini, 1995; Kraidy, 2005).
Tomlinson (1999: 141) describes hybridization as a consequence of deterritorialization: “the increasing traffic between cultures that the globalization process brings suggests that the dissolution of the link between culture and place is accompanied by an intermingling of these disembedded cultural practices producing new complex hybrid forms of culture.” Hybridization encapsulates the tensions between deterritorialization and reterritorialization: “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social territories and, at the same time, certain relative, partial territorial relocalizations of old and new symbolic productions” (Canclini, 1995: 229). These tensions underlie the celebratory versus the purist views on hybridity: The purist ideology relies on an essentialist notion of culture, wherein culture is viewed as a distinct formation and cultural identity is mapped on to a particular landscape. Accordingly, hybrid formations are deemed to contaminate culture and create identities lacking authenticity. The celebratory perspective emphasizes a synthetic view of culture and interplay of cultural forms that fuel innovation and new expressions. These polar views pose a challenge to legitimation of hybrid cultural products, which is essential in creation and success of new forms in the marketplace (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Contemporary approaches view legitimacy as “a shared cognitive construal of an entity as consistent with a cultural framework of beliefs, norms, and values that are generally accepted by the group as a whole” (Johnson et al., 2006: 57). Accordingly, while the purist view deems hybrid cultural products as illegitimate, the celebratory view considers them as legitimate formations (Frello, 2015).
As a central concept in institutional theory, legitimacy has several dimensions: normative/moral, cognitive, pragmatic, and regulative. Normative/moral legitimacy rests on what is considered as right, cognitive legitimacy is based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness, pragmatic legitimacy depends on provision of practical benefits, and regulative legitimacy rests on conformity with rules and regulations (Deephouse and Suchman, 2013; Johnson et al., 2006; Suchman, 1995). Market researchers have considered these forms of legitimacy to understand how brands (Giesler, 2012), markets (Humphreys, 2010a), practices (Humphreys, 2010b; Humphreys and Latour, 2013), and consumers (Coskuner-Balli and Thompson, 2013) strive for and acquire legitimacy. While sharing similarities with these studies, this research situates the social process of legitimation in a glocal context by focusing on a culturally hybrid product and considers multiple sources of legitimacy in diffusion of practices.
American Yoga
Yoga is a 2500-year-old discipline that is traditionally associated with quieting of the mind, transcending the physical self, and achieving union with the divine (De Michelis, 2004). While its origins lie in Sanskritic culture and the religious traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, the theory and practice of yoga in modern and postmodern times stem broadly from the philosophies, teachings, and practices of Hinduism (De Michelis, 2008). Yoga’s history in the United States dates back to the mid-19th century during which American transcendentalists invoked yoga in their call to asceticism. Swami Vivekananda’s speech in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, however, marks the official introduction of yoga to the United States. Vivekananda focused on contemplative dimensions of yoga, emphasizing metaphysical and devotional (i.e. Raja yoga) rather than physical (i.e. Hatha yoga) forms and articulated yoga as a core component of Hindu spirituality and the Indian nation (De Michelis, 2004).
In the 20th century, a distinct American Yoga started to emerge that gradually valued Hatha yoga and embraced “the physical as a route to the transcendent” (Albanese, 2007: 247). Actors ranging from Indian Swamis who immigrated to the US to Americans who traveled to India to seek teachings were instrumental in the creation of American Yoga (Syman, 2010). The resulting cultural product differs from traditional yoga practices in several aspects. While the variety of American Yoga brands range from meditative to athletic practices, yoga acquired secular meanings over time to accommodate American practitioners’ interest in physical exercise and their religious diversity (Cushman, 2000; Powers, 2000). The practice became governed by a scientific rather than a charismatic authority, challenging the traditional one-on-one guru–student relation. Instead of being holistic, the experience became commodified and hybridized (Jain, 2015). There are now beginners, intermediate, advanced yoga classes, new styles such as acroyoga, antigravity yoga, and hybrid forms like spinning and yoga, budokon (i.e. combination of yoga and martial arts), yoga and chocolate, and yoga and wine (Higgins, 2010). The wide variety of yoga brands ranging from Power Yoga to Jivamukti Yoga constitute products of American appropriation of yoga, that is, covertly metaphysical and heavily inscribed within medical and fitness domains (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015). Despite the existence of celebrity yoga teachers, American Yoga is characterized by anti-sectarianism and is entrepreneurial, decentralized, and non-hierarchical (Cushman, 2000; Powers, 2000).
