Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City: (9 WYSE Series in Social Anthropology)

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.

Table 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.

Review :
“I really like it when a book I am already looking forward to reading is even better than what I anticipated. Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City is one of these books. It provides a fascinating collection of ethnographic insights and historical reasons for the generation of the ‘Hare Krishna’ movement, otherwise known as ISKCON (International Society for Krishna CONsciousness). Ultimately, this volume is a discourse on the anthropology of ethics in relation to the moral system of ISKCON, the religious pedagogy that has evolved to cultivate perceived legitimate members, and the ways that relevant essentialized ‘Vedic’ characteristics are performed or rationalized within the twenty-first century context.” • International Journal of Hindu Studies “This research clearly stimulates the study of (Asian) new religious movements, which is often guided by an East–West binary due to a lack of expertise in regard to their origin in the Asian context. It is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of new religious movements as well as contemporary South Asian religious history in general.” • Regional Studies Review “Overall, Fahy’s book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing study of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, and it illuminates several doxastic attitudes of contemporary ISKCON devotees that could not be attained through other methodological approaches such as theological or textual analyses.” • Journal of Dharma Studies “This book is an important contribution to the ethnographic and theoretical literature. It is very well written and deals with an intrinsically interesting ethnographic context. It is theoretically ambitious in its engagement with the literature on anthropology of ethics.” • Jonathan Mair, University of Kent “The book offers the first ethnography of the Mayapur phenomenon, presenting an account of its development, of the political and economic issues involved, the conflicts over building and so on, along with an account of the devotees who live there or visit, based on qualitative interviews and participant observation. The lives and aspirations of devotees are brought to life in this book.” • Gavin Flood, University of Oxford