Common Purse, Uncommon Future: the Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities : The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities 9780313384639, 9780313384622

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Common Purse, Uncommon Future

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COMMON PURSE, UNCOMMON FUTURE The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities Joseph C. Manzella

Copyright 2010 by Joseph C. Manzella All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manzella, Joseph C. Common purse, uncommon future : the long, strange trip of communes and other intentional communities / Joseph C. Manzella. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-38462-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38463-9 (ebook) 1. Collective settlements—United States—History. 2. Communitarianism— United States—History. I. Title. HX653.M12 2010 307.770973—dc22 2010021210 ISBN: 978-0-313-38462-2 EISBN: 978-0-313-38463-9 14

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Preface How I Missed Woodstock A Defining Moment Chapter Summary

vii vii xii xv

Acknowledgments

xix

1. Introduction: Beyond the Threshold Influences and Evolution Communes and Intentional Living Hypermodern Liquid Life Patterns in Common Threshold People Revitalizing Community A Narrative Arc

1 2 4 6 10 17 19 21

2. Elders of Utopia One Place, Two Directions The Oneida Extreme Fertile Soil for Celibacy What Can Go Wrong, Will . . . Frontiers, Families, Communities The Frontier, European Style A Week in Someone’s Utopia

25 26 32 35 36 38 43 48

3. Last Days of the Counterculture Christiania’s Urban Dilemma American Pastoral: The Farm City Mouse, Country House

55 56 67 74

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4. Ritual as Nostalgia The Road to Utopia Isn’t Paved Floating Spirituality The Lifting of River Otter The Power of Ritual

83 86 87 90 93

5. Dream a Little Dream Arcosanti: A Postopia New Age to Green Age An Ancient Concern Ecovillage Evolution Ecovillage at Ithaca Whole Village Alchemy Farm Sirius Community: Findhorn West Of Seniors and Cul-de-Sacs

107 107 115 121 122 125 128 130 132 134

6. Communities in Motion The Volunteer Experience Locating Habitat Communing with the Arts Novel Forms of Community

137 138 139 149 154

7. Utopian End Game From a Yurt Individualism vs. Communalism Macro vs. Micro Authority Balancing Hypermodernity The Next Generation Middle-Class White People Organization vs. Ideas Nostalgia, the Enemy of Progress?

165 166 167 169 170 171 173 174 176

Notes

179

Bibliography

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Index

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Preface The group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but everything was held in common. —Acts 4:32 They just joining and dwelling together do easily agree on one fashion of living. —Thomas More, Utopia Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. —Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee

How I Missed Woodstock In 1969, my cousin and I picked up a hitchhiker while driving south from Montreal on the New York State Thruway. We had arrived in that most culturally complex of Canadian cities the previous day on an errand for my cousin’s friend. Not having the cash, either U.S. or Canadian, for a room for the night, we slept in the car. The next morning we left for home—which for my cousin, the driver of the moment, was Connecticut. The hitchhiker was dressed in standard late 1960’s garb. Leather vest over bare chest, long hair held in place with a bandana. He said he needed a ride to a music festival not far down the road. He asked to be left off at any exit around Newburgh, which was where we intended to turn east toward Connecticut. But the hitchhiker’s enthusiasm for the festival was unbounded. “You gotta be there,” he said, offering a toke that both my cousin and I refused. Not a good idea when you are switching off driving chores.

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The festival was not a bad idea, though, I thought, but when we got to Newburgh, he said the festival was at least an hour’s drive from the city in the opposite direction from where we were going. We passed on the opportunity. A few weeks later, after more traveling without the latest news readily available, I found myself at a friend’s apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I planned to stay there for a few days. In the fall I would begin my second year as a teacher at a Jersey Shore high school. To me, Greenwich Village was an iconic place because of its association to the beat generation and the folk music scene, but my friends told me the real action was near St. Mark’s Square in the East Village. So within a day of my arrival two friends and I walked the few blocks to what was then the center of the world, at least on the East Coast. The East Village was alive in a way I had never before experienced. Yes, the streets were filled. Yes, there were people who appeared to be panhandlers. Yes, there were young women and men who could have been drug dealers. There were girls with flowers in their hair (really). There were people with so much hair that determining their sex was unlikely. And there was a guy who offered me a free joint, and another who offered us a sugar cube—but not for free. And talk of Woodstock wafted through the streets like wisps of smoke from a hundred hookahs. And I realized I had missed the rain, the mud, and the lack of sanitation just because I declined a two-hour detour. Moreover, I missed what could have been a pilgrimage, a major rite of passage into the world of the counterculture. And the East Village told me what I missed not just by word of mouth but also by the feeling on those streets at the time. If this was the flower generation, I was glad to be part of it, even though I had missed the event that would help define that generation. What was the feeling in the East Village that night? The sense of community, the sense that we were all part of a larger whole, the sense of sharing something momentous but indistinct, lost in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Today that sounds rather naïve, and it was. Were the folks in the East Village that night handing out reefers or selling them? I don’t really remember. Did someone walk up and hug me for no reason? I think so, but maybe not. But that night meant something to me and stayed with me. Many times since I’ve walked those streets with one of my grown daughters, who lives a few subway stops away, and I bemoan how trendy both the East Village and West Village have become. And I’ve told her about how it was then, trying not to sound like a cliché. But, of course, memories are a

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cliché, in the good sense of the word. Our clichéd recollections of positive events, after all, are the building blocks of nostalgia. But nostalgia is sometimes not cool because it depends upon refracted memory, and not just memory of events, but the memory of personalized emotions of what those events may have been like. And that’s why I miss(ed) Woodstock both figuratively and literally as I write this a few weeks after the 40th anniversary of the festival, which was actually not held in Woodstock, New York, but more than an hour’s drive, without traffic, west of Newburgh.

Embracing the Tribe This book, however, is not about Woodstock, and this preface is as much attention as the festival will get. Nor it is all about the Woodstock generation, although they loom large in the modern history of communalism. It was that generation, the baby boomers, who helped revive the communal movement in North America and Western Europe. It was that generation who laid the foundations of some of the more successful late 20th- and early 21stcentury intentional communities. Rather, this book is about what became of the legacy of that generation and how that legacy has played out over time. In other words, it is about what time has done to the search for community and what the future may hold for that search. Woodstock was an aftereffect rather than the beginning or the end of that search, which, if anything, has widened and deepened with the growing pressures and complexities of modern living. Although sex, drugs, and rock defined the counterculture in the popular imagination, there was always an undercurrent of seeking, a nostalgic search for the village, a sacred place where the vapidity and disconnectedness of suburbia and the feverish hum of modern life were held at bay. This seeking defined the communal movement of that era. So it was that some members of that generation embraced the tribal and sought to re-establish connections to the earth and each other. Since 1969, the counterculture has become something of an embarrassment for aging baby boomers; although the movement never really died, it has not manifested itself in a legion of neo-hippies. Rather, it has transformed and transmuted into New Ageism and a variety of other expressions, including environmentalism and vegetarianism and an alphabet soup of other -isms. That much is obvious. What is often missed is how the

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infectious energy of the counterculture invigorated seemingly unrelated movements, such as religious revivalism, environmental awareness, and farmers market co-ops. Critics of the period tend to emphasize the excesses or point out the failures of that generation to fulfill its promise. They view the movement as nothing more than youthful exuberance distorted by an unpopular war that, in time, transitioned into materialistic excess. Heath and Potter (2004, p. 2–3), for example, cynically note: With the hippies, nothing symbolized their rejection of the “consumerism” of American society more than love beads, Birkenstocks and the VW Beetle. Yet during the ’80s, the same generation that had “tuned in, turned on and dropped out” presided over the most significant resurgence of conspicuous consumption in American history. The hippies became yuppies . . . hippie and yuppie culture are one and the same. Although there is some truth in the linkage between consumerism and the 1980s, the argument conflates the counterculture with the boomer generation that spawned it. Even at its most visible, the counterculture that defined a generation was only a subculture within that generation; hippies were a marginalized critique of mainstream society. What some contemporary intentional communities represent is a greatly modified ideological remnant—albeit an important remnant—of that subculture, or what some might consider the better angels of that period. What has carried over from the countercultural era is the need for community, which is concurrent with the yearning for identity. It becomes obvious that the counterculture was an expression of the need to find a theme or themes that would create identity. That yearning for identity is still with us, and contemporary intentional communities aspire to fulfill it.

A Contemporary Challenge Just as the counterculture represented a quest for identity, it also challenged the prevailing social order. That, too, has carried over to this time as contemporary intentional communities also critique and challenge the assumptions of modern life, although the challenge is milder, more studied, and less confrontational. What are being challenged are the quickening pace of

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social change and the strain of a world seemingly, if not actually, growing more complex. The search for some kind of identity through living in community, however ephemeral, is pervasive in the postindustrial world. It is not just confined to the spiritual descendents of the counterculture or any one generation. It expresses itself in a variety of novel forms. Writing about the digital effects– laden 3-D film Avatar, which was released in late 2009, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis (2010) observed that when the film ended, the captivated audience broke into “enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie.” She further notes: It is the social experience of the movie—as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact—which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. Avatar affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat. Living in community means contesting the effects of social change and the rapidity and isolation of modern life, which segregate individuals from the traditional nodes of daily contact, such as the New England town common, the European marketplace, and the Arab souk. Throughout the 20th century, the quickened advance of transportation systems, especially in North America, has forced the geographic separation of communities and the communal experience. This has been abetted by the swift evolution of communication systems and other technological advances. Modern humans are a nostalgic lot, especially the boomers. The more we seem to advance in science and technology and the more we earn and accumulate, the more we are buoyed by thoughts of the past. As soon as the counterculture and their VW Beetles had begun to run out of gas, we turned to the 1950s and earlier through sitcoms such as Happy Days and family dramas such as The Waltons. Maybe we just wanted to put the Vietnam War behind us and recall times of relative harmony, at least in our imaginations. Recollecting the past is easy, and something that is easy is comforting. But engaging the past and using it creatively is not easy, and today’s communitarians have not embarked on an effortless journey. They use their nostalgic images of the past to fashion new visions of the future. As Svetlana

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Boym (2001, p. 354) observes, “Nostalgia can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.” Communitarians believe they are the cure.

A Defining Moment Academic types, including myself, live on definitions. Social scientists in particular are defined by their ability to define. It is what we do. Define, categorize, and then explain why definitions and categories are important. And so at this point I will categorically resort to defining the key terms of this book, specifically intentional community and commune. Both terms beg definition. The first, intentional community, is a rather broad name for a variety of communal experiences. The key word, of course, is intentional, the implication being that those in the community all intend to be there and not somewhere else. Imbedded in that idea is the further suggestion that members of intentional communities, or communitarians, are mostly from somewhere else. So as long as the context is clear I will sometimes use the term community as shorthand for the more accurate term intentional community. Likewise, the term communitarian will stand occasionally for members of an intentional community, although the term communalist would probably function as well. A broad definition of intentional community encompasses a host of collective, intentional experiences, from the Pilgrim colony to early Mormon communities to Western and Eastern monastic societies to hippie communes to Israeli kibbutzim to artist colonies. In social science, the term intentional community also may be used to describe any genre of social movement aimed at alternative lifestyles. Such communities, Brown (2002, p. 165) notes, are consciously formed with a specific purpose; they are ways of restoring “psychic equilibrium” in a society under pressure to change. Friesen and Friesen (2004, p. 15) define intentional communities similarly, characterizing them as comprising “a relatively small group of individuals who have created a unique way of life for the attainment of an articulated set of goals. These groups . . . are not like a tribe or village that began spontaneously and then persisted for generations.” Andelson (2002, p. 131) notes that members of intentional communities “actively strive to forge a shared identity” and “can be differentiated from the traditional community, whose origins are more often than not . . . ‘lost in the mists of time,’ and the circumstantial community, whose members are thrown together by happenstance and may in fact develop little if any sense of shared identity.”

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One distinguishing characteristic of such communities is embodied in the term intentional. Simply put, such communities are not necessarily ethnically bound (i.e., members are joined by ideas, values, and beliefs rather than genetics or descent). This, of course, raises an interesting question. Are intentional communities by definition short-lived? What of those born and raised in intentional communities? If they do not share the ideologies of their parents and did not choose to live there, are they communitarians too? More importantly, can a community that lasts generations beyond its founding still be called intentional if its residents are mostly born and raised there? After all, staying in a community because it has been home is qualitatively different than voluntarily joining it. Now for the terms commune and communal. A pure commune is an intentional community is which all things are shared, where all property is held in common, and where everyone lives together, more or less. This form of community is rare in contemporary societies; not even communist countries are very good at it. For example, while visiting Havana, Cuba, in 2008, I was surprised by the differences in housing and free enterprise. There were well-appointed individually run bed-and-breakfast establishments and tiny apartment complexes. Except for weekly neighborhood gatherings in which residents were expected to do a variety of tasks, such as street cleanup, communalism was not particularly evident. Unlike some scholars, I have avoided the word communist or communism in reference to communities such as the Shakers or some later communities not because the term does not fit (it does) but simply because it is too loaded with sociopolitical baggage. As a substitute, the term communalism serves a similar function although with a different meaning. As used here, communalism refers to a belief in the need to create community in the face of the loss of community. Obviously all intentional communities are not communes, but all have communal aspects to them that are built into the political and economic structure or the system of values and beliefs of the community. The degree of communal experience, of course, varies widely (see chapter 1). As an illustration of the problem of using the terms communal and intentional community I note two groups: the Old Order Amish and the Mormons. Taking the last of these first, one can say that the first Mormon communities in the East and Salt Lake City were intentional, although the Mormon faith is now so widespread that calling it, or Salt Lake City, an intentional community seems rather odd. The Old Order Amish, on the other hand, maintain communities in several states that are cohesive in both structure and lifestyle. Although

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Amish houses and farms in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, are often scattered among non-Amish properties, the group’s distinctiveness as an intentional community is self-evident. The religious sect maintains its intentional character by not allowing succeeding generations to “become Amish” until they have made the choice after being freed from Amish restrictions when they reach 16, the beginning of the Rumspringa rite of passage. The term utopian is somewhat problematic. A utopian community is one that seeks a perfect state of being. Since most modern people know utopia is an impossible dream, I suggest a revision to “a more perfect state of being.” In that sense, most intentional communities are utopian.

