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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. While ISKCON's history is often presented in terms of an Indian guru 'transplanting' Indian spirituality to the West, this book focusses on the efforts to bring ISKCON back to India. Paying particular attention to devotees' failure to consistently live up to ISKCON's ideals and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an 'ideal Vedic city', this book argues that the anthropology of ethics must account for how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Names, Language and Transliteration
Introduction: A Tale of Two Countercultures
Chapter 1. Land of the Golden Avatar
Chapter 2. Changing the Subject
Chapter 3. Practices of Knowledge
Chapter 4. Learning to Love Krishna
Chapter 5. Simple Living, High Thinking
Conclusion: Failing Well
Glossary
References
Index
About the author
John Fahy is an Affiliated Researcher at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. He has published widely on the anthropology of religion, ethics and interfaith engagement in both India and the Persian Gulf. He is the co-editor of The Interfaith Movement: Mobilising Religious Diversity in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2019), with Jan-Jonathan Bock, and Emergent Religious Pluralisms (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), with Jan-Jonathan Bock and Samuel Everett.
Summary
Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. Paying particular attention to devotees' failure to consistently live up to ISKCON's ideals, and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an `ideal Vedic city'.
