This autoethnographic exploration of the development of Auroville offers a hopeful insight into the potential of a prefigurative articulation of utopian practice, one in which utopian ideals engage with present conditions in a flexible and reflexive transformative process. Among the key contributions gained from observing this unique project is the revelation that a spiritual quest can underly, strategically articulate and sustain a prefigurative utopian project. The community is not conceptually or practically dissociated from the challenges (and potentialities) of the conditions in which it is embedded – social, political, economic and environmental – but predicates itself on the incorporation of these challenges by virtue of a spiritual world view that seeks out their transformation. I find that the lens of prefiguration is particularly adapted to understanding this world view and the utopian practice that arises from it given that it is not a fixed utopian vision of the future but an evolutionary process to be engaged through praxis – an experience that may be shared by other spiritual or a-spiritual groups.

Davina Cooper (2017) highlights that prefigurative conceptualization, just like prefigurative practice, must be both reflexive and provisional. Each are key to an ongoing, evolutionary praxis of utopianism – particularly in an established ‘alternative’ society such as Auroville, whose experimental nature risks waning over time – because they enable such praxis to be engaged in a learning process. This process of learning – what The Auroville Charter describes as ‘unending education’ (The Mother, 1968) – is related not only to understanding what works or does not work in terms of the practical application of utopian ideals but also, as both the utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch and utopian social theorist Ruth Levitas have highlighted, to the very nature of utopianism itself. Bloch (1986: 3) described it as ‘learning hope’, Levitas (2013) as the education of desire for a better way of life and The Mother as a ‘thirst for progress’ (quoted in Satprem, 1981: 65). For The Mother, both the thirst and the progress were of a spiritual nature, which Ruth Levitas (2013: 13) suggests is central to utopianism itself: ‘If Utopia is understood as the expression of the desire for a better way of being, then it is perhaps a (sometimes) secularised version of the spiritual quest.’

Introduction

In seeking to understand why people engage in crime and violence, social scientists have pointed out the importance of studying the social relationships between young people, especially those thought to be in, or associated with, street gangs. Early scholarship on juvenile delinquency has produced some consistent findings. One such finding consistent in these works is the homophilous nature of friendship groups. Young people are thought to gravitate towards others who are like them. They are ‘birds of a feather that flock together’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1950), bonding on the basis of gender, race or class, a shared sense of ‘esprit de corps’ derived from loyalty, respect, attachment, trust and trustworthiness (Thrasher, 1927), a commitment to a defiant counterculture (Miller, 1958) or a set of informal rules that govern interpersonal behaviour among young people including law-breaking behaviour and the perpetration of violence (Anderson, 1999). Pro-social attitudes towards offending are thought to be transmitted through peer groups (Sutherland and Cressey, 1996; Akers, 1973) and solidify group cohesion especially in the face of status challenges and external threat (Klein, 1975).

While some early scholars, such as Thrasher (1927), have emphasised comradery as the glue that gels young people together, another finding, especially in the early studies, is the view that young men who engage in crime and delinquency do not have the ability to form credible friendships. For example, the view from control theorists such as Hirschi (1969) is that young people engaged in illegal behaviour are unable to make and sustain positive relationships because they lack a thorough grasp of what a friend is and do not have the social skills to be able to formulate positive relationships. Commensurate with this view is that delinquents lack selfcontrol (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990), are morally vacuous and express little feelings of guilt or remorse (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960) or, according to Albert Cohen (1955), ‘act with spite, malice and make the virtuous feel uncomfortable’.

A third significant theme running through the extant literature and policy documentation on crime and violence that involves young people as perpetrators and victims is the conflation between friendship, criminality and ‘gangs’.

