The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram’s Hot Yoga
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Allison Fish
Allison Fish is a senior lecturer in the Law School and a senior research fellow in the Centre for Policy Futures at the University of Queensland. Her research uses ethnographic and historical approaches to examine how legal forms, technological infrastructures, and cultural logics shape the management of informational resources. To date, her research in intellectual property has examined how different communities leverage claims and deploy digital tools in an effort to regulate various domains including South Asian classical medicine, ethnobotanical knowledge, open access scholarly outputs, and open source software.
Abstract
In 2003 the highly profitable transnational commercial yoga community was unsettled when the controversial Los Angeles-based yogi, Bikram Choudhury, launched a barrage of legal actions against fellow hot yoga teachers. At the heart of these disputes were Bikram’s copyright and trade mark claims to a popular yoga choreography performed in a heated room. These disputes quickly attracted attention from an array of stakeholders including Indian civil society, governmental figures, spiritual ascetics, and open source advocates who presumed that such proprietary claims were not only novel, but also preposterous and inherently at odds with yogic values. This article seeks to interrogate this presumption and, in doing so, trace a longer history through which transnational yogic flows have always-already been haunted by notions of spiritual and economic exchange. Moreover, while the Bikram disputes may have brought proprietary claims in yoga to public attention, this article will demonstrate two things. Firstly, that intellectual property claims of various kinds have been applied to expressions of the practice in the United States since at least 1895. Secondly, despite more than 15 years of active litigation involving Bikram’s claims, certain aspects of the intellectual property issues surrounding his hot yoga practice remain unsettled. In tracing the historical roots of yoga-as-property, the article illustrates how popular understandings and legal logics move in and out of sync with one another and that proprietary claims, once introduced, become virtually inescapable – a spectral presence that continues to trouble the practice as it moves forward into the future.
Funding source: ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology
Award Identifier / Grant number: CE230100021
Funding source: ARC Discovery Indigenous on The past, present and future of Indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge
Award Identifier / Grant number: IN230100065
About the author
Allison Fish is a senior lecturer in the Law School and a senior research fellow in the Centre for Policy Futures at the University of Queensland. Her research uses ethnographic and historical approaches to examine how legal forms, technological infrastructures, and cultural logics shape the management of informational resources. To date, her research in intellectual property has examined how different communities leverage claims and deploy digital tools in an effort to regulate various domains including South Asian classical medicine, ethnobotanical knowledge, open access scholarly outputs, and open source software.
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Research funding: This work was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology (CE230100021) and ARC Discovery Indigenous on The past, present and future of Indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge (IN230100065).
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the ‘The Spectral Nature of Intellectual Property’ Pólemos
- Focus
- The Spectre of the Machine: Finding Space for Empirical Inventions in Patent Law
- Copyright, Ghosts, Information
- Impossible Realities and Intellectual Property: Specters of Value in Amie Siegel’s Provenance
- The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram’s Hot Yoga
- Spectres of Intellectual Property in the Soviet Union: The Development and Recognition of the Inventor’s Certificate
- “A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise
- Schrödinger’s Rose: Indeterminacy and Contingent Futures in the Plant Variety Rights System of Aotearoa New Zealand
- Non-singular Logics of Intellectual Property in Biomedical Innovation
- Spectral Shadows in Scientific Practice: Unveiling the Haunting Effects of Authorship and Scientific Capital Accumulation
- Research
- Domination and Submission. From the Idea of ‘Legal Personality’ Back to the Metaphor of the ‘Mask’
- “The Whore That Lost Everything”: The Tyranny of Law and the Queer Feminisation of Soft Power as Explored in Black Sails
- Book Review
- Ian Ward: The Trials of Charles I
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the ‘The Spectral Nature of Intellectual Property’ Pólemos
- Focus
- The Spectre of the Machine: Finding Space for Empirical Inventions in Patent Law
- Copyright, Ghosts, Information
- Impossible Realities and Intellectual Property: Specters of Value in Amie Siegel’s Provenance
- The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram’s Hot Yoga
- Spectres of Intellectual Property in the Soviet Union: The Development and Recognition of the Inventor’s Certificate
- “A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise
- Schrödinger’s Rose: Indeterminacy and Contingent Futures in the Plant Variety Rights System of Aotearoa New Zealand
- Non-singular Logics of Intellectual Property in Biomedical Innovation
- Spectral Shadows in Scientific Practice: Unveiling the Haunting Effects of Authorship and Scientific Capital Accumulation
- Research
- Domination and Submission. From the Idea of ‘Legal Personality’ Back to the Metaphor of the ‘Mask’
- “The Whore That Lost Everything”: The Tyranny of Law and the Queer Feminisation of Soft Power as Explored in Black Sails
- Book Review
- Ian Ward: The Trials of Charles I