Narrowing the Scope Other than chapter 2, which offers an historical perspective on influential communities of the past, this book is narrowly focused on intentional communities created since the Second World War. In a further narrowing of the book’s scope, I am also adopting the Friesen and Friesen (2004) characterization of an intentional community as a relatively small group. Also beyond the scope of this book are the so-called cultish communities that have captured the headlines since the 1960s, such as Charles Manson’s “family,” Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, Warren Jeffs’s polygamist compound, and many others, which are usually labeled cults and whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream intentional movement. The term mainstream in relation to intentional communities needs explanation as well. Mainstream refers to communities that are part of an extensive community network. That network includes organizations such the Fellowship for Intentional Community, which operates a Web site, www. ic.org, and authors such as Diana Leafe Christian, whose books are used as guides for intentional living.1 Multilocale organizations such as Gaia University and the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) are part of this networking system and also contribute to the ideological uniformity increasingly evident among contemporary communitarians. In defining the mainstream is also is helpful to distinguish between communities that are strictly religious and sectarian and those that are spiritual but not sectarian. This book focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on the latter and on secular communities, except in reference to communities of the past. The reason for this is twofold. First, the fear of being dubbed a cult has slowed the development of strict sectarian communities, while the influence of the New Age movement has encouraged the growth of communities that

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practice a kind of floating spirituality, in which various religious traditions are either accepted as the individual choices of community members or blended into a vaguely defined spiritual path. As such, some communities are nostalgic, secular escapes from the modern world, while others contest prevailing religious hierarchies by carving new synergistic spiritual paths. Also, there are impermanent or transitory communal experiences, such as New Age gatherings, that seek alternative spirituality and community through thoroughly contemporary takes on various early religious traditions. The next chapter examines in depth some of the characteristics of the intentional mainstream, but in general these communities are inclusive, pacifist, and to some degree egalitarian. Many of them acknowledge to a greater or lesser extent a commitment to environmentalism and ecological sustainability. Some communities are purely secular, others decidedly religious, and many are part of a growing trend toward inclusive nonsectarian spirituality. Generally, communitarians are well-educated, gentle folk with a desire to build consensus. Many have to contend with the contradiction of being born and raised in a modern society with all its amenities and then leaving much of that behind, if only symbolically. Categorizing intentional communities is not easy because they often serve differing purposes for people joined by a common need for community but who may have quite different ideas on how to get there. As Donald Pitzer (1997, p. 3), observes, “Intentionally formed communities now satisfy needs not only for religious commitment and social reform, but also for alternative lifestyles, cohousing, private schooling, medical care, and retirement opportunities.”

Chapter Summary Chapter 1, “Beyond the Threshold,” opens at The Farm, a venerable older hippie community in South Central Tennessee, as an introduction to a general discussion of communal living and a theoretical examination of life in the hypermodern world. That leads to a description of the common elements that characterize contemporary communes and intentional communities. Chapter 2, “Elders of Utopia,” begins at New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two early 19th-century utopian communities that found distinct versions of harmonious living while turning the same soil. Other early communities are referenced—including the Oneida Community, the Shakers, and Brook Farm—in the context of their impact on the future. The second half of

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the chapter discusses 20th-century utopian experiments that have had an impact well beyond their communities, such as the citadel of the New Age, Scotland’s Findhorn, an older but still functioning community that is seeding other communities and setting a standard in intentional living, alternative spirituality, and environmental awareness. Chapter 3, “Last Days of the Counterculture,” examines the impact of the counterculture on contemporary communities in an urban versus rural context. The chapter focuses on two of the more important tests of the Woodstock generation—Tennessee’s The Farm, a rural experiment, and Denmark’s Christiania, a less common urban community. Both have undergone considerable change since each was founded in the early 1970s. They offer intriguing lessons on the impact of location and the news media on the evolution of contemporary communal living. They also serve to highlight the compromises communities must make to accommodate changing fiscal and social times and to remain relevant. Chapter 4, “Ritual as Nostalgia,” begins in a ritual circle deep in the forests and foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With that circle as an example, the various meanings of ritual activity are examined in the context of binding communities. Ritual practices in several communities are discussed with a focus on a rite of passage at North Carolina’s Earthaven. This passage ceremony is recounted in the section called “The Lifting of River Otter.” Chapter 5, “Dream a Little Dream,” gazes out over the Arizona desert at a city of the future that drew its inspiration from villages of the past. In addition to the futuristic Arcosanti, this chapter examines other trendsetting communities, such as Ontario’s Whole Village, a tiny rural community that strives to be ecologically sound, and the Sirius Community of Massachusetts, an ecovillage with a spiritual side. The EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York, serves as one of the best-known examples of trendsetting housing in the world of intentional communities, even though its popularity may be its Achilles’ heel. Chapter 6, “Communities in Motion,” appraises the growth of temporary communities. Not everyone seeking an escape from the anxieties of contemporary living is able or willing to move to an intentional community. But the 21st century has seen the evolution of a variety of novel forms of finding community. These alternatives to traditional communities often effectively mime the communal experience, and they range from volunteer associations to arts and crafts centers to community gardens and food cooperatives to virtual networks such as Facebook. Volunteerism is spotlighted through the example of one charitable association, Habitat for

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Humanity, which builds communities of volunteers, not just communities of houses. Chapter 7, “Utopian End Game,” draws a few general conclusions about some of the more pressing issues alluded to in previous sections. These include the problem of generations, reconciling the modern and the traditional, the problem of homogeneity, macro versus micro authority, and the power and limits of nostalgia.

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Acknowledgments There were several friends and colleagues without whose patience and kindness this work would not have been possible. Most of all I am indebted to David Snyder, whose interests helped launch the research that led me to this book. And there is my friend and colleague Leon Yacher, who has assisted me in a number ways, both small and large. As always, my wife Lucille has been a willing participant and adviser throughout the extensive fieldwork necessary for the project to succeed. Also, I am grateful for the support of my colleagues in the Anthropology Department of Southern Connecticut State University. Lastly, writing about intentional communities means that the people of those uncommon places were generous and spirited enough to let me in and allow me to listen and learn. To them, I owe a great debt of gratitude. Those who live in community are in many ways the best of us.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Beyond the Threshold That’s the whole meaning of life; trying to find a place for your stuff. — George Carlin, comedian

An abandoned school bus sits just off the road in a forest. There are cinder blocks against the tires. The passenger door is open as though waiting for a bevy of children. Not far away is another bus, also in the woods, with its rear propped up so the bus is level even though the ground it sits on slopes downward. Nearby are open fields, where dreams were made and died. This is The Farm, although not all of it — just gentle rusty remnants of a past that feeds into the present. The Farm is one of the largest, if not the largest, remaining American intentional communities from the 1960s – 1970s counterculture. Although its origins, fittingly, were in San Francisco, The Farm is located in South Central Tennessee, a world apart from Nashville, a little over two hours to the north. But the open fields, which were intended to sustain the community since its founding in 1971, simply did not provide enough for an economy based upon communal sharing. And the buses, which brought the original settlers to the area, are monuments surrounded by homes that are in some cases individually owned. Indeed, The Farm today is somewhat removed from its beginnings, when a hippie school bus caravan took up residence on a spread of farmland they hoped would be their future. But its continued existence is nevertheless a metaphor for the evolutionary road that communitarians have taken over the past half-century. During that time, The Farm has gone from an agricultural commune to an enterprising co-op community and education center including an ecovillage. In a sense, The Farm is a time capsule that narrates the evolution of other contemporary intentional communities. The path of The Farm parallels

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the baby boom generation that spawned it. And in that there is a kind of easy story arc. From socialistic idealism to more practical semi-capitalism and eco-consciousness, the communities planted in the soils of the Western world since the countercultural era, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, embody the aspirations and disappointments of a certain generation and their spiritual descendents. As Timothy Miller (1999) suggests in his book on hippies and American values, the counterculture was more than drugs, sex, and rock; it was also about community and the rejection of rampant materialism and commercialism. This attitude is still with some of us now but has been modified by time, experience, and the realities of the manic frenzy of modern life. It is still with us in venturesome folks who feel they have lost, but are eager to reimagine and reinvent, the spirit of community.

Influences and Evolution In this and subsequent chapters I will explore the evolution of modern communal living as aging hippie communes transform into ecovillages and religious communes or become nonsectarian spiritual centers or temporary volunteer communities. Like early American utopian experiments, contemporary utopian communities seek to distance themselves from the impediments and limitations of the larger society. But the variety and novelty of communal forms have intensified along with the pace of contemporary life. Indeed, escaping the culturally fractured nature and accelerated pace of modernity is one of the underlying themes of contemporary communal living. Communitarians accomplish this with varying degrees of success by attempting to nostalgically reproduce a more traditional and mostly agrarian lifestyle through liminal (or threshold) rituals and practices that contemporary society tends to deny. In other words, contemporary intentional communities are often about temporary fixes to modern life involving highly transient populations who are fully comfortable in both the outside world and life within the community. This was true of intentional communities in the past but to a lesser degree. In the United States, a hotbed of utopian experiments since the 18th century, the lifespan of the most notable communal experiments, such as Oneida Community and the two communities at New Harmony, Indiana, can be measured in decades, not centuries (see chapter 2). Such experiments rarely lasted into the third generation, with the exception of the Shakers and some Anabaptist communities.

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Of course, communal living in a broad sense is not just a centuries-old phenomenon. It is perhaps the oldest form of human social organization. Donald Pitzer (1997, p. 3) has written that communal sharing was there at the beginning of life on earth; in other words, it is at least as old as the fossil record. As an anthropologist, I will not venture back that far but will settle instead for hominid history and prehistory. Most of my colleagues agree that our hominid ancestors lived in small bands that subsisted by food foraging or scavenging or a combination thereof. That being so, modern food foragers (hunter-gatherers), although few in number, are probably the best example of how all our human ancestors once lived as they trod across the vast East African savannah. We can glimpse the past in the present, to a degree, in the Kalahari, with the partially imagined world of the !Kung San, more commonly known as the Bushmen.1 Scholars and filmmakers have documented Kalahari lifestyles for decades. Some consider the traditional San lifestyle a reflection of our common food-foraging past. The truth of that is not as relevant as the image perpetuated in magazines and films, such the simplistic, patronizing, and skewered portrait of San life in the 1980 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. The film garnered a cult following in part because it depicted the San in an ideal, though static, state. It ridiculed modernity and suggested that modern peoples have lost the meaning of life by straying too far from the natural state. Its noble savages were just that, but the film ignored that the San are anything but savage; rather, the San are a version of a civilized, though ancient, tribal culture that has persisted to this day, at least among the few San who have not transitioned to agriculture or the modern world.2 Although traditional San life was not as naïve and problem free as depicted in the 1980 film, scholars have identified several San characteristics that hold appeal to those who decry modern life and who would look to our collective past, or at least an imagined reflection of the past, as a model for contemporary communalism. As one of the most anthropologized food foragers left on earth, the San peoples thus have had a profound impact on both the public imagination and academic research because, on the surface at least, they appear to be living representations of our collective past. Anthropologists Marshall Sahlins (1972) and Richard B. Lee (1979), for example, have suggested that the communal lifestyle of food foragers like the San represents a contemporary example of an ideal human state, a lifestyle that represented, according to Lee, about 80 to 95 percent of Homo sapiens history. “Fiercely egalitarian,” ecologically balanced, and nonviolent (relatively speaking), the San were (and to some extent still are) living proof that

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humans were meant to live communal lives. Mostly devoid of property, San societies were largely leaderless and affluent without abundance, at least in their traditional living arrangements (Lee, 1979, p. 24). The last point — affluence without material wealth—was what compelled Sahlins (1972) to call hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society.” The San achieved this affluent state through a system of simple reciprocity — that is, the sharing of all resources within a bounded ecosystem—and by limiting the size of their groupings to a few dozen people in an extended family.

