ABSTRACT
Though the international yoga diaspora began well more than a century ago, it is really only since the mid-1990s that it has taken on the global proportions that make it such a visible-and profitable-enterprise today. Precise practitioner statistics are hard to come by and are often unreliable, but it is estimated that in 2004 there were more than 2.5 million practitioners of yoga in Britain alone, a truly exponential increase from previous years.1 In the United States, indications of growth are even more startling. A 1994 Roper poll commissioned for the world’s most popular yoga magazine, Yoga Journal, estimated that more than 6 million Americans (approximately three and one-third percent of the population) were practicing yoga-1.86 million of them regularly. Almost 17 million more-or about one in ten Americans-were “interested in yoga” but had not yet tried it (Cushman 1994: 47-8). Ten years later, another national poll estimated that 15 million Americans were practicing yoga regularly (Carter 2004), while the proportion “interested in yoga” had also risen substantially. Yoga Journal estimated in 2003 that approximately 25.5 million Americans (twelve percent) of the population were “very interested” in yoga. A further 35.3 million people (sixteen percent) intended to try yoga within the next year, and 109.7 million (more than half the population) had at least a “casual interest” in yoga (Arnold 2003: 10). even if we approach these statistics with caution, it is clear that yoga is booming in America and worldwide.
