Khan, Hareem

Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
California State University (USA)

Ethnic services and products have a particular salience in the global beauty and wellness industries such that their value is based on a perceived and curated Otherness that is mediated by workers, business owners, clients, as well as the state. In turn, the products and services serve as a means to achieve modernity/wellness/beauty/renewal through the manufacturing of authenticity in the global marketplace. This paper, grounded in ethnographic research based in Los Angeles, examines how participants in the Ayurvedic beauty and wellness industries, ranging from practitioners to consumers, activate and engage with aesthetic practices and services marketed and advertised as “authentically” Indian or Ayurvedic, which together reinvigorate the relational dynamic between tate projects and neoliberal multiculturalism. Borrowing from Gyanendra Pandey’s work on prejudice, I argue that the ways authenticity is racialized by Ayurvedic practitioners and Ayurvedic beauty business owners activates the “universal prejudice” of authenticity, thereby, obfuscating the racial mechanisms of exclusion and enacting homogenous and reductive South Asian representations of racial and ethnic inclusion (2010).

To examine these exclusions and inclusions, I draw from research on the professionalization of Ayurveda that has focused on its role in the nationalist project of India through the state’s crafting of Ayurveda as Indigenous. Interestingly, due in part to the consumption of Ayurveda in the West, efforts today continue to further locate it and other practices like Yoga as inherently Indian, fueled in part by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, as well as its recognition on global platforms (Kedhar 2010). Ayurveda, consequently, entrenches narratives of India’s global significance that rely on selective modes of inclusivity while also resting on the realities of exclusivity harbored by the state itself further signaling a form of cultural nationalism that racializes Hinduism and India in the consumer imaginary juxtaposed against what does or cannot fit.

Alongside these state-led initiatives, Ayurveda’s reach continues to extend far beyond the borders of India, manifesting into what some have termed “New Age Ayurveda,” due to its entanglements with New Age counterculture movements alongside a growing suspicion of Western biomedicine. The history and development of “modern” and “global” Ayurveda has been explored extensively from a range of disciplines including religious studies and medical anthropology (Berger, 2013; Wujcistyk and Smith, 2008). “New Age Ayurveda” is represented by the saturation of Ayurvedic clinics, services, and products that are marketed and advertised to multiethnic and multiracial clientele in Los Angeles. My research explores the transnational nature of New Age Ayurveda, and I intervene through a critical discussion of global raciality, often excluded from studies on Ayurveda, to focus on how it informs the racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics that constitute South Asian diasporic racial formations as well as neoliberal multiculturalism (Bacchetta, Maira, and Winant, 2019).

Through interviews with participants in the beauty and wellness industries, this paper bridges the Indian state’s crafting of Ayurveda as Indigenous with the popularity of New Age Ayurveda in the United States. I argue that the resulting processes of racialization place the production and consumption of authenticity into histories of racial formations that extend, and in some ways depart Beauty and the State from, Western liberal discourses of multiculturalism and inclusion through its entanglements with nationalist projects. Ultimately, I explore the ways categories of difference circulate transnationally to better understand the production of racialized Otherness in the global marketplace as well as the optimization of renewal, wellness, and beauty as their own racializing discourses.

Short bio:
Hareem Khan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. Her research has been published in Ethnicities, Journal of Asian American Studies, Wear Your Voice digital magazine, The New Ethnographer digital blog, an edited volume on migrant labor (Amsterdam University Press), and an anthology on global raciality organized by the University of California Center for New Racial Studies (Routledge). She is currently working on her first book project, which examines the burgeoning South Asian beauty and wellness industries focusing on the entanglements of race, labor, and the commodification of transnational aesthetic practices under neoliberal multiculturalism.