Auroville and its Potential Contribution to the Pluriverse

Rodríguez, Celia Valls (2020) Auroville and its Potential Contribution to the Pluriverse. Other thesis, University College Roosevelt.

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Abstract

Every two years, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) publishes a report concerning the health of our planet Earth. In the account of 2018, it was publicly acknowledge that “we are pushing our planet to the brink” (WWF, 2018). The furious levels of anthropogenic activity, such as mass industrial agriculture, extraction of natural resources, and the commodification of life, have taken an unprecedented toll on the planet, putting our existence in danger. The continuing endeavour to impose global capitalism and its standards of life, the so-called development, comes with a hefty price: the destruction of the environment and the callous exploitation of others, to be more precise, those living in the Global South. Thus, it can be asserted that the global obsession with growth and profit has lead to today’s environmental crisis (Bentley, 2013). Despite this sombre scenario, the past fifty years have seen an emergence of alternative approaches and an opportunity to change the weave of the Earth’s life. Grounded in the idea of the pluriverse, ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Escobar, 2018), these new outlooks are designing other ways of ‘being’ beyond modern existence.

This research focuses on the case study of Auroville, a ‘universal town’ in India devoted to attain an experiment in human unity (Auroville, 2017). The community, with a history of over fifty years, has anticipated the collapse of modernity and offered an early response to the current global environmental crisis, on a local scale. Auroville’s vision is rooted in the spiritual practice of Integral Yoga, a yoga-based philosophy promoting further human development and the evolution of the conscious mind, for the sake of collective growth. In the pages that follow, I am interested in exploring the social relations within the community that make up the notion of ‘human unity’. A second interest, connected to the aforementioned, is the relation of ‘human unity’ to nature, hence, the social practices upholding the natural environment. This paper seeks to explore the social contribution of Auroville to the enormous challenge we are facing at present, whilst unfolding where the Auroville model fails; and whether is possible to implement such a lifestyle in a different framework, (and out of greed), on broader societies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Other)
Subjects:	Collective Organisation > Collective Organisation (General)
Depositing User:	Admin User
Date Deposited:	02 Nov 2020 04:33
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2020 04:33
URI:	http://aurorepo.in/id/eprint/113

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