Communes and Intentional Living Some form of communalism is at the heart of most intentional communities, past and present. I emphasize some form because the degree of communalism obviously varies widely. In some cases, it may involve a strict communal economy; in others, it may be egalitarian governance. In others, communalism may be expressed symbolically, such as the occasional community meal or ritual activity. Generally, few 20th- and 21st-century intentional communities, outside of religious monastic situations, have achieved the level of communalism that marks traditional San society, with the possible exception of the early kibbutz movement. The Israeli kibbutz movement is a rather interesting model. Through most of the 20th century, kibbutzum were almost purely collective. As one former kibbutznik told me of her experiences as a child, “We shared everything, including our clothes.” And as Daniel Gavron (2000, p. 2) writes: The kibbutz belong to all it members, and each member was personally responsible to the collective. The community, its services, and the productive branches make up a single unit. All members were entitled to housing, furniture, food, clothing, medical services, cultural activities, and education for their children. In return they were expected to work in the kibbutz at the task assigned to them by the work organizer. By communal standards, the kibbutz was close to perfection. Perfection, of course, is never perfect. The problems, Gavron notes, were numerous, including economic sustainability, generational issues, and educational hurdles (2000, pp. 4–11). He contends that the uniformity and collectivist nature of kibbutzim was unraveling by the early 1990s, and by the end of the 20th century the movement was in “turmoil” (2000, pp. 1 – 2). But the importance of kibbutzim as a striking example of communal living cannot be underesti-

Introduction

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mated. In 1990, its members numbered 125,000, according to Spiro (2004, p. 557), who called kibbutzim “the largest utopian movement in history.” One also may argue that the kibbutz movement was the most successful utopian experiment in the 20th century. But as Leviatan, Oliver, and Quarter (1998, p. 163) point out, the success of the kibbutz movement depended upon the ideological commitment of its members, which began to wane in time. The role of ideological underpinnings should not be underestimated. As we shall see in chapter 2, a firm ideological base was a prerequisite for early and most 20th-century communitarians, but in more recent communities, strict adherence to a formal system of values and beliefs is more encouraged than imposed. On the other hand, many of the modern intentional communities and communes mentioned in the chapters to come are ideologically based by their relative isolation from the larger society. That isolation constitutes a value-laden comment on that larger society. Without an ideological underpinning of some sort, an intentional community may be nothing more than a quirky housing development. Indeed, more recent intentional communities are typically bound by values and beliefs such as a commitment to nonviolence, nonsectarian spirituality, or environmentalism, although the ideology may be softer in practice than in the past. Additionally, the level of ideological commitment varies widely within contemporary intentional communities, as do the specific expressions of these ideologies. For example, within the same community one often finds a variety of disparate spiritual paths. As one elder of a New England community dedicated to spirituality told me, “We accept everyone, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan.” This approach may seem enlightened to those living in pluralistic societies, but such avowed diversity also threatens to dilute the power of ideological commitment. Be that as it may, this kind of floating spirituality is proving quite attractive, especially in North America and Europe. Another major difference between earlier communities — including the kibbutz movement—and modern communities is that the former were born of extreme social crisis. For example, the Anabaptist movements that brought the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites to North and South America were the products of intolerable conditions in their often-unstable homelands. On the other hand, contemporary intentional communities, especially those of the American and European countercultures, were not born of crisis and need but of the need to affect social change in relatively stable societies. As traumatic as the Vietnam years were for Americans, the middle class — the pool from which the counterculture emerged—was not as severely affected by the

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war as were the lower economic and social classes. Indeed, the counterculture emerged from the middle class, and idealistic founders of communities such as New Mexico’s New Buffalo commune and The Farm did not create egalitarian communes to escape persecution or the horrors of somewhere else but to make a statement about how life should be lived. Their efforts challenged social norms and gave the middle finger to conventional wisdom. They were not, however, in an actual struggle for survival, although their members may have functioned with a kind of siege mentality combined with a euphoric sense of freedom.

A Matter of Degree For the most part, contemporary intentional communities embrace communalism in principle or in peripheral activities but less so as a critical element in the structuring of primary activities. Cohousing communities are an example of a trend that has gathered momentum in the 21st century. Cohousing combines the communal with a high degree of independent living, and such communities represent the other end of the communal spectrum from the kibbutz. A confusing term, cohousing refers to a community system in which residents own their own homes and sometimes land but may share a common house for occasional community meals. A European concept, these communities are relatively recent. They are replacing traditional pure communes and, according to Diana Leafe Christian (2007, p. 39), are perhaps the fastest growing intentional community arrangement in North America. One of the more successful and notable examples of cohousing is the EcoVillage at Ithaca, or EVI (see chapter 5), but defining the essence of EVI is difficult because on the surface it appears to have much in common with a condominium complex. In fact, I asked the condominium question to members of the EVI community during a visit there in 2009. The response was that EVI was planned and managed by those who chose to live there and that members shared a common vision of a sustainable future. In other words, cohousing communities are truly intentional because they have a system of values and beliefs. Cohousing, therefore, is mission driven, although the mission may be vague or soft.

Hypermodern Liquid Life Whatever the specific mission of an intentional community, certain longterm societal patterns tend to inspire an increase in the level of communal activity. One of these patterns relates to the nature of modern societies.

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Since the Industrial Revolution, the pace of life in developed societies has quickened. This has created lifestyles that have fractured into disparate elements. One’s job does not relate to one’s family, which, in turn, does not relate to one’s leisure. One’s neighbors are often strangers, and one’s day is broken into little segments of unrelated time. Lipovetsky (2005) calls this phenomenon “hypermodern times,” a step beyond postmodernity. Hypermodernity is characterized by hyperconsumption, or being caught up “in the machinery of excess” and extremism in many forms—that is, “extreme in terms of technology, media, economics . . . consumption and individual pathology” (2005, pp. 32–33). This is similar to what Bauman (2005) calls “liquid modern life,” which he defines as “the conditions under which [a society’s] members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines.” Social theorist Anthony Giddens (1991, pp. 4–5) calls recent times “high modernity,” which he sees as the postmodern state of newly evolving risk and disconnection from tradition. This quickening of life’s velocity has created the conditions for a push back. The modern intentional community is part of that push back. Communitarians push back through partial or total separation. In contrast to the culturally fractured nature of contemporary life, they often attempt to nostalgically reproduce a more traditional agrarian lifestyle through rituals and ecological practices that contemporary society tends to deny. Such actions may incorporate disparate modalities under the roof of the communal experience. In a world of rapid change, communitarians have shaped the direction of sociocultural change far beyond their communities. This suggests that intentional communities are not just a retreat from hypermodernity or a temporary fix but can also function as examples for the larger society. They represent particularly creative remedies to issues that have an impact beyond their domains. I observed this during research at Tennessee’s The Farm and Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark. These communities contest the limitations of what they perceive as a sociocultural environment in which economic output and unrestrained progress have become guiding principles; they contest the modern netherworld of disconnectedness and the denial of the community. To members of these two communities and many others, the larger society offers an ever-changing multiplex of customized technological and ideological options that are disengaged from the more sedate pace of normal human interaction, thus disallowing the imprint of close human contact and the ritual activity that such contact engenders. Instead, intentional communities offer a sense of moral achievement within the context of a moral community committed to a common end.

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Although intentional communities represent a critique of contemporary society, they do not reject society outright, as did some communitarians of the past, such as the Shakers or Amish or even the early communes of the counterculture, from which the modern form evolved. Instead, contemporary communities offer an alternative to the ever-quickening pace of change, or hypermodernity. As such, intentional communities contest the freneticism of hypermodernity while accepting some other elements of that society, such as technologies that could advance a community’s agenda. Thus, whatever path these communities embark upon, their members take with them elements of the modern world while layering on elements from an imaged past — that is, the traditional or the tribal. Contemporary communities use tradition and their customized version of tribalism as a relief from the defects of the times by nostalgically recreating traditions of indigenous people or other more distant cultures. This is especially urgent because, as Friesen and Friesen (2004, p. 2) put it, “most North Americans need a break from the monotony of treadmill industrialization, pedantic religious utterances, and cultural emptiness.” Communitarians also have increasingly injected themselves into the cultural crosscurrents that seem to swirl with greater and greater force in a world made ever smaller by countervailing forces such as globalization. For intentional communities, the answer to globalization is a new spin on tradition. This usually does not mean a complete immersion into the tribal, but simply one foot in the pool. One is not going to find modern communitarians hunting and gathering, although food foraging did mark a few isolated attempts at eking out a living during the early countercultural era. Instead, contemporary intentional communities willingly adopt some of the more benign tools of the modern world to recreate lifestyles that at the very least feel more traditional. The ecovillage movement, for example, displays the synergy between the traditional and the modern. The mission of ecovillagers is to create small-scale communities that are ecologically sustainable within the context of employing what they consider the best of modern technology, such as solar and wind energy devices, while rejecting what they see as the unsustainable velocity of hypermodernism. Yet another consequence of hypermodern life is the erosion of identity. As Bayart (2005, p. 7) notes, “the modern world is haunted by the spectre of difference vanishing. It fears that everything will become uniform and, as a result there is a ‘general anxiety with regard to identity.’” One of the more salient aspects of communal living is the reconstitution of identity. This desire to have an identity was captured in the theme song of

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the popular television show Cheers, where the bar is a place “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” Intentional communities not only provide a place where everyone knows your name but where that name is meaningful. In effect, joining a commune or intentional community is like walking through a door into a new world, where inhabitants are bonded by virtue of the mutual experience of exploring that world together. This frontier experience is possibly the reason some new communitarians change their names to novel appellations such as Mystic and Red Moon Sun.

Living Small and Slow Another pillar of the intentional movement is living small. Living small means not only building communities that do not grow too large but also leaving a small carbon footprint. In addition, living small implies a rejection of commercialism and consumerism, prominent markers of hypermodernity. The essence of consumer culture is the assumption that happiness is achieved through accumulating and using as much as possible. “He who dies with the most stuff, wins,” as the bumper sticker aphorism goes. For the burgeoning ecovillage movement, one of architects of living large is globalization, an anathematic term. Jonathan Dawson (2006, p. 75), a widely respected leader in the ecovillage movement, puts it this way: Where globalization is predicted on the notion that we can grow our way out of our social and ecological problems through ever greater specialization, accumulation and trade, ecovillages are the living manifestation of a philosophy of voluntary simplicity and greater self-reliance. Simplicity and self-reliance are fundamental building blocks of today’s intentional community movement, just as these attributes were characteristic of alternative living communities of the past. Of considerable importance today, however, is the attempt not just to recapture what was believed to have been lost but also to update the sense of tradition embodied in an imagined agrarian ideal. The idea of getting back to the land stands in contradiction to globalization just as some early communitarians called into question the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and North America. For example, Shaker founder Ann Lee led her followers to America in 1774 in part to escape the dehumanizing effects of the beginnings of industrial revolution in Manchester, England (Pitzer, 1997, p. 90).3

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On the other hand, communities of the past found more or less complete separation from the larger society somewhat less challenging for a few reasons, including the simple fact of geography. North America became fertile ground for the growth of communal living experiments in previous centuries because it was easier to settle in geographically isolated niches and, of course, because of the fertile soil, which the Amish of Pennsylvania found helpful. Contemporary communities, no matter how geographically isolated they appear, are always in fairly easy reach of an interstate or a cell phone. Yet another aspect of living small is the complementary notion of living slow. In his bestseller In Praise of Slowness, journalist Carl Honoré comments on the superficiality of modern living, or what he terms, “a life of hurry,” by noting, “when we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people” (2004, p. 9).

Patterns in Common Contemporary communitarians are not the lone warriors in the struggle against hypermodernism. Resistance to hypermodernism is situated in a variety of contexts that may be religious or secular but not necessarily geographically or even culturally bound. These phenomena reflect a collective desire by participants to engage in transformative experiences through the creation of both permanent and transitory communities. Participants in these communities, however, do not necessarily represent cultural wholes; instead, they represent diverse individuals seeking solutions to the sense of disconnectedness. Examples of these phenomena abound, including New Ageism, the American counterculture of the 1960s, the contemporary arts and crafts movement, and the Slow Cities/Slow Foods movements.4 The intentional movement contains crosscurrents of all the aforementioned phenomena and many more. As a result, intentional communities, even those classified as mainstream, are quite diverse. Although there is no single model for the contemporary intentional community, there are patterns of social structure, ideology, and overall culture that are remarkably uniform throughout the mainstream movement. The critical nexus is the counterculture of the 1960s – 1970s and the loose-knit New Age movement that followed. These influences were and are still an undercurrent among communitarians. As such, communitarians tend to be socially progressive. Writing for Communities magazine, a respected publication within the movement, Valerie Renwick-Porter humorously distinguishes between accept-

Introduction

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able and unacceptable conversation topics at Virginia’s Twin Oaks Community. For example: Acceptable: Global warming and polar icecap melt. More delicate: What temperature to set the communal hot-water heater, and the ecological implications of using ice cubes. (2008, p. 52) It is ironic that much of this uniformity is transmitted and absorbed by the rapid evolution of cyberspace, one of the most visible culprits in the formulation of the hypermodern life that communitarians seek to elude. But it is this duality of these processes, the process of escaping from the pressure cooker of hypermodernity and the use of the tools of hypermodernity to do so, that helps define the mainstream of the contemporary communal experience. In the present, however, these uniformities are aided by extensive community networks as mentioned in the previous chapter. So the following are general characteristics of mainstream communities. I should add that those who join intentional communities for the most part are white middle-class mainstream folk, like the hippies of the counterculture, whose life stories or acquired beliefs often set them apart from the social order. Said another way, they are regular people with a heightened sense of purpose and an unconventional view of society.

Human-Scale Living Anyone who has ever lived in a city knows that except for the sports and entertainment venues, real life exists in the neighborhood, or the urban enclave. Urban folks tend to compartmentalize their lives. They seek to tightly order their lives both temporally and geographically to eliminate the plethora of extraneous activity a city generates. As such, urban dwellers tend to limit choices in the face of too many choices, restricting the number of restaurants they patronize to two or three, for example. In other words, city people are all, to borrow Herbert Gans’s (1962) term for ethnic enclave residents, urban villagers. The problem with the urban village is the kinetic flow of city life, which tends to constantly reshape and reconfigure urban enclaves, disrupting the patterns of daily living. For this reason, most successful intentional communities of the past and present chose not just social separation from the larger society but also geographic isolation (see chapter 2). Geographic isolation from hypermodernity means adopting lifestyles of slower pace and smaller scale. The larger the group of people in a

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community—no matter how homogenous it appears to be—the greater the risk of fracturing. As noted sociologist Louis Wirth (1938, p. 11) noted, “The greater the number of individuals participating in a process of interaction, the greater is the potential differentiation between them.” In other words, fracturing occurs because lacking major differences, minor differences between community participants became exaggerated when the social carrying capacity of the group is reached. But is there an ideal size for a successful intentional community? Is there such a measure as social carry capacity? Again we return to Wirth, who notes: “Increase the number of inhabitants of a community beyond a few hundred is bound to limit the possibility of each member of the community knowing all the others personally.” In fact, most intentional communities today are small. The largest—such as India’s Auroville, at about 1,700, and The Farm and Freetown Christiana, both under 1,000—are no larger than very small towns. Although gathering overall population statistics on intentional communities is challenging, to say the least, it is fair to say that a review of the Fellowship for Intentional Community Web site suggests most mainstream communities are fewer than one hundred people. If nothing else, the goal of human-scale living has been achieved at least in terms of numbers.

