The Internal Turn: Rethinking Autonomy through the Swaminarayan Hindu Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I address a set of questions: What does it mean to be free? Does freedom only pertain to the removal of external barriers created by others or also to what I call “internal barriers,” in the form of one’s desires, emotions, dispositions, attitudes, and traits embedded in human nature, generated and experienced by us as we face external situations in our daily lives? What truly defines autonomy? Bringing together the themes of personal autonomy, human nature, everyday ethics, and religious teachings, I argue that in addition to removing social, political, economic, and other external barriers, agency lies more completely and fruitfully in removing internal barriers embedded in human nature that stem from egoistic and selfish motives, and in attaining personal autonomy as self-rule that is 1) an amalgamation of external autonomy and internal autonomy, 2) dedicated to realizing the inherent, essential characteristics of the self—peace, happiness, and fulfillment—to greatest extent, and 3) purposefully aimed at not harming anyone and bringing about the well-being of others. This study explores the challenges that everyday decisions and actions of religious practitioners pose to liberal understanding of autonomy. As a case study, I examine how present-day expositions of the premodern Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gītā and the modern sacred text Vacanāmṛta shape, and are shaped by, the agentival processes of self-formation in a modern transnational organization, BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, a denomination of the Swaminarayan Hindu Tradition. Building on my textual and ethnographic research, I develop a fivefold theoretical model of autonomy that integrates the self, external constraints, internal constraints, meaning-making frameworks, and everyday ethics. Such a self-reflective internal turn—which involves attending to internal autonomy from the constraining traits of human nature—substantiates, and does not undermine, the secular liberal pursuit of attaining external autonomy. My examination rather allows us to expand the liberal notions of agency and autonomy that lack sufficient epistemological openness and theoretical elasticity to account for ethical pluralism, theological heterogeneity, and the subject-positioning of religious practitioners. Enhancing personal autonomy by returning the gaze to within in order to negotiate freedom without marks the “internal turn.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".