Legitimation of Hybrid Cultural Products: The Case of American Yoga

Cultural hybridization indicates mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables and produces. Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines how hybrid cultural products strive for legitimacy in the context of yoga. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice that emerged as yoga was reconfigured through dialectical exchanges between India and the West and acquired new forms and meanings in the geographical and cultural sphere of the United States. The findings reveal a series of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to advance moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy for American Yoga, accompanied by identity, ownership, and authenticity centered tensions. We illustrate reterritorialization as a legitimation process mediated by strategies of market actors and identify unique outcomes in legitimation of hybrid cultural products drawing from polar perspectives on hybridization.