In The Easternization of the West, Campbell (2007: 25) discusses how yoga has “become an accepted part of the cultural landscape of the West” compared to mid-20th century when it was seen as “an exotic Eastern import.” We consider American Yoga to be a distinct part of what scholars refer to as transnational Anglophone yoga (Singleton, 2010), modern postural yoga (De Michelis, 2004, 2008), and glocal yoga (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012). In accordance with studies that examine counter and two-way global currents (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012; Campbell, 2007; Pieterse, 1994), the emergence of American Yoga evidences that cultural experiences do not just become uniform via globalization. Askegaard and Eckhardt (2012) demonstrate the reappropriation of Westernized forms of yoga in India and showcase how the traditional version of yoga in India has been superseded by glocal yoga. Similarly, Singleton (2010) draws attention to the renewed popularity of “health club” yoga types among affluent consumers in India. Liberman (2008) points out the availability of Western yoga books at Indian bookstores modeled after American bookstore chains like Borders and argues that the present status of yoga in India stems from the popularity of yoga in the West. The purpose of this study is to shed light on this transition by examining reterritorialization of yoga in the United States and market actors’ strategies in legitimation of American Yoga.
Methodology
Research began with an aim to understand the history of yoga in the United States, focusing on market actors and institutions that introduced and shaped the practice over time. We collected articles with the word “yoga” in the headline and lead paragraph from the New York Times over the 1893–2012 time period (n = 952). This archival data helped us form a historical trajectory of the market, identify actors in building of the market, and evaluate how yoga was deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the United States. We then conferred a number of historical sources including books on the history of yoga, newspaper- and yoga-related journal archives, scholarly research on modern yoga, industry reports on the US yoga market, and websites of yoga brands and associations to determine how American Yoga emerged overtime. Other sources of data include six interviews with yoga instructors trained in different yoga styles as well as 3-year participant observations in a variety of yoga classes.
Our immersion into the archival, interview, and observational data helped us identify countervailing responses of market actors both within and outside the United States that challenged the legitimacy of American Yoga. We examined several such efforts including the Hindu American Foundation’s (HAF) “Take Back Yoga” (TBY) campaign, protests against mandated yoga classes in US public schools, and Indian Government’s proposal for an International Yoga day through an observational netnography (Kozinets, 2006). We consulted news articles and web forum discussions following the launch of these initiatives to understand the sources of these tensions. This data consisted of 53 lead articles that generated approximately 2898 comments and amounted to 800 pages of text (see Table 1).
Data sources and types.
F: female; M: male.
The data were analyzed iteratively following a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). In open coding the data, we paid attention to the meanings and symbolic and material elements that constitute yoga along with market actors involved in disseminating the practice. During this process, we discovered specific mentions of American Yoga. We then analyzed the data to identify the strategies through which local actors produced American Yoga and countervailing responses that surfaced in the marketplace. We also examined the literature on globalization, hybridization, and legitimization, linking our findings to higher level constructs. Through iterations between our data and the literature, we conceptualized reterritorialization of yoga in the United States as a legitimation process.
Findings
For a cultural practice to reterritorialize—that is, to be made one’s own by producing a local form in a new society and geography (Yazicioglu, 2010)—it has to be made congruent with values, institutions, and social norms of that new society and geography (Suchman, 1995). Our analysis reveals an array of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to legitimize American Yoga. We discuss these strategies based on how they map on to three types of legitimacy: moral, cognitive, and pragmatic (Suchman, 1995).
Moral legitimation through aligning and embedding
Moral legitimacy rests on normative approval. When practices travel to new sociocultural contexts, local audiences need to be convinced that the practice promotes societal welfare and that it is the “right thing to do.” Such positive normative evaluations can be garnered by producing socially valued outcomes, incorporating socially accepted procedures, carrying morally favorable structural traits, and projecting charismatic leadership (Suchman, 1995). We identify two strategies by which market actors constructed yoga as morally legitimate in its reterritorialization in the United States: aligning and embedding.
