Yoga, its image and its public: The social representation of the practice as developed and projected through the puplic speech of its practitioners and the mass media
The present research examined the construction processes and the contents of the social representation of yoga in the Greek society. Starting from the theoretical background of Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations and the spiritual dimensions of yoga, the social representation of the aforementioned practice were examined. The material studied was based on two main categories of sources used for a lexical analysis of the content. The first category consists of 28 texts as they were posted on the internet promoting schools in Athens and other major cities of Greece and were designed to attract those interested to enroll in the yoga studios. The second category consists of 28 articles published in the last 20 years in the websites of major Greek newspapers. Based on the analysis of the texts, yoga is described either as a way of life, through the meditative practice of body-mind balance, or as a physical practice aiming at the improvement and empowerment of the body. Through the analysis that was held for each newspaper separately, the dominant representational intakes by the media were four: Yoga as a) physical training, b) a scientifically proven way to be healthy, c) an object of rejection by the orthodox church, d) a worldview. Overall, yoga was found to be represented both as a product of promotion and a controversial issue belonging to a holistic approach of the modern way of life, which introduces a new method of self- improvement, sports and at the same time a new spiritual worldview.