Legitimacy of Hybrid Cultural Products: The Case of American Yoga

摘要

This paper explores the emergence of American Yoga and examines how cultural products struggle for and acquire legitimacy. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice, whereby yoga is appropriated and taken from its Indian roots and context and is reconfigured, acquiring new forms and meanings in the new geographical and cultural sphere of the U.S. We raise the following research questions: (1) What strategies did the market actors adopt to reterritorialize yoga in the U.S.? (2) How did these strategies serve to legitimize American Yoga? We adopt institutional theoretical framework to unpack the processes and outcomes of reterritorialization.