Market actors such as social movement organizations and managers pursue alignment strategies to relate their interests, values, and beliefs with those of their audiences (Benford and Snow, 2000; Humphreys, 2010a, 2010b). In the context of hybrid cultural products, moral legitimacy rests on creating linkages between local consumers’ interests and values and the goals and ideology of the cultural product. Yoga has historically been linked to physical, medical, and spiritual outcomes (De Michelis, 2004, 2008). Although attention given to these goals has shifted over time, all three benefits are still emphasized in the United States yoga market (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015). Our data is replete with examples of yoga brands aligning these outcomes with societal issues and values of the American society to morally legitimize the practice of yoga.
The analysis of the newspaper archival data indicates that, in the 1970s, yoga’s benefits were highlighted in response to the increasing concerns for addiction and drug abuse in the United States. Psychiatrists conducted experiments on detoxification at yoga centers, while agencies like the narcotics treatment administration provided funding to yogic treatment methods (Claiborne, 1972; Roberts, 1970). These efforts helped legitimize therapeutic benefits of yoga, aiding consumers on path to self-transformation. One major brand that focused on the therapeutic goals of yoga was Forrest Yoga. Created in 1989 by Ana Forrest, the brand targeted destructive behaviors with the mission to heal: In teaching Forrest Yoga, I [Ana Forrest] am doing my part to mend the hoop of the people—to inspire people to clear through the stuff that hardens them and sickens their bodies so they can walk freely and lightly in a healing way. (www.forrestyoga.com)
In the 1980s, market actors increasingly focused on the fitness and medical benefits of yoga. Bikram Yoga exemplifies this trend as the first hot yoga brand and one of the most physically vigorous types of Hatha yoga (Syman, 2010). The founder Bikram Choudhury culled from his own recovery story to persuade Americans on the value of practicing yoga. He had injured his knee in a weight lifting accident and the doctors had predicted that he would never walk again. Yet, Bikram recovered from his injury in just 6 months with the help of yoga. In his book, Bikram pointed out the pervasiveness of physical and medical problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the United States and proposed Bikram Yoga as a means to address these societal problems. Alongside the claims to Bikram’s personal legitimacy, the positioning of the brand gave yoga an altruistic grounding, casting it as promoting the welfare of American consumers (Choudhury, 2007).
In their positioning and practices, brands also appropriated spiritual goals of yoga to fit the American lifestyle. They drew from the yama (ethical precepts) and niyama (guidelines for self-discipline) tenets of Indian yoga traditions and established links to New Age spirituality. For example, one of the fastest growing yoga communities of the 1990s was Anusara Yoga that adapted the seminal yoga style of Iyengar yoga to the American audience. The founder, John Friend, softened Iyengar’s precision with a new “heart-oriented language to celebrate the spirit inside us all” and offered a more playful practice (Droste, 2000). He positioned the brand as less exotic than some, yet more spiritual than the most commercial brands. Highlighting the spiritual effects of yoga over the physical ones, Friend told his instructors to “lead the students to that magical place where everyone’s heart opens naturally and where everyone feels empowered and filled with self love” (Swartz, 2010: MM38).
Brands such as Jivamukti Yoga also amplified spiritual goals of yoga. The cofounder Gannon remarks: “The practice of yoga … is union with God. All the rest—greater flexibility, better health—is incidental. We should focus on the union” (Green, 1998: ST1). Our interviewee Gloria summarizes Jivamukti Yoga as “a spiritually based practice, which incorporates vegetarianism, uplifting music, spiritual activation, this physical practice, chanting. So it’s much more than just a physical practice.” Gloria also distinguishes between religion and spirituality: Yoga is not a religion per se … historically, obviously, it was for people of that faith, the Hindu faith. But I think … if you’re a spiritual person, it just enhances your own spirituality. Because really it’s a universal message … a lot of the chants reference Hindu gods … but … in my opinion … it represents some aspect of ourselves.
