SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Finn Madsen, Institute for History of religion, at Copenhagen University:

defended his doctoral thesis succesfully on 13 September 2001, at Carsten Niebuhr instituttet.

Title of the thesis:

Social development in the Hare Krishna movement

Abstract: The presentation of the empirical material in this dissertation rests on social-constructivist based institutional theory as put forward by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Institutions are defined as actions and prescriptions for actions combined, but institutional theory offers the facility to analytically separate actions, goals and guiding principles of the actors.

In order to trace the attempts of the actors to construct, maintain and deconstruct the institutions that govern the religious and social life of ISKCON devotees Madsen combines historical and sociological views. First ISKCON‚s actors, the frames for interaction and the rolesystems are described. And along with defining four central institutions tapasya (renounciation), sankirtana (glorification of Krishna), varna (social status) and asrama (religious status), Madsen tries to capture the dynamic development which ISKCON is going through by accounting for the reinterpretations of these institutions that have taken place since 1965.

Until the middle of the 1990'ies the greater part of the religio-social life of ISKCON devotees was enacted within the walls of the temple interrupted only by the devotees‚ activities distributing the holy books of the movement. Within the temple the devotees were organized according to the Hindu asrama system, a rolesystem that divides the actors according to which stage of life the individual belongs to (monk/student, married, preparing for asceticism, and renounced ascetic).
Until the beginning of the 1990'ies persons who joined were forced to accept one of these stages, even bachelors who joined were forced to accept the ochre robe of the celibacy student. Over the years the devotees have come to see that the limited number of roles ISKCON has to offer new devotees, is a hindrance to the spreading of Krishna Consciousness. ISKCON has had only little to offer ordinary men and women. The total monastic lifestyle meant that ordinary people who sympathized with ISKCON, but were not able to change their lifestyle completely, could not relate to ISKCON in a way that was natural to themselves.

Today ISKCONs devotees are trying to create ways by which ordinary people can develop relations to ISKCON without having to distribute books or become celibate students in ISKCONs residences for monks and nuns. The idea is to create a system of ”layman -circles” with spiritual standards lower than within the temple, but high enough to bring the members ”back to Godhead”. The number of temple-devotees has decreased with only a few monks left and thus the structure will resemble what the founder of ISKCON, the late A C Bhaktivedanta, had in mind from the beginning: a copy of the Indian temples he was sent to the West to establish by his guru.