with Lara Monticelli, sociologist, and Suryamayi Clarence-Smith, Auroville-born and raised anthropologist as presenters
To confront the multiple crises characterising contemporary capitalism, we need a historical understanding of its functioning and its elements of instability. The debate on capitalism came back to the fore due to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Today, more than ten years later, capitalism is still the dominant system and we often hear terms like Capitalocene, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, accelerations, post-capitalism. In the context of its resilience, how do we work for systemic and progressive change? One example is that of prefigurative social movements. Intentional communities like Auroville in southern India can show how change can happen through interstitial mechanisms of karst-like erosion of capitalism from within.
Suryamayi Clarence-Smith was born and raised in Auroville, the largest, most diverse, and amongst the oldest intentional communities in existence today. She has been exploring how Auroville’s ideals are engaged in practice in this experimental community, through autoethnographic research, since 2015. She completed a doctoral thesis in Development Studies at the University of Sussex in 2019, building on an award-winning undergraduate thesis on Auroville in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Suryamayi’s research explores many aspects of Aurovilian society – notably socio-economy, collective organization, and education – and speaks to broader frameworks of utopian and prefigurative practice, social economy and alter-development, integral yoga and education, learning societies, community and intentional community. She has presented and published insights from this work to academic and non-academic audiences internationally, and continue to be struck by Auroville's richness as a site of experimentation in many fields, and the potential for insightful and impactful research to be produced here towards reimagining and reshaping human society.