Egalitarianism and Reciprocity In a 1994 article for the Atlantic Monthly, social thinker and management guru Peter Drucker wrote: The old communities—family, village, parish, and so on—have all but disappeared in the knowledge society. Their place has largely been taken by the new unit of social integration, the organization. Where community was fate, organization is voluntary membership. Where community claimed the entire person, organization is a means to a person’s ends, a tool. For 200 years a hot debate has been raging, especially in the West: are communities “organic” or are they simply extensions of the people of which they are made? Nobody would claim that the new organization is “organic.” It is clearly an artifact, a creation of man, a social technology. But who, then, does the community tasks? Communitarians are not organization oriented. They are folks who would prefer not to govern or be governed. Yet communities need to be organized and governed to thrive. Early hippie communes such as Colorado’s Drop

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City were free-form places that often had a floating population, and most did not last long. Lessons were learned, and today’s communities are relatively well organized. In fact, one of the most frequent complaints from communitarians is that there are too many meetings. One of the culprits is consensus governance, which essentially means all members of the community have an equal say and to get anything done all must agree or step aside. Under such circumstances, meetings can seem interminable. Although consensus governance is common, so are community leaders. One rarely hears organizational terminology such as chairperson or director, for community leaders often lead by unobtrusive controls such as influence. Indeed, egalitarianism poses an interesting dilemma. More often than not, intentional communities both past and present have been driven by charismatic leaders who sought to create communities of equals. On the other hand, intentional communities are defined by the fact they don’t evolve, so to speak, but have a clear beginning; therefore, there have to be founders. And the reality is those founders, such as The Farm’s Stephen Gaskin, Koinonia’s Clarence Jordon, or Findhorn’s Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, often become de facto leaders and/or inspirational figures. All these figures tended to encourage the egalitarian ideal while functioning as leaders nevertheless. In the early days of The Farm, for example, Gaskin conducted legal marriages, although he was not an ordained minister (Traugot, 1994, p. 17). History also is replete with examples of communal leaders who have pushed the limits of their power. Of course, those movements have usually been categorized as cults and, therefore, placed neatly in a separate box. Cults are most often defined as religious movements that brainwash their members, usually under the control of a powerful spiritual leader. But scholars such as Lorne Dawson (2003, p. 5) have suggested that the term is a synonym for new religious movements and, therefore, can apply to a wide range of spiritual experiences and intentional communities. The problem is that the news media (my old profession) tends to be too quick to use the term cult in reference to any new religious movement or community that is perceived as a potential threat to the larger society. Because the term can be so loosely applied, it is avoided in this book. Another organizational issue is the economic structure of the community. Since true communes are more the exception than the rule today, economic configurations such as cohousing mean that dealing with land, housing, and other property issues can be complex and require even more meetings. For larger communities, such as Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania, meetings may occur on both the neighborhood level and on the community level.

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Economic issues are more complex than in the 1960s and earlier primarily because today’s communities tend to be more entrepreneurial. Even smaller communities may run workshops and seminars on subjects such as permaculture or spiritual renewal. Larger communities may have independent businesses run by members under the loose umbrella of the community. Findhorn, The Farm, and Freetown Christiania all have such businesses. Such enterprises add yet another level of bureaucracy and complication.

Pacifism and Nonviolence Pacifism has been a long and venerable tradition in communes and other intentional communities. It was prevalent among the Anabaptist communities (Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites) and embraced by the Shakers, the Harmonists, the Perfectionists, the Oneida Society, and others. Even Dwight L. Moody, 19th-century America’s best-known evangelist, was pacifistic.5 In a sense it comes with the territory, both literally and figuratively. Intentional communities are inherently isolationist, and if a community isolates itself, even if only in spirit, it follows that involvement in national or international struggles would be discouraged. The pacifist, or nonviolent, antecedent of modern intentional communities, though, is the Vietnam era antiwar movement, which energized the counterculture and remains a subtext in alternative living situations. But there is a stark contrast between the activism of the Vietnam era and the peace orientation of contemporary intentional communities. Today’s communitarians are more likely to speak about peace in the abstract or in connection with spiritual matters than to engage in antiwar activists. Perhaps this has much to do with the aging of the intentional movement, which was a youth culture 40 years ago but is now, well . . . older. Having said that, community members still are largely left leaning, which goes with territory.

Sexuality This isn’t the 1960s, the sexual revolution has already occurred, and we are used to it. Communitarians are not running naked and having sex on their lawns; in fact, lawns are a luxury in an intentional community. It has been said it is harder today to find pot in Freetown Christiania, which has a reputation for drug use and sales, than in the rest of Copenhagen. Although public nudity is not particularly evident, neither it is forbidden or frowned upon. It is just accepted as an occasional part of life.

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Nineteenth-century utopian communities found it necessary to set hard rules on sexuality, either to one extreme or the other. Communities such as the Shakers and the Rappists were gender-segregated societies. Shaker celibacy, after all, led to the near demise of its communities in the 20th century. On the other hand, the open marriage system of the Oneida colony led to problems of another order. Contemporary nonsectarian communitarians largely avoid the subject in their literature. In her 2007 bible for joining an intentional community, Finding Community, Diana Leafe Christian warns new members not to jump into romantic liaisons until they have been fully acculturated into a community, but that is about it.

Spirituality In the early 19th century, the rural community of New Harmony, Indiana, was the site of two utopian communities (see chapter 2). First there was the Harmony Society, or Harmonists, a strict religious community with similarities to the Shakers. Then there were the Owenists, or Perfectionists, a distinctly secular community whose members valued science and educational innovation. Neither succeeded long in that location, although in terms of overall longevity the Harmonists were more successful. But the line between strongly religious and distinctly secular communities is more blurred in the 21st century. That is not to say there are not strongly religious communities. There are many that are specific about their religious or spiritual direction. Notable are L’Abri, an evangelical Christian community in Switzerland; New Vrindaban, a Krishna Consciousness community in West Virginia; and the Iona Community, a Celtic Christian community in Scotland. Even if it is not specifically religious, communities may have either religious underpinnings or at least encourage spiritual practices. The Federation of Damanhur in Northern Italy, for example, claims to be an ecovillage and a spiritual community. Scotland’s Findhorn, though members practice no specific religious tradition, embraces its three founders’ Christian and Sufi backgrounds. Tennessee’s The Farm is not overtly religious but members consider it a spiritual community. Stephen Gaskin, the influential founder of The Farm, expresses deep Judeo-Christian sentiments combined with Eastern influences in his short book This Season’s People: A Book of Spiritual Teachings (1976). He continues this approach, a kind of floating spirituality, in his book Mind at Play, in which he muses extensively and positively about Christianity and Zen Buddhism, a fairly common pairing of

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religious beliefs. In the following paragraph, published nine years after the founding of The Farm, Gaskin (1980, p. 182) writes the following about the community: I know a lot of people came in here banged and crazy in such directions that may have been personally very exotic, but actually, we’d have four or five avatars hit the Gate (the entrance to The Farm) in a week, sometimes. Different religions—Jesuses and Buddhas, Thorazines and Zoroastrians and whatnot. And a lot of us who are here now are those people and remember coming in the Gate in that condition. And we didn’t forget that trip. We still remember it; we just don’t push it on our friends so hard. Members of The Farm today still reflect some of those various spiritual traditions. This diversity is almost standard in contemporary communities. Indeed, even within very small communities one may find a stew of beliefs and rituals from several major world religions and tribal religions. This patchwork of beliefs and practices may include within the same complex ritual snippets of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity alongside elements of Navajo and Australian Aboriginal rituals and beliefs, or at least the replication of those beliefs according to popular culture. Indigenous knowledge is particularly popular, and, not surprisingly, communitarians have a special place in their collective hearts for American Indian cultures, which were also a preoccupation of the 1960s counterculture and New Agers (Pike, 2004, p. 82). In fact, in almost every extended conversation I have had with communitarians, the subject of American Indian knowledge has come up. Usually these conversations refer to Indians in a general sense, rather than in the context of a specific Indian nation. This appropriation of all that is indigenously American, including indigenous Mexican and Central American cultures, is somewhat controversial. It tends to blur tribal distinctions and their cultures into a generic category of “Indian.” Be that as it may, the communal love affair with indigenous and ancient knowledge shows no signs of abatement.

Sacred Spaces Spirituality is reinforced and refreshed through ritual, especially communal ritual, and, thus, sacred space is critical to the development of a both a spiritual and a secular community. For communitarians, that space may

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be both real and symbolic. Most communities, for example, have a multipurpose common room or community house, often polygonal or round. Like the churches of the early New England Puritans, the common room usually serves multiple purposes. It may be used for dining, special events, meetings, or meditation. In spiritual communities it is a virtual house of worship. For some community members, the common garden or the land itself is sacred space. This is especially true of ecovillages, whose connections with the natural world are complex and powerful. Those who choose the ecovillage lifestyle usually are required to commit to a low carbon footprint, and that commitment usually means something more than just using low-impact building materials or mounting solar panels on a dwelling. It is also an ideological position and, in some cases, a spiritual preference. For ecovillagers this often expresses itself in a reverence for the earth through a form of animism, a belief that spirits can exist in natural objects. The controversial scientific theory called Gaia, which views the Earth as a living whole, is also in vogue among some ecovillagers. This theory and ecovillage life will be further explored in chapter 5. Sometimes the built environment itself becomes sacred space. For example, Arizona’s Arcosanti was designed by visionary architect Paolo Soleri to demonstrate that design could foster community. Because of their unique character, the singular buildings of Arcosanti in effect are the community. In Northern Italy, communitarians are reverently restoring the tiny medieval village of Torri Superiore and in the process transforming it into an ecovillage. It was these traditional Italian villages, like Torri Superiore, that inspired Soleri to fashion Arcosanti.

Threshold People I have a friend and colleague who likes to travel, almost nonstop. Nothing wrong with that, although likes is a rather mild word for how he regards his global excursions. As a geography scholar it goes with my friend’s territory, so to speak. For him, going somewhere, as far from the familiar as possible, is more than an indulgence without a terminus—it is a mission. He has traveled to more than one hundred countries on six continents for both research and curiosity. There are, of course, business travelers who are also constant travelers, and high-ranking members of the State Department have no doubt racked up more time in the air than my friend, but with him traveling is something of a

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compulsion. And it is freedom. And then there are the borders, the crossings. For my colleague, few travel experiences compare with the act of crossing a border by foot or, if necessary, by car. He photographs borders, he challenges border guards, he collects passport stamps like some people collect butterflies. Each specimen, each stamp, is cherished and is accompanied by a narrative, and every passport he has possessed has required more extra pages than the U.S. government was willing to give. Some of his border adventures have caused problems, like the time he tangled with armed guards while crossing the border between two volatile Central Asian nations. But for him the risk is worth it, for crossing a border is a transformative act. It means the traveler is unbounded; it is a kind of freedom mixed with danger and excitement. Crossing a border is like opening a door and crossing a threshold from one state of being to another. As David Sibley notes: “Crossing boundaries, from a familiar space to an alien one which is under the control of somebody else, can provide anxious moments; in some circumstances it could be fatal, or it might be an exhilarating experience—the thrill of transgression” (1995/2004, p. 361). I am reminded of the wooden arch marking the main entrance to Freetown Christiania. The sign on the front of the arch says “Christiania.” On the back it says: “You are now entering the EU.” The arch clearly enhances the sense of passing into and out of something significant. The first time you enter is a bit exhilarating. When you leave, the exhilaration quickly fades.

A Rite of Passage As an anthropologist who does multilocale studies of media in addition to my interest in intentional communities, I have also traveled a bit, and so I have come to appreciate the power and attraction of the border, the threshold. And I admire my colleague’s widely scattered itineraries, but most of all I understand the sense of freedom that comes with the experience of crossing a border. Freedom is a troublesome word, partly because it is overused but also because it is so arbitrary and subject to intense misuse. It is situational; it means too many things to too many people of divergent views. And so here is another word that gives context to my friend’s passion for borders — liminality. This term and its adjective form, liminal, have a history in anthropology, beginning with its use by Arnold van Gennep, the French scholar best known for his book The Rites of Passage (1909/1960). The book explained the universality of this complex ritual and explicated its three

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distinct stages. In his work, van Gennep uses the terms door and threshold in reference to the middle stage of a rite of passage, which he also dubs the “liminal” stage. The word liminal is derived from the Latin, limen, for threshold. Van Gennep’s work was refined and expanded by anthropologist Victor Turner, whose classic work, The Ritual Process (1969), explains the critical concept of communitas (Latin for community), which is further explored in chapter 4. Communitas refers to the bonding that occurs to those undergoing a rite of passage together. It implies that those undergoing the rite together experience a unique sense of community—communitas. During this transition stage of a rite of passage, the initiates are caught (or transitioning) between worlds, so to speak. They are in effect liminal, or threshold, people. During this stage, participants are freed from the constraints of normal society by being betwixt and between worlds — the old world one is leaving behind and the new world into which one is being initiated. This state of liminality is an apt way of explaining the nature of intentional communities. Contemporary communitarians are indeed caught between worlds, specifically the outside, hypermodern world they are supposedly leaving behind and the world of the traditional or the tribal, the world of communal living. A few caveats are necessary. I use the verb phrase “leaving behind” as opposed to “left behind” because those who join intentional communities today rarely abandon the outside world unconditionally. Most communitarians are not food foragers, nor are they Luddities, eschewing modern technologies for stone-age tools. Rather, they are people with a deep respect for earlier, tribal forms of living whose lifestyle choices tend toward simplicity. There is resilience and flexibility in the notion of liminality. It helps explain certain kinds of alternative human behavior, such as monasticism, in which participants trade the boundaries of the larger society for the state of gradually transforming into a higher state of being. There is power that comes from being on the threshold from becoming rather than simply being. It is the sense of being unfettered by the world out there and being open to the seemingly limitless possibilities of the unknown.

