Between Wellness and Elegance: Yoga Consumption in China

Abstract

Yoga has become prevalent as a fitness choice in China. Its commercial development is based on imported knowledge and is also constructed through a traditional way of interpretation, reflecting the localization of an “exotic” body technique. Although the related literature focuses primarily on Western and South Asian societies, the subjectivities of a new yoga “school” require examination for a better evaluation of present theory. By combining historical analysis, personal interviews, and auto-ethnography, this article investigates yoga from different perspectives to illustrate the practice’s social connotations. Particularly, this study shows how yoga has experienced continuous translation and transformation during the interaction of interpreters and learners, and eventually become a consumption category associated with “wellness” and “elegance.” Incorporating ontological anthropology and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, this article defines yoga as a multi-faceted habitus mediated among scenarios constructed by different actors, which sets with the time lag between the Chinese present and the past originated from the west and India. In this process of cross-cultural practice, yoga reveals two sets of conflicting values that embody the particularities of Chinese discourse.