The second reterritorialization strategy toward attaining moral legitimacy was to embed yoga in already legitimate institutions such as corporations, schools, prisons, and the army. In her study of casino gambling, Humphreys (2010a) suggests that the formation of coalitions such as trade organizations and social ties to legitimate organizations like federal agencies can help build material resources for innovations in acquiring local acceptance and validation. Similarly, by associating yoga with respected entities in the American society, the normative evaluation of yoga was strengthened. For example, as employers and insurance companies recognized yoga as a treatment form and corporations started offering alternative health-care policies that included yoga, the medical benefits of yoga were validated (Whitetaker, 1996). Mainstream companies like PepsiCo Inc. and Texaco started to offer yoga to help their employees attain work-life balance, reduce stress, and become happier, increasing productivity in the workplace (Foderaro, 2001).
Driven by missionary pursuits, a small but growing number of American yogis formed organizations that teach yoga in prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Yoga Journal points out “social activism is becoming more and more a part of mainstream American yoga. People are realizing it’s almost a requirement to give back” (Zezima, 2008). For example, founded in 2006, YogaHOPE is a nonprofit organization that “strives to lead women toward empowerment and recovery by cultivating mindfulness through yoga, meditation and non-judgmental self-inquiry” (http://yogahope.org/about). It offers yoga at women’s homeless shelters, substance-abuse treatment programs, domestic-violence safe houses, and correctional facilities (Zezima, 2008).
Other American yogis brought yoga to schools while leaving out religious elements like sanskrit words, chanting, and prayer poses. Brands such as KarmaKids, Little Flower Yoga, and Bent on Learning are among the many who teach children at private and public schools. The founder of Bent on Learning states: No prayer position with the hands. Nothing that anyone could look in and think, this is religious … Perhaps a teacher accustomed to working in other settings inadvertently puts hands together in a prayer position, for instance. It is easily explained, and fixed … we weed it out quickly. (Billard, 2011)
Cultural-cognitive legitimation through familiarizing and standardizing
Cultural-cognitive legitimacy is the degree to which a practice is known and understood by social actors. It is often measured as the degrees of comprehensibility and taken for grantedness (Suchman, 1995). We identify two reterritorialization strategies that helped enhance cultural-cognitive legitimacy of yoga in the United States: familiarizing and standardizing.
One way to fit a new practice into existing cognitive schemas and make it comprehensible to local audiences is through familiarizing. In line with past research that has documented the role of media and managers in using linguistic tools to manage legitimacy (Humphreys 2010a, 2010b), our data reveals influential actors in the media (e.g. Yoga Journal) as well as brands and entrepreneurs who use specific language to familiarize American consumers with yoga. As Yazicioglu (2010: 243) notes in the Turkish Rock context, the creation of hybrid practices through mixing language and form in novel ways is “always around notions of local and global and authentic and commercial.” Similar dynamics underline the familiarizing of American audiences with yoga by replacing the Sanskrit names of the postures with English names. For example, Berly Bender Birch, an influential American yoga teacher since the 1970s, appropriated Ashtanga style of yoga by calling it “Power Yoga.” Her aim was to communicate the physically rigorous nature of the practice and help the “western mind to relate to this rather obscure version of yoga called ashtanga” (Berly Bender Birch, quoted in Pizer, 2012). Similarly, Beth Shaw created the YogaFit brand as a “user-friendly” practice that dispensed with the sanskrit names of postures and eliminated Om’ing and chanting (Oldenburg, 2004). Tara Stiles, the founder of Strala Yoga, dismissed the discussions of sacred Hindu texts and chakras and used plain terminology such as “push-ups” and “lower back” instead of “chaturangas” and “sacrum” (Alvarez, 2011). These translations not only allowed the practice to be intelligible but also more accessible for a wider range of practitioners. Local journals and associations also disassociated yoga from Hinduism through the use of language. For instance, the Yoga Journal purposefully avoided the use of the word Hinduism (Vitello, 2010), while the American Yoga association argued that Hinduism’s religious structures evolved much later than yoga (www.americanyogaassociation.org).
