Abstract
Buddhism has always had a relationship with local economies, which help to shape the forms in which Buddhism is practiced and represented. Naturally, the emergence of Buddhist-derived mindfulness meditation in the West is affected by capitalist, market-based values, and forces that impact other phenomena brought into the marketplace. The necessity to market mindfulness to non-Buddhist consumers leads to alterations in contextualization and presentation, while the fluctuating usefulness of Buddhist associations leads product vendors to lean sometimes toward, sometimes away from Buddhism as a resource for imagery and concepts. An analysis of the popular magazine Mindful, with particular attention to its advertising policies and featured advertisers, provides insight into the forces at work in the commodification and diversification of the mindfulness movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Prices in this chapter were obtained by my research assistant, Laura Morlock, in mid-2015, by checking the vendors’ websites or appropriate online stores, such as Amazon.com. Because these prices fluctuate frequently, those listed here are for illustrative purposes, and may or may not correspond precisely to those current when the February 2015 issue of Mindful first debuted.
- 2.
Mindful is a joint American–Canadian production, and it has readers in countries outside the United States. We should be careful, then, about too easily conflating Mindful readers with Americans. Nevertheless, the large majority of Mindful readers are in fact American.
- 3.
Ad prices come from the 2016 media kit of Mindful, obtained in Fall 2015. They may not, therefore, precisely correspond to the actual cost of the ads in the February 2015 issue, but should nonetheless be reasonably close. They are used here for illustrative purposes, since the actual costs may have differed for any given advertisement due to bulk buying, changing ad rates, delays in delivery, and other factors.
- 4.
These calculations are intentionally simplistic, as they leave out additional considerations such as the cost of raw materials, employee wages, and other costs of production. They are intended only to broadly demonstrate the level of revenue and profit involved.
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Wilson, J. (2016). Selling Mindfulness: Commodity Lineages and the Marketing of Mindful Products. In: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds) Handbook of Mindfulness. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_8
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