Between Heaven and a Hard Place: Inhabiting the Space Between an Enchanted Past and a Utopian Future

  • John Fahy University of Cambridge

Abstract


This essay looks at how devotees of Krishna in Mayapur, West Bengal experience the space between an ideal past and a prophesied future. Through an affective and imaginative engagement with Vaishnav cultural history, devotees learn to relocate themselves in a particular temporal flow, within which both the past and future become constitutive horizons of the ethical imagination. I will focus on how the tradition of katha (storytelling) facilitates a convergence of temporalities, within which devotees are encouraged to routinely participate in the past. Such engagement with an enchanted past, I will argue, in turn informs devotees’ imaginings of and aspirations for the ongoing development of an ‘Ideal Vedic City’.

Author Biography

John Fahy, University of Cambridge
I am a PhD researcher in the department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. Working with a community of international Hare Krishna devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal, my research looks at how ideas of both knowledge and culture are mobilised in the the ethical projects of self-cultivation and social transformation.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/unfamiliar.v4i1.1113
Published
22-Dec-2014
How to Cite
Fahy, J. (2014). Between Heaven and a Hard Place: Inhabiting the Space Between an Enchanted Past and a Utopian Future. The Unfamiliar, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.2218/unfamiliar.v4i1.1113
Issue
Vol 4 No 1 (2014): Imagining the Future
Section
ESSAYS I

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