While familiarizing strategy popularized yoga among mainstream American consumers, it also stirred identity and ownership tensions in the marketplace. In 2010, the HAF—a non-profit advocacy organization that educates the public about Hinduism and represents the interests of the Hindu American community—initiated the campaign “Take Back Yoga: Bringing Light to Yoga’s Hindu Roots.” In one of the cofounders’ view, de-ethnicization of yoga veils the national heritage of the practice and shakes the very foundations of Hindu American identity: “The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a legacy in which they can take pride” (Shukla, April 18, 2010, Washington Post Under God Blog). Viewing the globalization and reterritorialization of yoga in the United States as cultural domination (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012), Shukla went on to demand reconciliation for the popularity of yoga in America and denial of its Hindu heritage at the same time: Hindus across America and around the world face religious bigotry, hate speech and human rights abuses because of fundamental misunderstandings about their religion. At the same time, millions are turning to the power and benefits of yoga; yoga, the gift given to all of us by … the mothers and fathers of Hinduism. (Shukla, 2009, Letter to the Yoga Journal)
The second reterritorialization strategy aimed at achieving cultural-cognitive legitimacy is standardizing—“promoting taken-for-grantedness by encouraging isomorphism” (Suchman, 1995: 592). Hannan and Freeman (1989: 132) argue that the “simple prevalence of a form tends to give it legitimacy.” In the United States, yoga became a common and popular offering at fitness centers, growing rapidly in 1990s (Lamb, 2006). By 2002, 84% of clubs were offering yoga classes, up from 38% in 1995 (Oldenburg, 2004).
With missions to make yoga accessible to the masses, brands also played a key role in the prevalence of the practice among American consumers. CorePower Yoga, for instance, entered the market in the 2000s with an aggressive growth strategy, offering a variety of classes targeting a range of segments: “CorePower Yoga strives to increase awareness and widespread adoption of yoga by making yoga accessible to everyone through a variety of yoga styles for beginners and more advanced yoga students, and class times to meet any schedule” (www.corepoweryoga.com). The founder, Trevor Tice, compares the brand to Starbucks: “Howard Schultz created the coffee culture in America. And we are doing that with yoga …” (Schultz, 2012: 1).
Another example of standardization was the training process of yoga teachers. The original transfer of yogic knowledge that took years of training through a one-on-one guru–mentee interaction was replaced by training programs that allowed a large number of teachers to be trained at the same time in studio settings (Jain, 2015). According to our interviewee John, the standardized training programs in the United States provided calculability and efficiency (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001) that resulted in a safer and better training: I think Sharon (co-founder of Jivamukti brand) went to Shivananda. And it was really, really kind of primitive. You know, very tough conditions. They got sick. They got dysentery. They, you know, the water was bad … I think the quality of yoga in this country is probably better than it is in India. The mission of the brand has always been to bring yoga to the masses … So we built a market … we brought yoga to the people around the country, to the smallest communities, and taught people how to teach a user-friendly fitness-oriented style of yoga.
Pragmatic legitimation through segmenting and community building
To achieve pragmatic legitimacy, actors must meet the substantive needs of various audiences (Suchman, 1995). In the United States, adopting the marketing logic of responding to customer tastes and expectations helped American Yoga attain pragmatic legitimacy. Toward this end, we identify two reterritorialization strategies: segmenting and community building.
Marketers tackle the challenge of appealing to local preferences by adopting segmentation strategies. The analysis of our archival data reveals that marketers in the United States carefully targeted yoga to middle age and baby boomer Americans with heart and cholesterol problems, pregnant women seeking methods to cope with pain, and working professionals wanting to manage stress in their everyday lives (Epstein, 1999). Yoga was positioned as a stretching exercise to help improve performances of runners, football players, and golfers. National Football League (NFL) teams reportedly added mandatory yoga sessions to their trainings to increase the flexibility of players and prevent injuries (Williams, 2001). Another segment increasingly exposed to yoga was children. Non-profit organizations and occupational therapists are influential figures in the integration of yoga into school curriculum, training of teachers, and tailoring the practice for special-need students. Schools across the country introduced yoga breaks to help students cope with stress induced by intensive testing and pressure to succeed (Brown, 2002; Saslow, 2003).