Introduction

This chapter explores the lesser told stories of sexual relations on-road. Feminist and gender theorists have long since argued that sex is inherently political; summed up in the second-wave feminist slogan the personal is political (Millett, 1970). The premise was that how individuals and couples related in their intimate relationships was as important as the broader societal picture, connecting the micro and macro levels. Personal issues became public matters (Holmes, 2007). Feminist theorising about experiences of sex, framed as within the constraints and context of patriarchal society, have largely focused on women's experiences, however in recent years this has been changing. Aiding this change has been the critique and deconstruction of the idea of what it means to be a woman in itself. Black feminists such as Crenshaw (1991) conceptualised intersectionality to respond to the relative invisibility and lack of consideration around Black female victims of domestic abuse within refuges run by the feminist mainstream. Crenshaw urged feminists to look beyond gender solidarity and instead explicitly focus on the myriad of ways in which gender intersects with other aspects of identity, including race and class. As this has gained traction it has also brought critiques of masculinity(ies) and an understanding of the ways in which gender, race and class intersect and fundamentally change the discursive negotiations of the victim or perpetrator labels in men's lives. This is pertinent for young men on-road, who are often living at critical junctures of exclusion. Their image is constructed (both by themselves and others) in ways which resonate with protest masculinity (Connell, 2005; Levell, 2020). Toughness, invulnerability, sexual prowess and the street hustle are foregrounded in a way which leaves their experiences of vulnerability or victimisation invisible. This chapter uses an intersectional lens to examine diverse ways that men on-road discussed their consensual, exploitative, abusive or transactional sexual experiences.

Sexual prowess and gang stereotypes

Connell (2005) has argued that masculinities are defined in relation to each other as well as in relation to femininities. If this is the case, then how men view women will form a key aspect of their personal gender construction efforts (Mullins, 2006). All forms of masculinities have been constructed in contrast to a feminine other, with those that are positioned at the bottom of the masculine hierarchy somehow symbolically assimilated to femininity (Swain, 2005).

• 1. The first necessity is the inner discovery in order to know what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances. At the centre there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.

• 2. One lives in Auroville in order to be free from moral and social conventions; but this freedom must not be a new slavery to the ego, to its desires and ambitions. The fulfilment of one's desires bars the way to the inner discovery which can only be achieved in the peace and transparency of perfect disinterestedness.

• 3. The Aurovilian should lose the sense of personal possession. For our passage in the material world, what is indispensable to our life and to our action is put at our disposal according to the place we must occupy. The more we are consciously in contact with our inner being, the more are the exact means given to us.

• 4. Work, even manual work, is something indispensable for the inner discovery. If one does not work, if one does not put his consciousness into matter, the latter will never develop. To let the consciousness organise a bit of matter by means of one's body is very good. To establish order around oneself helps to bring order within oneself. One should organise one's life not according to outer and artificial rules, but according to an organised inner consciousness, for if one lets life go on without subjecting it to the control of the higher consciousness, it becomes fickle and inexpressive. It is to waste one's time in the sense that matter remains without any conscious utilisation.

• 5. The whole earth must prepare itself for the advent of the new species, and Auroville wants to work consciously to hasten this advent.

• 6. Little by little it will be revealed to us what this new species must be, and meanwhile the best course is to consecrate oneself entirely to the Divine.

Introduction

Tell Me, My Friend, What Is This Auroville? is a book for children by Aurovilians Jyoti Khare and Christine Devin, in which a small blue rabbit asks the titular question of the Banyan tree located at Auroville's centre. ‘One cannot answer your question just like that’, answers the Banyan; ‘You have to find out for yourself. I can only help you’ (Khare and Devin, 2012). The rabbit decides to try to guess, asking the Banyan a series of questions: what would it be if it were a wild creature? Or a battle? Or a gesture?