Revitalizing Community In some important ways, contemporary intentional communities are a social movement. More importantly, the intentional phenomenon

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resembles a specific kind of social movement that anthropologists have called revitalization. Revitalization movements, from the American Indian ghost dance to Melanesian cargo cults, have long captured the interest of social scientists. Indeed, some researchers have speculated that the notion of revitalization lies at the core of most major world religions. Today, revitalization movements take various forms, some deeply religious and others spiritual but secular. All such movements—past and present, such as the Amish or peyote cults—originate in the context of rapid societal change, and all are characterized by origin stories rooted in sociocultural upheaval and stress. They all evolve through certain identifiable stages. In effect, they are creative reactions to change that may take many novel forms (Wallace, 1956), including intentional communities. More to the point, revitalization movements arise as a means of coping with rapid change by offering new spiritual, or spiritualistic, expressions that ease the tensions associated with social upheaval. Revitalization movements accomplish this by mediating ideological contradictions within a society in flux by synthesizing disparate cultural elements. This definition of revitalization borrows, but differs slightly, from earlier placements of such movements, most of which follow Anthony F. C. Wallace (1956) or Ralph Linton (1943), both of whom position these phenomena in a colonial context. Early applications of the revitalization concept focused on traditional societies, such as American Indian societies and their reactions to colonialism or early modernity. This genre of study (Aberle, 1966; Carroll, 1975; Champagne, 1983; Harkin, 2003; Jorgensen, 1972; Schwarz, 1998; Thornton, 1993) sought to apply the term revitalization to encapsulate various movements often loosely classified as foundationally religious and to place the evolution of these phenomena as reactions to rapid and often painful social change. In a 2003 work, Wallace further explained his original concept of revitalization thusly: Revitalization is thus, from a cultural standpoint, a special kind of culture change phenomenon: the persons involved in the process of revitalization must perceive their culture, or some major areas of it, as a system (whether accurately or not); they must feel that this cultural system is unsatisfactory; and they must innovate not merely discrete items, but a new cultural system, specifying new relationships as well as, in some cases, new traits. (2003, p. 11)

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Susan Love Brown (2002, pp. 154–155) is among those who have applied Wallace’s revitalization concept to intentional communities. She explains the role of such movements in society as such: The rise of revitalization movements in great numbers signals a disturbance in the larger society — that is, some respect in which the society has not met the needs of a substantial number of people. The form of revitalization movement—whether it is religious or secular, whether it is based on the revival of a traditional culture, a new culture imported from outside the larger society, some mixture of traditional and new, or some as yet unrealized utopian goal . . . —often embodies the nature of the critique at hand and serves as a juxtaposition to the larger society. The contrast between the movement and the society at large casts the problem into specific relief and makes it evident, providing the opportunity for a reexamination. Revitalization movements meld elements of the present onto elements of the past to assemble a new sociocultural paradigm. They look forward and backward, as do intentional communities. Seen as a movement, intentional living takes on a more unified role in helping shape the rest of society. By their very existence intentional movements point out hypermodern society’s fundamental flaw: the erosion of the sense of community. As an alternative to the larger society and an antidote to its flaws, intentional communities capture the spirit by recreating the structure and energy of the preindustrial village by using the tools of the times. This need to recapture or reconstitute the communal spirit of the past also expresses itself in forms other than intentional communities as such. Craft fairs, community theaters, local farm co-ops, and community gardens are forms of temporary community that can be considered adjuncts to the intentional movement.

A Narrative Arc Since the 1960s when the first hippie communes popped up like crocuses in the spring, there have been patterns to the development of intentional communities—a narrative arc, so to speak. It should be no surprise that in very broad outlines the narrative arc follows a parallel path with the life choices of the baby boom generation. That generation, with its wide spectrum of values, for better or worse, is still driving much of society today, at least in North America and Europe. With that in mind, the following is a proposed

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evolutionary model of the progress of modern intentional communities over the past half century. It is assuredly not intended to apply to all communities. The time frames are highly generalized, and there is a lot of overlap. Stage One: 1960s, early 1970s. This was the era of the hippie commune, although pinpointing any pattern to the communes of that era is, as Timothy Miller (1999, p. xxiv) points out, “preordained to failure.” Primarily communal, some of these communities, such as New Buffalo near Taos, New Mexico, took their inspiration from American Indians, which was reflected in both lifestyle and ritual. Some, like The Farm, were motivated by urban political and social activism and were expressions of the West Coast counterculture. Others, such as Findhorn, were spiritual movements that attracted members of the counterculture. Stage Two: late 1970s, early 1980s. Hippies-era communes failed in large numbers. Diverse countercultural themes and expressions began to coalesce and then transformed into expressions that may be loosely classified as New Age. Strict communalism showed signs of weakening as boomer populations begin to raise families and require a steady income. Stage Three: 1980s, 1990s. Dreams of economic self-sufficiency began to fade as some communal economic systems broke down. Some communities switched to cooperative living arrangements. Socially responsible capitalistic enterprises began to take shape. The ecovillage concept began to take hold. Some older communities put on the ecovillage mantle. Stage Four: 1990s–2000. Ecovillages thrived, and the cohousing movement took shape. Newer arrangements developed with most residents working in the “outside world.” Spirituality became increasingly centered upon ecological/environmental concerns. Stage Five: 2000–Present. Communities develop ecological training centers and other educational programs, including ecotourism. Cohousing becomes a widespread economic model. As baby boom populations age, there is an increasing emphasis on senior citizens, or “aging hippies.” New forms of community, such as elder communities and cul-de-sac communes, take shape. Aging membership presents new challenges to living in community. As intentional communities move further into the 21st century, quite a few have begun to resemble in form and lifestyle the society supposedly left behind. This leads to the question: are those who escape the distress of contemporary life to find utopia in an intentional community creating an alternative to hypermodernity or simply offering a minor variation of the world they supposedly left behind?

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There is no easy answer except that it is a little of both. The nexus upon which the question hangs is the word intentional. The form of the community, its physical shape, its political and economic direction, and its spiritual path are important factors in distinguishing an intentional community from just another suburban neighborhood. But it is the intention of the inhabitants to live in community that is the most critical distinction. If the residents of a cookie-cutter, standard-issue American suburb find novel ways of living in community and are fully committed to that goal, then they have formed an intentional community.

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Chapter 2

Elders of Utopia Neither they suffer anything that is filthy, loathsome, or uncleanly to be brought into the city, lest the air by the stench thereof infected and corrupt, should cause pestilent disease. —Thomas More, Utopia Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? —anonymous

New Harmony is adorned with remnants of and monuments to the past that symbolize the communitarian spirit upon which town was built. One such monument is Paul Tillich Park, where the noted Christian philosophertheologian’s ashes are interred. Tillich’s nontraditional, existential take on religion is fitting here in a town that is most nontraditional in a most traditional way. Near the park is another monument of sorts, a modern monument in the form of an odd creased cone-like structure in an open, walled-off green space. The structure is the centerpiece, or altar, of the space, which is called the Roofless Church, since the altar is the only roof in the space. Designed by architect Phillip Johnson, the postmodern Roofless Church does what postmodern architecture is supposed to do—move into the future by recalling and respecting the past. Within a short walk of the Roofless Church is another kind of monument— a large, flat granite circle. Etched into the circle is a labyrinth. When I visited the labyrinth in the summer of 2008, three or four people were either walking the labyrinth itself or just mediating in the spaces around it. Like Paul Tillich Park, it drew tourists as well as those who believed the sites are sacred ground. Called the Cathedral Labyrinth, it was a replica of one at Chartres Cathedral in

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France according to local tourist pamphlets. Near the edge of town is another labyrinth built of hedges near the site of a labyrinth used for meditation by the Harmony Society, also known as the Harmonists or the Rappites, the first utopian group to build a community at New Harmony. Back toward the Cathedral Labyrinth is a collection of log cabins, the first homes the Harmonists built. They are primitive by the standards of the early 19th century and bear a greater resemblance to structures built by the Plymouth colonists than to other Harmonist houses built only shortly afterward in the same neighborhood. A short walk from the log cabins is the Atheneum—a museum and visitor center. It stands in the starkest contrast to the log cabins. A severe albeit inventive modernist building, the all-white Atheneum is set off from the rest of New Harmony by a long, broad lawn and parking lot. Inside are various displays and photos of New Harmony’s utopian past. Oddly, despite its 20thcentury design, the Atheneum respects the past and one leaves it with the sense that it belongs. Indeed, everything that is modern in New Harmony, which has a population of under 1,000 (2000 U.S. Census), seems to reflect, or at least pay lip service to, the past. New Harmony today, perhaps more than contemporary intentional communities, radiates what the town’s utopian forerunners intended it to be, a community at peace with itself like a fully functional family. In that sense, even though the town’s two early 19th-century utopian experiments eventually failed and even though the current community is not communal, the past resonates. It is evident in the seeming slow pace of life and in the careful preservation of the town’s many 19th-century homes. It is evident in the fact many residents use golf carts in town rather than cars even though there are no nearby golf courses. It is evident in the easy walking trails along the lazy Wabash River.

One Place, Two Directions It is a mild, slightly muggy summer day in 2008, and the golf carts are quietly humming down a shaded street in New Harmony, Indiana. Cars move slowly yielding to the carts. What makes this place, this village, so compelling is its resonance with its history. It was the site of two early experiments in communalism—one strictly religious, one resolutely secular. The impact of the two communities—the first being the Harmonists, the second, the Owenists—was felt well beyond

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the borders of southern Indiana, which at the time was the frontier. And the communities, although relatively short-lived, have lasted in an odd, serendipitous way. Unlike some other North American utopian experiments, such as Brook Farm or the Oneida Community, New Harmony’s two polar opposite utopian communities have not been reduced to historic buildings with museums but remain unseen presences in an active, real place where people live and work in an atmosphere that breathes what it once was. For the sake of full disclosure I should mention that I have lived in New England for most of my life, currently in a coastal Connecticut town near New Haven founded in 1639, complete with an expansive town common and hundreds of buildings dating from the 17th, 18th, and 19th century and still in use. Historic and colonial towns (and struggling cities) are pretty much the rule rather than the exception in New England, which also is rife with recreated history for tourists in places such as Old Sturbridge Village, Plimoth (Plymouth) Plantation, and Olde Mistick Village. By comparison, New Harmony’s 19th-century structures are relatively new. They do not reach into the colonial era. But they are historic, and some are stately; a few are unique, although not many are architectural gems. Yet one is unable to resist being impressed with the hard-to-define undercurrent that flows through the streets like a gentle ghost. Maybe it’s the quiet, perhaps the isolation. Located in southwestern Indiana, New Harmony is bounded by fields and forests and the lower Wabash River. The nearest town of any size is Evansville, about 27 miles away. It feels further. In fact, New Harmony still has the slightly odd flavor of an experiment, from the golf carts to the gourmet restaurant near the town whose owner is young and skilled but uncertain of success. Or maybe it is something else. Perhaps New Harmony still feels as if it were the frontier; beneath the town’s pacific façade, one imagines something dramatic is about to happen. Perhaps the community is waiting for the next wave of idealists and dreamers to move in and propagate a third utopia.