The amalgamation of poses, scripts, and material elements in a selective fashion allows brands to manage diverse needs of consumers and secure endorsement from a wide range of actors (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015). For example, CorePower Yoga combines fitness and spiritual goals in its classes. It offers hot yoga classes that incorporate weight training and spinning as well as spiritual practices such as the ritualistic closure of the class with the salutation “namaste.” The following vignette from our participant observations illustrates how the New Age spirituality is integrated into the class scripts reterritorializing the practice in the local setting: The instructor was dressed in striped swim trunks and a tank top with a sunset image on the front. He looked like he was ready to go to the beach. He started the class with a story to guide the day’s practice: “Let me tell you something that happened this weekend. I was driving up to Santa Barbara to see my best friend. In my excitement I must have been pushing the gas pedal a bit too much and all of a sudden there was a police siren behind me. I got a speeding ticket. So I want this to remind us to control ourselves and let go off the gas pedal. As you engage in your practice today dedicate it to self-control.” Throughout the practice he reminded us to focus on control as we held each pose. Right before the squads he started playing a Janet Jackson song, “Control,” to bring inspiration to our practice. (Field notes at CorePower Yoga) … atmosphere in the gyms do not allow for a deeper practice. It’s really just the physical because this is the … environment here. It’s a physical working out. And so when you take your practice to a deeper level … it’s such a radical idea and people shut down on it really fast.
On the one hand, the segmenting and community building strategies allow brands to meet localized demands of consumer segments and create opportunities for new forms to emerge in the market. On the other hand, these new styles and brands are viewed as diluted practices and tainted by commercial motivations, resulting in authenticity and ownership tensions. These tensions showcase potential dilemmas that may arise between different types of legitimacy, in this case, a conflict between pragmatic and moral legitimacy. For the most part, the American Yoga brands attempt to address the possible conflict between pragmatic and moral legitimacy by appearing above commercial considerations—a strategy that Beverland (2005) also observes among luxury wine producers. Jivamukti Yoga, for instance, maintains that their primary intention is to facilitate spiritual elevation not to gain profit (MacDonald, 2001). Similarly, Yoga to the People (YTTP) is positioned against the increased commodification in the American Yoga market. YTTP’s key feature is its donation-based classes (Billard, 2011). Its mantra is that, in yoga, there are no correct clothes, proper payment, or glorified teachers and that yoga is for everyone (yogatothepeople.com). In contrast, brands that do not successfully disassociate themselves from motivations of commercial gain risk illegitimacy. Notably, Bikram Yoga has become the central brand in cultural and legal disputes due to its aggressive copyright strategy. Bikram’s attempt to set up exclusive segmentation of the hot yoga market instigated advocacy efforts to protect the public nature of yoga. In 2003, studio owners, yoga teachers and students, and other lawyers banded together to form the non-profit organization of Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU) challenging the moral goals and therefore the legitimacy of the brand. Viewing patenting and copyrighting as violations of the tradition of yoga, OSYU argued that the poses that constitute Bikram Yoga have been in the public domain for centuries. The group filed suit with Bikram to defeat his intellectual property claims and to prevent him from coming after yoga studios that use Bikram Yoga poses (Fish, 2006).
While the dispute between OSYU and Bikram was settled out of court in 2005; Fish, 2006), Bikram continued to clash with other brands and yoga studios. These disagreements around who owns and accrues commercial gain from yoga also led the Indian Government to take a stance against branding and copyrighting practices in the United States, viewing them as a form of piracy and violation of the spirit of yoga. The country’s traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) began to digitize yoga postures to serve as a source of authentic yogic knowledge. The founder of TKDL argues, “No one should be able to claim ownership of these traditional postures … The information has been in the public domain in India for thousands of years” (Sinha, 2011).
The market outcome of this ownership tension has been an auto-orientalist reappropriation of yoga in India as a sign of unique cultural and national identity (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012). The analysis of our netnographic data reveals how the Indian government started to use yoga as a postcolonial platform to rediscover and teach themselves and the world their cultural heritage. Appointed to office in 2014, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took several actions to (re)claim yoga as India’s cultural property. First, he initiated the Make in India campaign, which includes the wellness industry as one of the sectors of focus. Second, he appointed a Minister of Yoga to promote recognition for the practice: “There is little doubt about yoga being an Indian art form … We’re trying to establish to the world that it’s ours … (Yoga) is our system and it has not received enough prominence. We will take it to the masses” (Minister Naik quoted in The Week Staff, 2015). Finally, Modi proposed an International Yoga Day to the United Nations General Assembly, highlighting the Indian (in comparison to Hindu) tradition of yoga (Suri, 2015): 192 countries participated on the first International Yoga Day (June 21, 2015) and Delhi hosted the world’s largest yoga session with over 35,000 participants (Singh, 2015). What was interesting was that Modi’s scripting for the big day endorsed yoga as a secular practice and eliminated certain poses (sun salutations and Om chanting) from the event. Thus, the efforts promoted yoga as an Indian brand.
