Peace Love Yoga : The Politics of Global Spirituality The Politics of Global Spirituality

Abstract

Peace Love Yoga analyzes growing spiritual industries and their coherence with neoliberal capitalism. “Personal growth,” “self-care,” and “transformation” are just some of the generative tropes in the narrative of these industries. The book illuminates the power dynamics underlying what the author calls neoliberal spirituality, illustrating how spiritual commodities are rooted in concerns about deviancy, not only in the form of low productivity but also forms of social deviancy. The book, however, does not just offer one more voice bemoaning the commodification of spirituality as a numbing device through which consumers ignore the problems of neoliberal capitalism or as the corruption or loss of “authentic” religious forms. Instead, it asks what we should make of subversive spiritual discourses that call on adherents to think beyond the individual and even out into the environment, claims to counter the problems of unbridled capitalism with charitable giving or “conscious capitalism,” challenges to the imperialism behind the appropriation and commodification of products from yoga to mindfulness, calls for women’s empowerment, and efforts to greenwash commodities, making them more environmentally “friendly” or “sustainable.” Rather than a mode through which consumers ignore, escape, or are numbed to the problems of neoliberal capitalism, many spiritual industries, corporations, entrepreneurs, and consumers, the book suggests, do actually acknowledge those problems 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 contained.