There and Back: The Harmony Society Even though New Harmony’s two utopian communities have disappeared, their distinct visions of sacred space and how to redefine society may be found in the spirit of modern communitarians. The first New Harmony utopians, the Harmonists, were German immigrants and dissenters from Lutheran orthodoxy who first moved in 1803 from the Württemberg region of Germany to rural Pennsylvania. There they built the town of Harmony. Seeking more

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land and better resources, the group moved to the Indiana wilderness in 1814, where they fashioned a new town near the Wabash River (Pitzer & Elliott, 2002, p. 226). It was not the first spiritual community in Indiana Territory. In 1808, Prophetstown was established about two hundred miles north of New Harmony, also on the Wabash, by the Shawnee Tenskwautawaw, known as The Prophet, and his famous brother Tecumseh. For a brief time it was the spiritual and political capital of a new American Indian confederation, at least until it was ravaged by the U.S. military in 1812. New Harmony lasted longer than Prophetstown, but not by much. By 1824, the Harmonists pulled up stakes and moved. But they left a legacy and a few lessons. Like the Shakers before (and after) them, the Harmonists set a standard for communal living. And like the Shakers, the Harmonists were intent upon disposing of European notions of family and substituting an unusual version of male and female monasticism. The Harmonist story begins with George Rapp, known as Father Rapp, who, like members of the Anabaptist sects—such the Zoarites and the Amana colonists, who also moved from Germany to America—believed in disconnecting civil authority and spirituality. Since Rapp’s ideas were criticized by the state Lutheran church in Germany in the late 18th century, he became determined to emigrate from Europe. He had taken up the ministry by this time and had developed a large following attracted in part by his charismatic personality (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, pp. 150–151). Rapp left his native land when he was 46 and landed in Baltimore in 1803. Soon after, he bought 5,000 acres north of Pittsburgh. In 1804, six hundred followers on two separate voyages arrived in the United States and settled in a town they built and called Harmony, or Harmonie. The following year, the Harmony Society was formed. Soon after that the society adopted a communal economic system and a uniform dress code. In 1807, the Harmonists adopted celibacy (Pitzer, 1997). No community ever changed from the married to the celibate state with such ease; husbands and wives continued to live together, with their children, in the houses they had always occupied, but ceased as if by magic from conjugal intercourse. Some members withdrew from the community . . . but for those who remained no precautions were taken, no rules were made; strength of religious conviction was considered to be—and apparently was—sufficient. (Holloway, 1966, p. 90) In a short time the Harmonists were ready to move on, pushed by the need for land with more productive soil. In 1814, with the purchase of

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30,000 acres on the Wabash in Indiana, they did. There, in the second town they built and also called Harmony (later New Harmony), the society prospered and perfected the lifestyle for which it is best known. Their prosperity was based on strategic use of their location. The Harmonists controlled shipping trade along the Wabash River by building the only landing in miles and by buying a strategically located island downstream (Pitzer & Elliott, 2002, p. 253). As more settlers moved into the region, the community became a regional business center, and Harmonist branch stores sold products well beyond the community’s borders (Holloway, 1966, p. 91). In a display of confidence in the community’s economic status, in 1818 Rapp ordered the public burning of a record book containing data on the amount of money each family had contributed to the common fund (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 154). Eventually the Harmonist community suffered setbacks. Among them was a form of malaria that afflicted several villagers. The neighbors, particularly businessmen who resented the community’s success, also proved troublesome. Ultimately this led to a dispute that worked its way up to the Indiana legislature (Indiana became a state in 1816), resulting in the state’s seizure of the commune’s mill. These problems and growing discontent within the community forced Rapp to consider a move back to Pennsylvania (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 155). In 1824, the Harmonists constructed the town of Economy from a parcel of land they purchased in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh and not far from their first settlement. In Pennsylvania, life initially was easier— homes were larger and their industries more productive. There were issues, however, that eventually sapped the community, including the increasing power of George Rapp, disputes over celibacy, and a schism precipitated by the arrival of German immigrant Bernhard Müller. Müller, whose ideas differed from Rapp’s, attracted a following that fractured the community in the 1830s. Although the schism was eventually resolved, membership in the community gradually declined after the death of Rapp in 1847. The Harmony Society lasted in Pennsylvania until the 20th century, not formally dissolving until 1906 (Pitzer, 1997, pp. 83–84).

The Owenists Arrive In 1924, George Rapp, the patriarch of the Harmony Society, sold the Indiana town to Robert Owen, who had been impressed by the Harmonists but had his own concept of communalism. Owen was born in Wales in 1771, but it was in Manchester, England—a hotbed of the Industrial Revolution—that he

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became successful through the manufacture of cotton-spinning machinery. In 1800 he moved to New Lanark, Scotland, where he became a partner in a major cotton-spinning mill. The New Lanark facility and the working conditions there transformed Owen’s view of society. He attempted with little success to improve working conditions through legislation. Eventually Owen concluded that society itself needed reform and that marriage, private property, and the church were stumbling blocks to that reformation. He also thought environment was a key factor in shaping human character. In this regard, the rural nature of New Lanark was appealing even though remaining in Scotland to achieve his ends was not (Carmony & Elliot, 1980, pp. 162–163). The Indiana property Owen purchased from Rapp included all the buildings and surrounding property. Within six weeks of Owen taking over the Indiana village, about eight hundred people had settled in. An immediate issue, however, was finding a direction. Owen left the village for six months soon after arriving in Indiana. When he returned, he recognized the need for more structure and moved to create a constitution. It was crafted to establish a community of equals that accepted anyone and everyone, except “persons of color.” Another disharmony in Owen’s New Harmony was that his community never became truly communal or egalitarian (Carmony & Elliot, 1980, p. 168). The arrival in Indiana of William Maclure, a Scottishborn geologist and educational reformer, also affected the direction of the community. Maclure had been Owen’s partner in the purchase of New Harmony and eventually became his rival. The rivalry eventually divided the community and set in motion one of the factors that led to the eventual end of the social experiment. In addition to Owen’s spats with Maclure, a variety of other factors brought the Owenist community to an end in 1827, but New Harmony’s fame was spread primarily by the presence of the luminaries Owen and Maclure attracted. When Maclure arrived he was accompanied by what became known as the “Boatload of Knowledge,” an assembly of scholars and educators, including noted scientist Thomas Say, who arrived in New Harmony by river (Carmony & Elliot, 1980, p. 170). Although Owen dissolved the community in 1827 and returned to Scotland, some scholars and others stayed on in the town of New Harmony, including five of his children, all of whom played significant roles in state and national politics, science, and education (Carmony & Elliot, 1980, p. 178). New Harmony also was the site of the early headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey, and one of Owen’s sons drafted the bill that created the Smithsonian Institution.

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Common Thread, Uncommon Cloth David Yount (2008, p. 83) suggests that the success or failure of a utopian movement rests on how participants resolve three issues: authority, property, and sexuality. The Harmonists and the Owenists approached all three of these issues quite distinctly. The differences between the religious Harmonists and the resolutely secular Owenists were especially striking considering the historic fact that the second community came into being because of the first. Probably the critical distinction concerns the overarching purpose of each. The earlier community was religious and not unlike the Shakers in their most obvious practice—celibacy. The Owenists were secular. Both the Harmonists and the Owenists urged, and attempted to impose, ideological conformity, as have many sectarian and religious communal experiments prior to the 20th century. In the case of the Owenists, however, conformity was not in the nature of the community of intellectuals Owen brought together. In addition, Owen’s belief in egalitarian communities belied the reality of life in New Harmony, probably because this conviction did not seem to be deeply felt. The Harmonists were a homogenous group, a fact that initially worked in their favor in establishing group identity. But their society was dependent upon the personality of George Rapp, and the long-lived patriarch (he died at 89) failed to set in motion a socioreligious structure that would sustain the community over the long haul, as the Shakers had more successfully accomplished. The Owenists also were too dependent on their founder, especially financially, since Owen’s wealth helped establish the community. Owen also lacked the charismatic appeal of Rapp. In addition, the heterogeneity of community members fostered a lack of cohesion. There was no binding spiritual tradition or ideological structure other than Owen’s nebulous notion of a working utopia based upon his socialist communalism (Holloway, 1966, p. 106). On the other hand, Owen was driven to denounce organized religion, and he and his family and Maclure were noted promoters of scientific endeavors, but a respect for science and an objection to the faith of others were not sufficient devices to keep the social experiment afloat. It is also instructive to reflect on the differences between New Harmony’s two communities and contemporary counterparts who also struggle with questions of social and economic sustainability. There are, of course, critical differences between then and now. Although early communities by their very nature rejected elements of the larger society, some of these communal societies were the result of “economic dislocation or social disorientation” (Sutton, 2004, p. 132). This was particularly true of religious communities,

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such as the Mormons or various Anabaptist or Hassidic movements and, of course, the Harmonists. Like those other religious movements, the Harmonists were for the most part religious refugees whose move to America and then to the frontier carried significantly greater risk than going back to the land did for those of the 1960s–1970s counterculture, who could simply opt out of dropping out and drop back in. Like the counterculture, contemporary communities tend to be populated by those Gardner (1978) calls “children of prosperity,” whose resilience in the face of adversity is probably not as well honed as their spiritual ancestors. In that context, today’s communitarians may have more in common with the well-educated, relatively affluent Owenists than with the Harmonists. Like the Owenist experiment, contemporary communities tend to stress inclusiveness and accept all comers. But unlike the Owenists, who rejected religious or spiritual concerns, many contemporary communities accept residents of various religious beliefs or no religious belief while encouraging nonspecific spirituality and inclusive spiritual practices. This distinction between secular and religious communities is a convenient way of categorizing intentional communities. Indeed, Sutton (2003, 2004) devotes one of his two-volume work on communal utopias to religious communities and the other to those that are secular. The problem with these categories today is that contemporary intentional communities often don’t fit either category as easily as communities of the past. As noted in chapter 1, this may be one of the more salient traits of modern communities, whose members often walk a fine line between the secular and the religious; most modern communities stress memberships that are open to people of all faiths or no faith but encourage spirituality and religiosity in their communal rituals.

The Oneida Extreme Less than three miles from the brick mansion that used to house the Oneida Community is the Oneida Indian Nation. Located in the original homeland of the Oneida tribe, the reservation is prosperous relative to reservations further west. This prosperity shows in a modern housing development and a government building that looks like a spaceship. Hardly anything is left of the Oneida past except for a few artifacts in a small tribal museum. There are few hints of the past in the adornments and design of the tribe’s towering casino, Turning Stone, in a neighboring town. The casino is a modern structure with all the accoutrements of a gaming palace. Except for the museum,

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neither the casino nor the reservation directly references Oneida history as one of the six nations of the powerful Iroquois confederacy that dominated much of the Northeast before the 19th century. In contrast, the nearby 19thcentury Oneida Community mansion looks as if the members of the influential commune were still performing their daily chores or joining for communal functions and rituals in the mansion’s Big Hall. But the Oneida Community is long gone while the Oneida Indian Nation still lives. That is how history works, and perhaps it’s for the better; the Oneida Community was, in a sense, too inflexible in structure and too dependent on its founder to long survive the initial few decades. The Oneida Community Mansion House today is both a hotel with rental apartments and a museum, but it was once the nexus of the community, which had branches in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Vermont. Built in 1862, it replaced an earlier mansion house, or communal home, built in 1849 (Schaefer & Zellner, 2008, p. 52). As one walks through the darkened halls the photos of community members, or Perfectionists, force an evaluation. Probably because photography of the 19th century was primitive and slow, the faces of men, women, and children from an 1866 photo are sober and unsmiling. So are the faces in a drawing of a group of adults in a communal dining area from the same period. And thus the questions arise: Were these people happy? Does it really matter? One does not approach Oneida and the nature of its community without considering two critical factors. The first is the charismatic leadership of John Humphrey Noyes, who, like George Rapp and Robert Owen, was the political and spiritual overseer of the community. The second is the practice for which the Perfectionists of Oneida were best known: their radical notions of family in connection with their unique take on sexual relations. The latter drew attention to the Perfectionists, although perhaps not to the same degree as the practice of polygamy did to the Mormons. A well-educated New Englander, Noyes became a preacher who advocated self-perfection and communalism. His Oneida Community evolved from members of the Noyes family and gradually attracted others. By the end of the 1840s, the Perfectionists were living communally and began experimenting with group or “complex” marriage (Schaefer & Zellner, 2008, p. 59). This meant that the community supervised heterosexual relations that could involve any number of members. “Special love” or emotional attachment between members was discouraged because everyone was considered married to everyone else. Men practiced “coitus reservatus,” or continence, to prevent unwanted childbirth.1 A system of organized childbirths or selective breeding

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was instituted later in the community’s history to increase the number of children (Brumann, 2003, p. 396).2 Perfectionist marriage practices were in part the result of Noyes’s interpretation of the Bible. Noyes claimed that monogamous marriage was an earthly institution that emphasized individual possession of one woman to one man. In other words, it was a selfish act that failed to recognize the spirit of the Pentecost as recorded in the Book of Acts, in which loyalties were oriented toward the community of believers and God. From Noyes’s perspective, group marriage represented the community of believers and, thus, a more perfect state (Foster, 2002, p. 77). The idea of a perfect state—hence the name Perfectionist—came from the belief that Christ had already returned to Earth in 70 ad at the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. As a result, mankind was redeemed to attempt to lead a perfect lifestyle (Smith, 1999, p. 59). In addition to reconstituting the notion of family and marriage, the Perfectionists sought to employ communal economics. Private property and personal wealth were anathema. The community would thrive on shared play and shared work. Like Tennessee’s hippie commune, The Farm, a century later, the Perfectionists were spiritual descendents of early Christian communities, who according to Acts 4:32 eschewed all manifestations of materialism. And like some early Israeli kibbutzim, even clothes and children’s toys were the property of the entire community. Communal economics worked for the Perfectionists, although the first decade was difficult. In time, branch communities in Vermont and New Jersey folded (Schaefer & Zellner, 2008, p. 63). In a kind of irony, Oneida was financially salvaged by a capitalistic enterprise—the sale of traps. This business was the result of Sewell Newhouse, an expert trapper and hunter who had been a member of the community for some time before being cajoled by Noyes into making traps for the open market. The manufacture of traps became a big business that involved all members of the community and eventually included outside workers and an assembly-line factory. Other business ventures followed, including canned goods and silk thread. In 1877, the Perfectionists were turning out silverware, an enterprise that outlived the community (Schaefer & Zellner, 2008, pp. 64–65). Indeed, in one of the great twists in the history of intentional communities, the commune’s name, although not much else, has been preserved by Oneida Limited, a commercial enterprise that conducted business into the 21st century. The Oneida Community, whose population varied between roughly two hundred to three hundred persons, lasted until 1881. It ultimately failed for

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a number of reasons, including internal conflict and the lack of Noyes’s leadership—Noyes had been accused of statutory rape for his involvement in initiating young girls into sexuality and fled to Canada in 1879.3