Discussion
Our discussion revolves around four key points that are unique to legitimization of hybrid cultural products: (1) market logic plays a key role in reterritorialization strategies and ensuing resistances, (2) countervailing responses to reterritorialization emanate from actors from both within and outside the reterritorialized geography, (3) tensions that accompany reterritorialization fuel multiplicity in the market (e.g. practices, ideologies, and forms), and (4) hybridization creates multiple sources of legitimacy (see Figure 1).
Legitimation of American Yoga.
Our findings support the centrality of market logic in globalization processes (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012; Hannerz, 1996). In contrast to Yazicioglu (2010: 250) who characterizes rock music in Turkey as “a self-marketing commodity due to an ideological strength that enables reterritorialization,” our analysis showcases the role of market actors in promoting and legitimating yoga in the new cultural sphere. Askegaard and Eckhardt (2012) also highlight the marketization processes by illustrating how the legitimacy afforded by the Western adoption of yoga practices played a crucial role in the reappropriation of yoga in India. While they observe the meanings and motives Indian consumers have in engaging in modern yoga practice, our institutional theoretic framework allows us to unpack reappropriation and reterritorialization processes by honing in on actors’ (e.g. brands, journals, and non-profit organizations) strategies in fostering legitimacy of American Yoga. These strategies explain some of the ways in which the middle-class informants in Askegaard and Eckhardt’s (2012) study reappropriated and reappraised value of yoga in the contemporary Indian consumptionscape. For example, yoga was reappropriated by modern corporations as a stress relieving technique for their employees. Our study complements this finding by articulating the strategies like aligning and embedding that allowed yoga to be reappropriated as a human resource management technique. Similarly, reappropriation of yoga as a customer-friendly, market oriented, and health practice are results of familiarizing, standardizing, and aligning strategies.
While the literature on hybrid cultural products revolves around the purist versus celebratory duality (Papastergiadis, 2005; Pieterse, 1994, 2001; Tomlinson, 1999), we find that both of these positions are influenced by discernable structural commonalities (Wilk, 1995). The key category of this common structure of difference is market logic; both reterritorialization strategies and consequent responses follow rules and dynamics that are globally determined by the market. In other words, actors that support the purist as well as the celebratory ideals draw on market logic to substantiate their ideological positions. Focusing on the market as the prime force in globalization of culture, Hannerz (1996: 74) argues, “if there is one tendency in the market frame to homogenize and reach as widely as possible with the same goods, there is also the alternative of limiting competition by finding a particular niche for a more specialized product.” These two tendencies are evident in reterritorialization strategies that range from aligning, which is about mass appeal to American consumers, to segmenting that specifically attunes yoga to local groups of consumers, and represent the celebratory position on cultural hybridity.
The development of American Yoga also mobilizes national efforts by India to reinvent yoga as Indian heritage. While these efforts stem largely from purist positions, they also require adopting and complying with market logic. HAF’s campaign to promote Hindu roots of yoga serves as a public relations campaign involving key constituencies in the multi-billion dollar market (American consumers and Indian immigrants). The Indian government’s digitization of yoga poses abides by the market framework of global capitalism and seeks to capitalize on the valuable commodity of yoga. Its call for an International Yoga Day, too, is motivated to preserve national and cultural heritage of India and, thus, exemplifies a national branding effort.
