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- Author or Editor: Suryamayi Aswini Clarence-Smith x
Auroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, is an internationally recognised endeavour in prefiguring an alternative society: the largest, most diverse, dynamic and enduring of intentional communities worldwide.
This book is a critical and insightful analysis of the utopian practice of this unique spiritual township, by a native scholar. The author explores how Auroville’s founding spiritual and societal ideals are engaged in its communal political and economic organisation, as well as various cultural practices and what enables and sustains this prefiguratively utopian practice.
This in-depth, autoethnographic case-study is an important resource for understanding prefigurative and utopian experiments – their challenges, potentialities, and significance for the advancement of human society.
While prefigurative scholarship is concentrated almost exclusively on political practice, fellow-travelling with utopian practice invites the conceptual and experimental scope of enactment of prefiguration to broaden, and thereby, through multiple avenues, empower the transformation of societies that prefigurative actors seek to facilitate. This chapter introduces the potential of a ‘prefigurative utopianism’, utopian practice enacted through prefigurative processes. Based on auto-ethnographic research on alternative political and economic practices in the largest intentional community in the world – Auroville (India) – this chapter proposes how certain forms of utopian practice, those that embody utopian ideals through strategic and reflexive experimentation, are to be recognized as prefigurative.
This chapter critically examines the development of Auroville’s communal economic framework, institutions and policies, and how the community’s founding economic ideals have galvanized, underpinned and informed these, and continue to do so. In so doing, it reveals the legal, financial and administrative challenges of prefiguring an alternative economy in a dominant capitalist mainstream, as well as the critical and reflexive nature of Auroville’s utopian practice. Empirically, this chapter contributes a significant case study of alternative and prefigurative economic organization, which is particularly relevant for practices of participatory budgeting and non-monetary forms of provision, universal basic services, and basic income policy programmes.
The chapter contextualizes and examines the Auroville community within various prevalent frameworks and possible definitions – those of an intentional community or ecovillage, utopian community or ashram, and government project or neocolonial enclave – discussing and drawing parallels with other contemporary or historical examples of these to best situate and understand the nature of this particular experiment. In so doing, it highlights Auroville’s unique success as the largest, most diverse and among the longest-standing intentional communities in the world, and how it is distinct from historical utopian communities given its experimental ethos and absence of a predetermined societal blueprint. While acknowledging its roots in the Indian ashram tradition and the presence of a spiritual founding figure, the chapter distinguishes Auroville from an ashram or other forms of guru-centric organizations and communities on the basis of it being a self-governed collective eschewing religious rites or doctrines. The role of the Indian government in the development of the project is also discussed, alongside the critique that Auroville is a neocolonial enclave. The chapter concludes by outlining the original theoretical lens of (spiritually) prefigurative utopianism that serves to analyse and understand Auroville’s praxis in this work.
Intentional communities around the world are experimenting with new paradigms for human society, including participatory political practices, cooperative economic arrangements and holistic educational modalities. As such, they are perhaps the most compelling contemporary exercise of utopianism and certainly have something to teach us about attempting to foster positive societal change. This book examines Auroville, the largest, most diverse and long-standing intentional community in the world, internationally recognized for its holistic, progressive and inclusive ideals and practices. Located in Tamil Nadu, South India, Auroville uniquely draws on spiritual ideals to enact a prefigurative utopian practice applicable to all aspects of human society; the author, a scholar native to Auroville, offers an in-depth autoethnographic analysis of how its ideals have been, and continue to be, articulated, embodied and developed in realms as wide-ranging as the community’s political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices. Responding to critiques that spirituality discourages activism, this work is revelatory of the strategic role and influence of spirituality in inspiring, informing and sustaining prefigurative political practice, while providing an honest analysis of the challenges of direct democracy, as well as prefiguring an alternative form of economic organization within a mainstream capitalist context. It raises important considerations pertaining to the perpetuation of prefigurative experiments, drawn from Auroville’s singular longevity and development trajectory, providing both theoretical and pragmatic insights into how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained that are relevant for scholars and activists of prefigurative and utopian experiments alike.