Fertile Soil for Celibacy The Oneida Community represents a rather sensational episode in the communitarian past, and the two New Harmony communities are a study in contrasting values and practices within the same town. These communities, however, were only three of several that flourished prior to the 20th century. And none could claim the honor of being the most successful. The 19th century was a particularly fertile time for experiments in communal living, but it is not the intention of this book to cover all the important communities of that century. However, it is worth mentioning others that left a mark on future generations of communitarians. The Shakers have been mentioned a few times in comparison with other communities, but a recitation of their long history is also beyond the scope of this volume and has been covered extensively elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that at least in North America, the Shakers set the standard for other communities for several reasons: their longevity in the face of what would seem on the surface to be a self-destructive survival strategy; their remarkable system of work and the products of that work; their steadfast commitment to their system of rituals, values, and beliefs; and their insistence on the equality of the sexes. The Shakers and their unique character proved an inspiration to the Harmonists, the Owenists, and the Oneida Perfectionists. Today, there is only one active Shaker community left—the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village of New Gloucester, Maine, one of the least consequential of the sect’s communities. As of February 2009 there were only five members of the community remaining at the village. Other Shaker communities, such as Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires of Massachusetts or New Hampshire’s Canterbury Shaker Village, are popular museums that feature striking examples of Shaker ingenuity and architecture. Shaker furniture fetches high prices at auction and examples are featured in art museums. But by the time this is read, the Shakers may be history. But it is quite a history. The Shaker narrative begins in Manchester, England, in 1747, but the United Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing took shape when Ann Lee joined the community in 1758. Before she joined, Lee lost four children, which she thought was a punishment from God for her sexual desires. As the leader of the Shakers—called Mother Ann by her followers—she set out

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to purify, or perfect, society by advocating celibacy. After a vision, Lee moved her tiny group (there were only nine) to America in 1774, where the transition to celibacy took hold after considerable effort. The name Shaker stuck because of the group’s enthusiastic gyrating dancing (see chapter 4), which was intended to compensate for sexual desires (Smith, 1999, pp. 50–51). As a survival strategy, celibacy had obvious disadvantages. So the Shakers created a form of non-kin family in which all adults were brothers and sisters and therefore had to disconnect from their natural families. Shaker communities were divided into families of about one hundred members. “What was once the nuclear family became the communal family, [Shaker] communities were viewed as homes, Mother Ann was the parent and the brothers and sisters were her children. . . . Each family was headed by two elders and two eldresses, deacons and deaconesses, and trustees” (Smith, 1999, pp. 53–54). Shaker brothers and sisters lived separately and contact between them was limited. Mother Lee was considered the second and the female incarnation of God (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 105). Given the Shaker commitment to the celibate separation of male and female it is remarkable the group survived so long, but by the mid-19th century the group claimed more than 3,800 members in 18 communities (Pitzer, 1997, p. 37). The Shakers, it seems, were strikingly successful at recruiting members, including taking in and raising orphaned children. Shaker communities, however, began to decline in the late 19th century and more rapidly in the 20th century. The reasons are manifold, including an increasingly secular and industrialized larger society and internal divisions over ideology.

What Can Go Wrong, Will . . . The success of Shaker communalism is belied by the reality that most utopian communities both past and present did not last long. The success of communal experiments is in part dependent upon the ability of members to negotiate the netherworld of liminality. To reiterate, Turner (1969) defined liminality (see chapter 1) as the state of being betwixt and between worlds—between, for example, civilization and the wilderness. Liminality is a state in which the normal constraints of society are temporarily suspended. When an entire community exists in a liminal state, new rules must be conjured to create order. In other words, liminality permits the freedom to reshape the future using new structuring tools. For some, the challenge of handling freedom and creating structure is too daunting.

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Of course, the dividing line between failure and success is not clear. Longevity is one criterion. The impact of the community on other communities is another. The number of members yet one more. By these standards, the Shakers are one of the most successful communal movements in North America. The Owenists, on the other hand, did not last long, but they attracted a sizable number of adherents and were influential. Does that make the community a modest success or a modest failure? In terms of influence, one cannot dismiss the impact intentional communities of the 19th century had upon American society. Communities such as the Shakers, New Harmony, and Oneida’s Perfectionists were involved in the antislavery movement, and both New Harmony’s Owenists and Brook Farm members in Massachusetts helped revolutionize education. In addition, most of the groups in this chapter offered a more liberal view of the roles of women (Holloway, 1966, p. 179). Although success and failure may be difficult to assess and are probably not the best perspectives on communal movements, some failures are worth briefly noting because they at least qualified as influential. One of these, the aforementioned Brook Farm, stands out as both a failure in terms of longevity and a success in terms of influence. And Brook Farm is worth mentioning if for no better reason than the famous personages attached to the experiment. Brook Farm was the brainchild of George Ripley, a Unitarian minister in West Roxbury near Boston. Ripley had visited Shaker communities and New Harmony, but philosophically he was a transcendentalist like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the godfather of the movement. Ripley also was intrigued by the ideas of Charles Fournier, a Frenchman who was repelled by the insidiousness of competitive societies. In place of the social order of the day, Fournier envisioned small self-sustaining communes called “phalanxes” spread throughout the world (Pitzer, 1997, pp. 159–160). When Fournier’s ideas spread to the United States, Ripley eventually became a proponent. But first, in 1841, Ripley set in motion a community of intellectuals inspired by transcendental ideas by purchasing two hundred acres of land complete with farmhouse. The community he built grew from 20 to 115 members. Among notables attached to Brook Farm were Nathaniel Hawthorne and journalist Charles A. Dana. Emerson called Brook Farm “a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a pattypan” (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 134). Two years into Brook Farm’s operation, Ripley introduced Fournierist principles. But Fournier believed his phalanxes could only function properly with a population of 1,600, and Brook Farm worked more efficiently with

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smaller numbers (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 135). Within a short time, the community faced other problems, including an outbreak of a variety of smallpox and the inability of the community to remain financially self-sustaining. The final straw was a fire in 1846 that destroyed much of the community. At that point, the Brook Farm experiment ceased (Renfro-Sargent, 2002, p. 89). Since the history of modern (after the Second World War) intentional communities has yet to fully unfold, it is especially hard to pinpoint the most successful contemporary community. In terms of size, impact, and longevity, the Israeli kibbutz movement arguably ranks high, but communities such as Scotland’s Findhorn, the subject of the next section, have been among the most influential in terms of the mainstream intentional community movement.

Frontiers, Families, Communities The United States—and, to an extent, Canada—has provided the fertile soil for many communities resulting from large-scale religious movements, such as the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Hutterites. Mormons and Hassidim are familiar, while Shaker communities set the standard for several generations of intentional communities. But North America also gave birth to the Icarians, Zoarites, Jansonists, Amanites, the Ferrer Colony, and many other lesser-known utopian movements both religious and secular. The reasons have to do with the availability of natural resources; the political structures of Europe, the nature of colonial settlement, and the freedom to slip between the cracks of societies in the making. New Harmony’s two communities symbolized two distinct themes, or forces, in American history that created the conditions under which utopianism thrived. The first is the Myth of the Frontier, which Richard Slotkin calls America’s oldest and most enduring myth, and one that is expressed in literature, film, politics, and the news. He elaborates: The original task of the Myth was to explain and justify the establishment of the American colonies, but as the colonies expanded and developed, the Myth was called upon to account for our rapid economic growth, our emergence as a powerful nation-state, and our distinctly American approach to the socially and culturally disruptive processes of modernization. (1998, p. 10)

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The mythic narrative goes something like this: out there, beyond civilization—which means the world of the white European—there is a savage land, a wilderness, that must be tamed and settled in order to bring the civilization and the light of progress to the indigenous primitives who inhabit the great and bounteous wild places. An adjunct to the myth is the notion of the frontier hero, a liminal person who leads the civilized into the world of the savage. The frontier hero is able to do this because he is able to negotiate the worlds of both the savage and the civilized. The frontier hero, in other words, knows both worlds and exists betwixt and between them. The frontier myth does not center on Little House on the Prairie family life but on the individualist, who is the often rugged, sometimes troubled antithesis of the family man or woman. He is Daniel Boone and the fictional Natty Bumppo of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. He is Buffalo Bill and the hero of a thousand dime novels. He is the semifictional Eliot Ness and most of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. He is Indiana Jones and the many roles of Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson. They are Thelma and Louise and the heroes of pulp fiction and comic books. They are usually men—and more recently women—who are single, separated, divorced, widowed, or simply confused. The Myth of the Frontier has both positive and negative attributes. On the one hand, the myth offers the hope of new beginnings. On the other hand, it fed the malignant late 19th-century notion of manifest destiny, which metastasized into the Spanish-American War and many of American’s 20thand 21st-century military adventures. Of course, the myth fosters the notion that there actually was a wilderness to tame, that indigenous peoples were savage, and that progress was always for the best. Actual, not imagined, history has shown otherwise; it has shown that the hundreds of distinct nations of indigenous of North and South Americans had highly developed civilizations, built cities that rivaled those of Europe—including pre-Columbian cities in what is now the United States—and lived lives in some respect less savage that those of Europeans. Despite history, the myth romanticized the American frontier by depicting the wilderness as a challenge and an opportunity. For the utopians of the 18th and 19th century, the frontier was an opportunity to bring a version of civilization to the wilderness while escaping the forces mounted against them in the larger society. Thus, the wilderness offered a refuge and a chance to build a New Jerusalem. It is one of those ironies of history that some of those early American communities, with their pacifist sensitivities and egalitarian ideals, were built on the bones of the

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so-called primitives who were the victims of a mythology that drew settlers to the continent in the first place.

Recreating Family The second theme and related reason for North America’s fertile utopian soil is the notion of the loosening of traditional family ties, which runs as an undercurrent through American history. This notion is an adjunct to, and a mirror image of, the Myth of the Frontier. In a sense, the impetuousness of the frontier requires a counterbalance, which is the re-creation and transformation of family apart from European models. In other words, the settlement of North America meant for many the dissolution of family life. With that came the need to create new forms of family, which the communitarians accomplished. Rootlessness rather than family became the colonial pattern. And no race or ethnic group was immune to the fundamental family-negative shaping of American life. Even among the founding fathers, the family has a spotty record. Washington had no children of his own and married a widower. Jefferson was not a family man in the way we would like him to be. And Franklin was a consummate philanderer. Indeed, much of American history is a chronicle of the deterioration of white, African, and Native American families. The westward expansion of white Europeans initially meant families had to be left behind. For African Americans it was infinitely worse. And, of course, slavery meant the destruction of family life was institutionally situated. For Native Americans, the coming of Europeans meant the end of their varied cultures—through disease and through conquest and ultimately through identity-robbing government policies. In the context of colonialism and the postcolonial period, early intentional communities served an important function—the reinterpretation and reconstitution of the notion of family in a context adapted to the so-called frontier. Without the bondage of European societies, family could take on novel meanings, and so the Shakers defined family as single males and females living in separate quarters but with a common sense of mission. And the Oneida Colony defined family as plural marriage with shared children. These new definitions of family were based upon a major revision of the earliest form of family—specifically, the extended family, not the modern Western nuclear family. The extended family was the human pattern from our distant human ancestors’ first tenuous treks out of Africa hundreds of millennia ago until comparatively recently. In fact, the extended family, unlike

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the nuclear family, is fairly stable. It does not dissolve because of the death of a spouse or divorce. Kin fill the gap. The nuclear family, a fairly modern innovation, simply does not work very well. Even the New Testament suggests that family as we currently define it was not firmly embedded in emerging Christianity. St. Paul suggests that family life is the lesser of two options for those who would preach the Gospel. And Jesus (Matthew 12:46–50; Mark 3:31–35; Luke 8:19–21) exhorts his disciples to redefine family in terms of the community of believers. But the definition of family as community rather than blood kin has established itself only tenuously in modern life and not without controversy. In the late 20th century, debates raged in American political and social rhetoric over what constituted family values. During those debates, news stories and talk show chatter all too often failed to question definitions of family. Specious labels, such as “traditional family,” were routinely used, and the premises upon which the terms were based went unchallenged. A deeper public discussion of what constituted the contemporary family was often ignored. Unfortunately, the debate over family was consistently reduced to a few hot-button issues; thus, family became simply coding for a set of meanings and positions that may have little to do with the realities of family life. Early utopian communities tacitly acknowledged that there were no easy definitions of family. Therefore, family could be whatever the new community decided it would be. And, perhaps, in a place where the nuclear family was weak and the extended family never took firm root, their experiments were a bold attempt to nostalgically establish the essence of family in another form—that of community. And it is no stretch to suggest that the communal experiments of early Americans and their spiritual descendents today are about as close as we have come so far to that definition. In a hypermodern context, this redefining of family as community may come to mean recognizing that many of the support functions of the extended family are being filled, sometimes inadequately, by a variety of other venues: the workplace, the religious association, the charity group, the coffee house, the yoga class, the book club, the therapy group, and the contemporary intentional community. In particular, the various forms of modern communalism, like their spiritual ancestors, have developed interesting variations on the family theme. The kibbutzniks defined family as all members of the kibbutz, and the counterculture, like the early communitarians, defined family as a community of like-minded individuals or, as some put it, the tribe. Today, communitarians have reconstituted families, or the tribe, as ecovillagers or members of a cohousing community. This does not mean the nuclear family has disappeared

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from contemporary communities. Rather, it means that nuclear families may thrive within the context of a larger non-kin family. Communal membership in such cases enhances the kin-based nuclear family by introducing a broader vision of sharing (Smith, 1999, pp. 128–129). For contemporary communitarians the new family structures mean distancing themselves to a greater or lesser degree from hypermodernity. Thus, new communities usually grow in isolated places, often rural North America, which is the modern equivalent of “the frontier.”