Finally, our findings demonstrate that legitimation is “a contested process that unfolds across time” (Johnson et al., 2006: 59). This dynamic is in line with Suchman’s (1995: 594) observation that “institutionalization often generates its own opposition,” wherein the success of legitimation projects mobilizes opponents that seek to delegitimize these projects and/or oppose institutionalization. The legitimacy of American Yoga is contested by actors both within and outside of the United States. Our findings depict American consumers’ protests against offering yoga in public schools as well as Indian Government’s attempts at redefining yoga in terms of a national product (e.g. Make in India campaign). The resulting identity, ownership, and authenticity tensions reinforce formation of new hybrid forms, brands, and styles, each meeting the demands of different segments. Consider brands like Bend on Learning as a secular form of yoga offered at schools, YTTP with donation-based classes that rise above commercial motivations, and CorePower Yoga that integrates New Age spirituality into its class scripts to cite a few. Askegaard and Eckhardt (2012) have also noted these same tensions in reappropriation of yoga in the Indian consumptionscape. While some of the ways in which yoga was reappropriated can be viewed as grounded in celebratory ideals (e.g. yoga as a resource management technique), others can be seen as based on purist ideals (e.g. global yoga as cultural domination). Our study shows that, if it were not for the purist position, it would not have been possible to witness such innovation of new hybrid products in the global marketplace. That is, both purists’ responses and adoption of the market logic breed multiplicity that protects legitimacy of American Yoga in face of contestations.
Our findings also inform studies of diffusion as a social legitimation process (e.g. Giesler, 2008, 2012; Humphreys, 2010a, 2010b; Humphreys and Latour, 2013). We posit that reterritorialization can be viewed as a special case of diffusion. Johnson et al. (2006) delineate four stages in the legitimation process—innovation, local validation, diffusion, and general validation—as a template for market development. The reterritorialization strategies uncovered herein can be mapped on to these stages (e.g. aligning for innovation, familiarizing for local validation, standardizing and embedding for diffusion, and segmenting and community building for general validation). Yet, we observe key differences in legitimation of cultural hybrid products. First, legitimation process of hybrid products starts off with appropriation and hybridization processes. Second, due to the two distinct perspectives on hybridity, we observe specific set of tensions (identity, ownership, and authenticity) that surface especially in the local and general validation stages. Third, the reterritorialization strategies we identify include and go beyond rhetorical strategies marketers employ to manage legitimacy. Finally, while our analysis shares these past diffusion studies’ institutional approach and focus on the role of brands in the social legitimation process, our attention to multi-actor/brand practices reveals that the social drama among market actors breed multiple positions rather than resulting in a new consensus in the marketplace (c.f. Giesler, 2008).
Extending Suchman’s (1995) legitimacy framework from an organizational to a market level, our study showcases the collection of actors that play a role in legitimation process. We illustrate multiple sources of legitimacy in global diffusion of (hybrid) practices. Over the course of the reterritorialization process, the cultural authority of Indian gurus transfers to brands and American brands and entrepreneurs emerge as legitimate sources. In response, Indian actors rely on their government and heritage, emphasizing origins and higher level goals of yoga (e.g. world peace) to reform their cultural authority. Thus, the growing global legitimacy of American Yoga has created a paradoxical situation in which the original version(s) of yoga have to strive for reclaiming its legitimacy. Interestingly, while the Indian government’s and actors’ efforts are nationalistic in nature, they, too, draw on market logic and appropriate and reappropriate American Yoga. That is, they are not able to act outside of and circumvent the cultural authority of the United States.
Overall, we identified and showed how brands and entrepreneurs serve as sources of legitimacy and how their reterritorialization strategies contribute to legitimating American Yoga. We discussed the different types of legitimacy as separate even though the “distinctions … among [the three pillars of institutions] are analytical in the sense that concrete institutional arrangements will be found to combine regulative, normative, and cognitive processes together in varying amounts” (Scott, 1995: 143–4). Importantly, different types of legitimacy can be in collaboration as well as in conflict with one another (Suchman, 1995). We observed how pragmatic and cognitive legitimacy can come into conflict with moral legitimacy. Whereas standardizing fosters cultural-cognitive legitimacy, it also threatens moral legitimacy of American Yoga as new procedures raise questions of authenticity. Brands can mediate such conflicts by disassociating themselves from motivations of commercial gain and by creating novel forms of enchantment via blurring of cultural boundaries. The different dimensions of legitimacy can also work in collaboration. While segmenting strategy fosters pragmatic legitimacy, it also complements cognitive-cultural legitimacy by allowing for adoption and communication of specific scripts, procedures, and benefits to constituents. Similarly, community building strategy also contributes to moral legitimacy by promoting communal relationships and welfare. Future research can further explore how various actors use language, social norms, and rules especially when the pillars of legitimacy are in conflict to mediate tensions in different institutional settings.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.