I personally understand and experience Auroville to be a unique spiritual and societal project embraced and developed by diverse peoples who have made of it their home, their family, their work and their sadhana (‘spiritual path’). However, there are many layers to understanding the community and many labels ascribed to it from within and without. Is it an ecovillage, a model township, a cult, a utopia, a neocolonial enclave or a government project? The Internet is rife with videos made by visiting bloggers who seem to have found the answer in two days, while researchers and native authors have offered more nuanced accounts (Minor, 1999; Pillai 2005; Jouhki, 2006; Meier, 2006; Majumdar, 2017; Kapur, 2018, 2021; Horassius, 2021). In this chapter, I will not seek to define, but rather explore, how Auroville might be understood through various lenses and how well it sits in various frameworks.

Establishing communities in which to experiment with alternative ways of living than in dominant cultures and societies is a diverse and thriving phenomenon with a long and rich history and scholarship to draw from. In order to best contextualize the experience of Auroville, I will draw special attention to other communities inspired by utopian ideals and Indian spirituality, and that governments have been involved in establishing or supporting. I will also examine Auroville's roots in the Indian ashram tradition and how it is distinct from an ashram and other guru-centric organizations and communities, as well as its recalcitrant assimilation into the ecovillage movement and its uncomfortable embeddedness in a postcolonial context.

Introduction

This chapter outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between male adult youth work professionals characterised, or positioned, as ‘role models’ and young men positioned as ‘roadmen’. It begins with a critique of social policy that promotes male role models for young men in the UK, as it relates to both formal and informal education settings. It then sets out a theoretical perspective on masculine subjectivities using positioning and psychosocial theory and highlights some implications for our understanding of relationships between male youth professionals and young men. Using a closely observed case study of a young Black man and his older White male youth worker, this chapter argues that male youth workers seeking to proffer alternative ‘roads’ for younger men need to develop a deep, reflexive awareness of their own and young men's identity constructions. The chapter concludes that social policy making and professional training regimes may need to be more acutely attuned to the complexity of these professional relationships.

Role models and roadmen: policy and positioning

Role models

Considerable political capital has been spent, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, on ‘solving’ the problem of youth crime and violence via the promotion of appropriate ‘role models’ and ‘mentors’ for ‘alienated’, and especially Black, young men. Politicians from both of the main British political parties have promoted this common-sense notion despite that it seems to consist of a set of assumptions that have come to be accepted ‘on the basis of limited evidence and challenge’ (Robb, 2014: 238). Drawing on classic social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and/or sociological, dramaturgical formulations of identity performance (Goffman, 1959), young people are understood as potentially being redirected along new, non-deviant pathways or ‘roads’ when these are set out or ‘shown’ by an older role model/mentor. This is assumed to occur through a process of imitation and eventual inhabitation of preconceived social roles, which are usually presented as more respectable, law-abiding and successful. Arguably, though, it remains unclear what the precise meaning and function of these male role models might be, and how the process of modelling and behavioural change occurs on the ground in face-to-face youth work practice.

In Exploring Urban Youth Culture Outside of the Gang Paradigm: Critical Questions of Youth, Gender and Race On-Road, editors Levell, Young and Earle usefully offer a deep analysis of the embeddedness of deficit narratives censuring the on-road subculture that frames the everyday lives of racialised and working-class young people. The contributors take a deep dive into the ways in which the marginalised are constructed in youth culture rhetoric and public policy discourses, and question the societal and environmental factors that create and sustain racism and disadvantage. As such, they decipher the cascading effect of structural inequalities to provide a critical analysis of how racially minoritised youths are treated in education and youth services. Indeed, they argue that because racism is so entrenched in our society, inequality and disadvantage play a pivotal role in the growth and development of marginalised youth. In other words, structural and institutional racism, which is endemic to British society and within education, child welfare and youth justice systems, plays a significant role in the problems that bring racially minoritised children to the attention of child welfare and youth justice services and contributes to the significant overrepresentation of Black children in the care system.

