Peace Love Yoga: Appropriation and Commodification in Spiritual Industries

In her talk, Andrea Jain asks what we should make of spiritual calls on adherents to think beyond the individual, claims to counter the problems of unbridled capitalism, challenges to imperialism and cultural appropriation, calls for women’s empowerment, and efforts to greenwash commodities. Many spiritual commodities, corporations, and entrepreneurs, Jain argues, acknowledge the problems of capitalism and, in fact, subvert them; but they subvert them through mere gestures. From provocative taglines like “peace love yoga” to calls for “conscious capitalism,” commodification serves as a strategy through which subversion itself is contained.