Beyond “science” and “religion”: bringing the spiritual to life in Auroville (South India)

Most of the (many) discussions on the notion of “spirituality”, in a modern form of the term, have often focused on the relevance of the empirical data that characterise it and justify its use in an academic context. Turning this tendency on its head, this paper aims to examine the social uses of the term from the point of view of actors and not only researchers. In the utopian township of Auroville, South India, the notion of spirituality is at once a lexical, symbolic and praxeological item. Socially dispersed and unevenly distributed in language practices, it nevertheless contributes to the structuring of the social and spatial organisation and the ideological project of the community. It also nourishes the universes of individual and collective meaning and action, but in an oblique or discrete manner. It is precisely this empirical, and therefore theoretical, complexity of spirituality that this article aims to address.