I think it is worth considering that by virtue of their disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, Black children and young people are typically under-served, under-supported, intensely surveilled and over-policed (Bernard and Carlile, 2021; Bernard and Harris, 2019). As Johnston and Akay (2022) observe, racially minoritised young people are often criminalised based on their friendship groups, as well as for the music they listen to and where their habits and behaviours are seen as deviant. It is important to restate that assumptions of deviance are habitually made, and that Black children are often perceived as less innocent than White children and somehow less deserving of support and protection (Bernard, 2019). Yet, the realities of racism mean that Black children often experience adultification, and other subtle and unconscious societal and race-based biases that negatively affects the ways they are treated in the child welfare and youth sector (Bernard, 2019). The most shining example to illustrate a growing recognition of the ways adultification manifest in the safeguarding arena is in the case of Child Q, a 15-year-old Black girl with multiple inequalities, who was strip-searched by police officers in her school (UK Parliament, 2022).

As this is a book which at the heart is about intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), it is impossible not to comment on the process of editing the collection. An edited collections can be viewed as both a process of collaboration gatekeeping, inclusion and exclusion. It is inevitable that a boundary will be drawn between those people approached to contribute and others who were not. In this regard, as editors, we would like to provide readers with a brief explanation of who we approached to collaborate with us on this collection. Further, we will also discuss how feminist praxis guided our thinking. Criminology has long been critiqued for being malestream (Bernard, 2013), in that it is androcentric both in its traditional focus on men's lives, and also that masculine patterns are reproduced in the scholars who are deemed to be at the top of the academic scene. Historically this is the academic norm, and it remains true that, despite gains made, ‘the highest positions in our professional association are held by men, particularly by White men’ (Chesney-Lind, 2020: 407). Although Chesney-Lind writes from experience principally in the US, it is undoubtedly the case that a similar profile exists and there is also a double penalty for women scholars; work by men is given a higher valuation by peers, but also those who publish explicitly feminist work. There have been many studies which have shown that White men are more often ranked higher than women and those from minoritised communities (Chesney-Lind, 2020).

Academic citation practices have also been heavily critiqued by critical race scholars as they can firmly reproduce the niche inner circles of academia and its pervasive Whiteness (Mills, 1997; Anderson, 2022). In the ground-breaking commentary, the Imperial Scholar (Delgado, 1984), it was noted the work of many Black scholars fades into insignificance and is not cited by the inner circle: ‘It does not matter where one enters this universe; one comes to the same result: an inner circle of about a dozen white, male writers who comment on, take polite issue with, extol, criticize, and expand on each other's ideas. It is something like an elaborate minuet’ (Delgado, 1984: 563).

Introduction

It is a Thursday evening and a group of Aurovilians are gathered in the Awareness Through the Body Hall for our weekly sensory awareness session. For the first time, our facilitator has chosen to work with the 12 qualities identified by The Mother as essential to embody for an individual and collective spiritual evolution. She begins by reading out the names of each of the qualities and the description The Mother has given about them from a set of cards. As she does so, I find that one of them particularly resonates with me: Generosity. She then places each of the cards, face down on the floor and asks us to pick one: “If one card calls you, then pick that one, and if none of them calls you, then just pick at random”, she says. We each pick the card, look at the quality and then place it back. Mine is Generosity.

We then proceed to individually explore embodying each of these qualities through various spontaneous physical forms, our facilitator verbally prompting and guiding us to express outwardly, with our bodies, the quality as we are experiencing it within us (see Figure 5.1). Once we have explored all 12, she guides us to create a collective shape, each embodying the quality they had originally picked. One by one, we add our bodies and our qualities to complement the growing form. I was very touched watching each person move and place themselves consciously, with depth of presence, care and sincerity, their faces soft and receptive. I still remember the first one of my peers: her intentional and deliberate walk to the centre of the room, where she placed herself in a kneeling position, arms extended, embodying Sincerity. Once we had each joined the form, our facilitator guided us to feel the collective shape, and each of the qualities that we were embodying within it, repeating each of their names.

Like in so many Awareness Through the Body sessions, I was struck by the depth of interpersonal connection and collective presence that we were able to embody and cultivate with one another in this consciously facilitated space.

