The Commodification and Exchange of Knowledge in the Case of Transnational Commercial Yoga
Open accessAbstract
The practice of yoga outside India and for commercial exchange (transnational commercial yoga) is a multibillion-dollar industry that has been the site of increasing formal regulation. The primary questions these regulations are meant to resolve include the following: (1) What is yoga? (2) What is its proprietary nature? and (3) Who has the right to manage its expression? Two recent U.S. federal district court cases involving the Bikram Yoga College of India, a yoga franchise based in Los Angeles, have drawn international attention to the debate on whether yogic knowledge or practice resides in the public or private domain. This article asks, if given the monetary value at stake, did the global market for transnational commercial yoga set the stage for claims to individual IPRs? Furthermore, this article analyzes how yoga, due to its unique characteristics as an embodied practice and intangible form, serves as a platform for experimentation from which new meanings of open source, IPRs, and information management strategies emerge.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank the Department of Anthropology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for their funding support.
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Allison Fish's research on international copyright law and Bikram Chowdrey's attempt to copyright sequences of āsana has interesting implications for the transmission of yoga in the modern world.
“Allison Fish's research on the international copyright law and Bikram Chowdrey's attempt to copyright sequences of ! sana also has interesting implications for the transmission of yoga in the modern world (2006).”
From The development of modern yoga: A survey of the field (2009) · cites this paper as Fish 2006
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- Authors
- Fish, A.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Corresponding author
- Fish, Allison
- ORCID
- Fish, Allison
- Venue
- International Journal of Cultural Property
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2006-05
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 02
- ISSN
- 0940-7391 (ISSN-L)
- 1465-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2020558777
- Cited by
- 90
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 3 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 13 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 9.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- International Journal of Cultural Property (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Intellectual Property Law
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Intellectual Property Rights and Media
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management of Technology and Innovation › Intellectual Property and Patents
- Keywords
- commodification of knowledge, intellectual property, Bikram yoga, proprietary knowledge, open source, embodied practice, information management
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