Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spitituality

by Andrea R. Jain

Engaging with the growing popular and academic interest in the "spiritual but not religious," Andrea R. Jain explores the connections between the practices of global spirituality and aspects of neoliberal capitalism in Peace Love Yoga. "Personal growth," "self-care," and "transformation" are all tropes in the narrative of the spiritual identity Jain is concerned with. This "spirituality" is usually depicted as firmly the term "alternative" (alternative health, alternative medicine, alternative spiritualities) is omnipresent. To the contrary, Jain argues, spiritual commodities, entrepreneurs, and consumers are quite mainstream and sometimes even conservative and nationalistic. Ranging from the transnational to the economic to the activist, Jain refuses the single narrative focus of most works on the SBNR; human phenomena that can be analyzed through a single lens or narrative are few and far between, and existing research in this area too often yields a suspiciously tidy story.The heart of the book includes sophisticated analyses two politically divergent but equally entrepreneurial and global-capitalist yoga gurus; "athleisure apparel" corporations, such as lululemon, that successfully market consumer goods as a purchased commitment to social justice; and therapeutically-focused applications of spirituality that concentrate on healing the broken person rather than undermining the system that broke that person in the first place.Many spiritual commodities, corporations, and entrepreneurs, Jain suggests, do actually acknowledge the problems of neoliberal capitalism and in fact subvert them; but they subvert them through mere gestures. From provocative taglines printed across t-shirts or packaging to calls for "conscious capitalism," commodification serves as a strategy through which subversion itself is colonized.

Genres: Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Jules]

Some of the arguments in this book were well-argued (e.g., that neoliberal spirituality pushes the ideology that problems can be solved through self-improvement, not improvement of the system), but other arguments could use more evidence. For example, Jain argues that many yoga practitioners in the West see the damaging effects of capitalism, racism, sexism, and environmental degradation, but they only challenge these problems through gestural subversions; that is, they purchase "ethically produced" goods, organic food, and t-shirts with mildly subversive phrases. Jain then assumes that such gestural subversions comprise the sum total of all of the subversions of Western yoga practitioners.
I see two problems with this argument:
(1) It may be true that Western yoga practitioners' subversions are all gestural, but Jain does not *prove* that. Jain cites and quotes academics liberally, but the voices of yoga practitioners on the ground are largely absent. Indeed, even the polls she cites are mostly magazine polls, without any critique of who those polls reach or how the polls were constructed. How do we know that Western yoga practitioners don't participate in marches, call their senators, start community food gardens, etc.? We really don't; we only have assumptions.
(2) After assuming that all Western yoga practitioners' subversions are gestural, Jain goes on to assume that Western yoga practitioners are OK with this - that most of them think gestural subversions suffice. Jain, again, does not provide evidence for this. I wonder if many Western yoga practitioners *do* want to do more, but don't know how. Even Jain admits that her book "does not provide solutions" (p. 44) - although Jain later critiques a magazine article for "simply... publishing a selection of #MeToo narratives, offering no discussion of structural causes, solutions, or interventions" (p. 125). Jain certainly discusses structural causes, but she does not provide "solutions" or "interventions". If an academic such as Jain doesn't know how to fix this, how can the average Western yoga practitioner?

I think part of the problem is that Jain oscillates between critiquing yoga corporations (whose views she can prove through their marketing campaigns and products) and yoga practitioners (who are represented only by the goods they presumably consume and not their words or other actions) without clearly demarcating the two.

[Anu]

“[S]piritual industries support neoliberal capitalism, in the pursuit of both surplus value and ideological control, that is, by reinforcing its structures, norms, and values and punishing deviations from them. Creating deviant out-groups by extending neoliberal governance and responsibilization, and claiming the members of such groups fail to choose the right spiritual interventions to cultivate self-improvement, serve these ends.”

Incisive work of critical theory on a subject I've never heard discourse nor thought about.