A society dedicated to a poet, imagined by a mystic and occupied by visionaries is an ideal site for any anthropologist or storyteller. A utopian community exploring the extraordinary possible will undoubtedly also attract revolutionaries and innovators fascinated by Auroville's radical experiment in lived human unity. As an anthropologist, novelist and change maker, Auroville has occupied a central role in my personal journey. Some places have a lasting impact on our being, on our ideals and on the way we live and think. Auroville has had this profound impact on me since my first encounter in 1989. I arrived young and curious, my Indian grandmother's envoy, carrying her wish for me to visit this spiritual community – which she called ‘Mother's Dream’, after her guru. I walked the red dirt that is often evoked by Auroville's early pioneers (impossibly hard to imagine now while walking through Auroville's fertile forests), and I was taken to the top of a concrete staircase that would later become the Matrimandir, the spiritual centre or ‘soul’ of Auroville. Sitting high on that plateau with a warm breeze against my skin, I closed my eyes and meditated on a vision for a better world.

Jump forward to 2017 and the Matrimandir is complete. I am visiting on a university sabbatical, welcomed by the remarkable Dr Aster Patel, an early Auroville pioneer and my uncle's cousin (interviewed in this book). It was Aster who introduced me to Suryamayi as one of Auroville's leading young researchers. At the time, she was writing her PhD thesis, which has led to the publication of this intriguing book. I had so many questions and was filled with wonder. How did Auroville work? What did Auroville have to teach the world? I was utterly fascinated by the idea of a utopia designed to promote spiritual and social evolution simultaneously. I delightedly explored the sustainability start-ups that Auroville had engendered. I was particularly intrigued with how a society that aspired to live without money could operate. As someone leading a degree in creative intelligence, I also wanted to understand how innovation and radical creativity worked outside the Western paradigm, and I wanted to know how the young ones were raised because I was creating my own curriculum for ‘Being’, not just ‘Knowing’ – described as ‘21st-century skills’ by some.

Introduction

Urban space has long haunted the penal and criminological imagination; as a site of crime and disorder, where ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983) about overcrowding, mixing and safety co-exist with political ideologies and government policies that treat urban social life as a spatial, moral and socio-political problem to be monitored, regulated and controlled. In fact, the relationship between crime and the urban realm goes to the heart of criminology, as an academic discipline that is marked by an ‘urban bias’ (Donnermeyer, 2016: 1) due to its emphasis on studying crime as a quintessentially urban social phenomenon. Perceptions of ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘deviance’ and ‘conflict’, therefore, cease to exist in the abstract. They become designed into, associated with and represented by urban geography – as metaphors for physical locations and social spaces where hierarchies of power, social relations and social structures take shape.

Nowhere is this more evident than the areas of the city that are imagined, researched, sensationalised, suspected and policed as pockets of ‘criminality’ where ‘incivility’, violence and danger are thought to fester uncontrollably. Targeted, surveilled, securitised, walled, barb-wired and patrolled as ‘no-go areas’, ‘urban wastelands’ or ‘crime-infested ghettoes’, such ‘dangerous’ places denote more than physical space. They feature as ‘symbolic locations’ where what is symbolised is the physical and cultural presence of those who are perceived and policed as socially and politically out of place, through processes of state-sanctioned, racial(ised) criminalisation (see, for example, Fatsis, 2021a, 2021b). The colonial ‘plantation archipelago’ (Wynter, nd: 372), the Jewish quarter in medieval and Nazi Europe and the contemporary urban ghetto (Duneier, 2016), stand as symbols of such ‘territorial stigmatisation’ (Hancock and Mooney, 2013) as vividly as they illustrate the ‘multi-racist’ (Keith, 1993) ideologies, politics and law enforcement that establish and police the inner city as a ‘zone of racial enclosure’ (Hartman, 2021: 94).