This chapter is an autoethnographic examination of an Auroville community decision-making process that is prefigurative of a spiritualized political forum. It describes and discusses the inclusion of practices designed to facilitate the embodiment of spiritually conscious states, as well as that of activities that explicitly draw on spiritual guidance to strategically inform participation and decision making. The chapter is revelatory of the shared and contested ways in which Aurovilians relate to the community’s spiritual heritage, and contributes to an understanding of the challenges and potential for spiritually prefigurative politics.
The chapter outlines the key contribution of the book: an autoethnographic analysis of how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained. It presents the overall structure of the book and the distinct theoretical and ethnographic foci of each chapter, distinguishing the research focus of this work from that of intentional community scholarship in general given that the latter tends to be limited to understanding and analysing alternative practices, rather than the processes that give life to these. The chapter introduces the intentional community of Auroville, its founding period and its development, challenges and achievements, and presents the community’s endemic understandings and practices of research. It discusses the author’s positionality as a native scholar, her autoethnographic research methods and how these are uniquely leveraged to offer a rich analysis of the process of engaging in utopian practice in an intentional community context.
Intentional communities around the world are experimenting with new paradigms for human society, including participatory political practices, cooperative economic arrangements and holistic educational modalities. As such, they are perhaps the most compelling contemporary exercise of utopianism and certainly have something to teach us about attempting to foster positive societal change. This book examines Auroville, the largest, most diverse and long-standing intentional community in the world, internationally recognized for its holistic, progressive and inclusive ideals and practices. Located in Tamil Nadu, South India, Auroville uniquely draws on spiritual ideals to enact a prefigurative utopian practice applicable to all aspects of human society; the author, a scholar native to Auroville, offers an in-depth autoethnographic analysis of how its ideals have been, and continue to be, articulated, embodied and developed in realms as wide-ranging as the community’s political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices. Responding to critiques that spirituality discourages activism, this work is revelatory of the strategic role and influence of spirituality in inspiring, informing and sustaining prefigurative political practice, while providing an honest analysis of the challenges of direct democracy, as well as prefiguring an alternative form of economic organization within a mainstream capitalist context. It raises important considerations pertaining to the perpetuation of prefigurative experiments, drawn from Auroville’s singular longevity and development trajectory, providing both theoretical and pragmatic insights into how communal utopian practice is enabled, challenged and sustained that are relevant for scholars and activists of prefigurative and utopian experiments alike.
This chapter discusses the political relevance of intentional communities in light of alternative practices developed within these and adopted in mainstream society. It challenges the restrictive scope of contemporary scholarship on prefiguration, focused on the prefigurative politics of social movements, by arguing that a broad range of practices are to be considered within the prefigurative canon given that alternative societies need to be prefigured in all their aspects. The chapter introduces the prefigurative nature of Auroville’s utopian practice and specifically illustrates its spiritually prefigurative nature by examining a wide range of cultural practices within the community, from work to education, art and town planning. It evokes the challenges of engaging in prefigurative utopian practice and points to how central spirituality is to sustaining such practice in the Auroville context, challenging the criticism that spiritual practice renders individuals apolitical.
This chapter discusses the founding spiritual and anarchic ideals for Auroville as a polity, and how these are linked to its aspiration of prefiguring a spiritualized society. It examines the evolution of Auroville’s political organization and practices since its founding years, the modes and institutions of internal governance developed by the community, and its flexible and prefigurative process of institutionalization. In so doing, it provides a revelatory case study of this exceptionally durable example of a horizontal, self-governing polity, while also considering concerns with, and recent points of departure from, the community’s heretofore horizontal processes of political organization. The chapter further includes a critical discussion on Auroville’s relationship with the Indian government, reflecting on how this historically enabled the community’s internal anarchic practice, while also addressing concerns of government co-optation.