The Fate of Progress An assumption inherent in the Myth of the Frontier is the idea of progress. Like the frontier hero, communitarians are suspended between the past and the present. The hypermodern world defines progress as material advancement or technological change or economic growth. Progress today usually means growth, which, as Cohen (2008, p. 215) suggests, “comes from a false sense of how humankind has ‘progressed.’ ” Cohen (p. 215) continues: We have a profound belief in “progress” . . . even though we don’t actually pay much attention to how we measure it. Our faith results partly from the fact that we usually recite only the history of the privileged classes and technological advances rather than exploring the realities of life faced by common people. Changes in the structure of cultures and societies through historic and prehistoric time have led, through competition, toward bigger political units and the accumulation of material goods. But bigger political units and more goods have not always been successful in improving human lives. Just as past and present communitarians have redefined family, they are redefining progress as rooted in the appreciation of the elements of past that can be useful to the present and future. This attitude is often expressed in the acquisition of indigenous, or tribal, knowledge. This involves returning to traditional—or at least the perception of traditional—practices such as midwifery or alternative medicine. This alternative notion of progress is also expressed in an abiding concern with the environment, which has become an ideological mainstay of contemporary communitarians. The logic goes something like this: if human activity—pollution, for example—has caused the planet to de-evolve, then progress has to be made to reverse the process.

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In this scenario, living sustainable lives and leaving a low carbon footprint are equated with progress by stopping the processes of planetary de-evolution. This means scaling down to human size the functions of community institutions. And it means encouraging human-friendly, compassionate workplaces and redesigning and human-scaling neighborhoods so they meet the real emotional and communal needs of people. Key to these processes is the understanding that building community can be formidable in complex, pluralistic, and diverse societies. The alternative may be the increasingly detached lifestyles of hypermodernism. In the United States this is particularly true for suburbanites, who have become gradually and painfully aware that their suburbs, consisting of single houses on large isolating plots of land, are designed just for commuting, not communing. For communitarians, a compromise strategy between the pure communalism of early communities such as the Shakers or the Harmony Society can be found in the cohousing movement, which is discussed further in chapter 5. Cohousing is an emergent model of settlement in which separate households, usually on a common parcel of land, share certain resources and communal activities. Cohousing communities are defined by the common house, where meals are shared—sometimes daily, sometimes weekly—and ceremonies marking key events or rituals are enacted. Shared resources may involve the basics, such as laundry and common backyards or community gardens. Some surviving communes of the countercultural era have converted to the cohousing model, either because it made economic sense or because community members felt the model better fit the changes in their lives. Contemporary communalism has a long and diverse bloodline, and the Myth of the Frontier, with its mixed message of progress and the quest for family, courses through it. New Harmony is part of it, but the broad outlines of the modern commune can be found in the dawn of humanity, in our common ancestors who walked upright in the East African savannah for hundreds of millennia. It was manifested in various places and cultures, especially in monastic movements or early religious sects such as the Essenes, an ancient Jewish group.

The Frontier, European Style The history of communalism runs too deep to cover in this volume, so this chapter has focused so far on movements of the last two centuries that had an impact on contemporary forms. The two Indiana communities, the Oneida Colony, and Brook Farm were 19th-century phenomena. The remainder of the

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chapter is devoted to one other community whose structure, practices, and beliefs helped shaped contemporary communalism. The Findhorn community began in 1962 as a commune, predating the communes of the counterculture. The hippie era marked the beginning of the contemporary communitarian movement, but Findhorn is arguably the most influential still-functioning community in the intentional movement. It is mentioned widely in communitarian networks, and it has been at the forefront of both the ecovillage movement and the propagation of New Age beliefs. As such, it is included as one of the elders of modern communalism. Findhorn is located in the Scottish Highlands, but it draws its residents and visitors from around the world. In important ways, Findhorn (also the Findhorn Foundation) is a forerunner of the modern intentional community. Called the prototype of the modern New Age community by the British press, Findhorn’s community and ecovillage evolved from a small group of people interested in alternative spirituality and organic gardening who settled in northern Scotland in the 1960s (McCarthy, 2001). Findhorn’s influence can be broadly felt—for example, in the founding of the Sirius Community and Lothlorien, a small commune in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Findhorn also has become a mecca of sorts for celebrities from self-help guru Eckhart Tolle to Patch Adams to anthropologist Jane Goodall. Additionally, Findhorn is a pioneer of the ecovillage movement (Christian, 2007, p. 29).

Into the Public House My wife Lucille and I walked into the pub in what appeared to be a small fishing village in the Scottish Highlands and found a seat near a window looking out on Findhorn Bay. It was old-school charming, a Kodachrome image of another time. It was the night before our weeklong experience at the nearby Findhorn community, a New Age–style enclave about a mile up the bay from the fishing village known as Findhorn, which is about 30 miles northeast of Inverness. As I gazed out the window, it struck me that most of the boats in the bay were not for fishing. In fact, most of the boats appeared to be pleasure craft, and as far as I could tell there were no fishing boats in sight despite the late hour. On further inspection of Findhorn Bay, which leads to Moray Firth, I did see a sailing school and a number of sloops of various sizes. Inside the pub, I dined on the best cod fish and chips I have had in decades while speaking with an English couple who had moved to Findhorn because of its unique location. The husband was familiar with the area because of his

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service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), which was quartered nearby at the Kinloss air base. The base is east of the village and adjacent to the Findhorn community. The intentional community and the village are within walking distance of each other. It is not just its proximity to the RAF base and to the Findhorn community, however, that makes the one-time fishing village and the surrounding area unique. It is also the climate—or, more specifically, a microclimate than is drier and sunnier than most of the rest of Scotland. The microclimate is what drew the RAF to the area and vacationers to the village. It also may account for the Findhorn community’s success in gardening and farming. On the other hand, the village of Findhorn and the Findhorn community are located on a rather precarious spit of real estate jutting out into Moray Firth. The quaint town is subject to flooding; it was a flood that devastated the first village of Findhorn when a river changed course three centuries ago. And as one Findhorn community member told me, the RAF base would be a prime target in a nuclear war. But despite this, the three founders of Findhorn, Eileen and Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, believed they had been divinely led to the site.

Stopping at the Park The Findhorn community itself is divided into two parts: The Park, which is near the village, and Cluny Hill College, or just Cluny Hill, a refurbished mansion that was once a hotel located in the nearby town of Forres. The Park is the site of the original community as founded by three people in 1962. Eileen and Peter Caddy have been described as typically middle-class British, although their lives could not be classified as anything but atypical. The Caddys have since died—Peter in 1994 and Eileen in 2006—but in the summer of 2009, word spread through the community that Dorothy Maclean, who had been living in the United States for many years, would return to Findhorn to live out her life. Maclean, a Canadian, was 89 at the time of our visit. The story of how the trio formed the community, like most creation myths, is replete with variations within a central narrative. That narrative still drives much of the so-called spirit of Findhorn. One element seems to be universal. All three founders were very different from each other. Peter Caddy has been described as a “practical man,” athletic, with an “incisive mind” (Bogliolo & Newfield, 2002, p. 21). Caddy’s life changed through the influence of his second wife, who trained him in spirituality for a numbers

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of years (Walker, 1994, p. 40). While serving in the RAF, Caddy, whose duties were catering, met Eileen Combe, who was married to an RAF officer and had five children. After getting to know the Combes family, Caddy was said to have had a vision of Eileen as his “other half” (Bogliolo & Newfield, 2002, p. 21). Eileen Combe eventually left her husband and children for Caddy, and she became his new spiritual guide. The Caddys, who eventually had three children of their own, settled in a caravan, or trailer/camper, in the area now known as simply The Park during a time in 1962 when Peter was unemployed. Previously he had worked in the hotel business, at one point successfully managing the hotel that would become Findhorn’s Cluny Hill. Maclean soon joined them. On the land that would be called The Park, they began an organic garden, aided, Maclean believed, by spirits in nature: “Although unclear as to what it would mean cooperation with the spirits of Nature was an acceptable idea, since to me cooperation was and is the way to relate.” Maclean says her “attunement” to the vegetables in their garden was instrumental in their horticultural success (1994, p. 48). All three were caught up in various levels of Western and Eastern mysticism. Maclean was influenced by Sufi mysticism. Christian mysticism ran like a river through the Caddys’s spiritual landscape. Eileen Caddy was said to receive messages from God that guided her and the others. The kaleidoscopic spirituality the founders brought with them nurtured those who shortly gathered around them. As their garden grew so did a crop of newcomers, among them Ogilvie Crombie, or Roc, who shared an interest in nature spirits and the occult. By the end of the decade the community was thriving and had gained about two hundred residential guests (Walker, 1994, pp. 54–57). In 1970, the arrival of David Spangler marked a significant turning point for Findhorn. With Spangler, the community’s focus shifted from gardening to education. Spangler, a seminal figure in the infant New Age movement, helped shape the community into something resembling its present form. Although Spangler is credited with transforming Findhorn into a New Age center, the Caddys’s and Maclean’s spiritual excursions also contained elements of New Ageism, although the movement lacks a fixed point of philosophical reference. Long-time member Craig Gibsone has referred to his community as the “Vatican of the New Age,” a claim difficult to either disprove or certify since the New Age movement has been ill-defined, a collection of various syncretic beliefs, practices, music, and publications. In effect, the New Age phenomenon, which flowered in the 1970 and 1980s but has been more or less mainstreamed in the 21st century, is more of a stew of beliefs and practices drawn from a variety of religious traditions. Perhaps

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even more to the point, New Age is more a network of similar alternative spiritual interests than a centered movement (see chapter 5). Nevertheless, Spangler’s New Ageism became a template for other communities. As Spangler wrote of what makes Findhorn a New Age hub: It is the fact that esoterically it has a connection with an overlighting spirit—which itself might be thought of as an angel—that embodies the inner qualities of creativity that are destined to unfold in humanity as it moves through its next stages of spiritual and cultural evolution. (1994, p. 29) In 1972, the Findhorn Foundation was created to give structure and order to the community. The umbrella organization is responsible for the governance of the two community locations. Around this time, counterculture members began to arrive at the community. Gibsone said the Caddys and Maclean were in many ways still proper English folk, and the counterculture did not particularly appeal to them, but they supported the expressions of the hippie era nevertheless. By the end of the 1970s, however, Peter Caddy had left, and the community’s finances were in dire straits.4 In the 1980s, collective enterprises were being privatized, and a rise in individual interests marked a corresponding decline in communalism. According to Gibsone, the idea of retooling the community into an ecovillage originated as a survival strategy during this time, although elements of ecovillage concepts, such as organic gardening, were evident in the gardening techniques of the founders. Be that as it may, by the 1990s the ecovillage concept had taken hold. In 1995, Findhorn sponsored a conference on ecovillages and sustainable communities that drew three hundred participants, and in the following year at a U.N. Human Settlements Programme conference the Global Ecovillage Network was launched (Dawson, 2006, p. 19). In the 2000s, the current pattern of educational programs and individual enterprises emerged.

Pinning It Down Findhorn is a floating community. Its population, for example, is hard to pin down. Findhorn’s Web site claims about 320 people and 30 organizations as “part of the Findhorn Foundation community association.”5 The operative words are Foundation and association, because some who live at The Park and Cluny Hill are associated with Findhorn and some are not

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resident but are either dependent upon or associated with the Foundation, which overseers the community economy and the various education and outreach programs at The Park and Cluny Hill as well as a variety of other activities. About 70 people are said to be directly dependent upon the Foundation, and another 70 are partly dependent upon it. Others may be associated with the Foundation but not dependent upon it for a living. There are said to be about 35–40 people who are in some decision-making role at the Foundation. Mari Hollander, focaliser of Findhorn College, explained the complicated social and economic structure of Findhorn thusly: “Findhorn is chaotic order within chaos, an ecosystem that gets increasingly complex with time.” When inquiring about the composition and population of Findhorn, I received different answers and different numbers, in part because there is a rather high level of transience as well as different levels of belonging to the community. Estimating the population is difficult because everyone cites a different figure. One figure frequently cited is that there are about four to six hundred people associated with Findhorn in the area, but that number may include people who may have participated in one of the community’s programs or who sense a kinship because they occasionally attend a dance performance. Several sources noted that the average stay at Findhorn is four years, which tends to coincide with figures I have heard at other communities. Another way of thinking about the community is as a gateway, a gatekeeper of ideas within the intentional movement.

A Week in Someone’s Utopia The following is an account of an Eco-Experience Week at the Findhorn community that my wife, Lucille, and I joined in mid-July 2009. Experience Weeks are Findhorn’s entry-level education/work program. Other programs involve longer stays in the community, some up to three months; some programs lead to a permanent or semipermanent residency. We were joined by 19 others who had signed up for various reasons, such as spiritual awakening and learning about sustainable living. Experience Week participants were from Germany, the United States, Southern England, France, Spain, Denmark, Finland, and Hungary. None were native to Scotland. Representing Findhorn were two group or activity leaders, known within the community as focalisers. Both focalisers, Craig Gibsone and Helen O’Brien, were originally from Australia, the latter from the state of Tasmania. Experience weeks and other short-term stay programs serve more than one purpose:

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they provide income for the community; they help spread Findhorn’s messages; and they offer an entry point for the occasional participant who wants to stay on and potentially join the community. The Day Before: After the meal in the pub in the village of Findhorn, we returned to a room we had taken for the night at a local bed and breakfast. The owner, Violet (not her real name), said she was once part of the nearby Findhorn community and still considers herself associated with it. Our host also tells us she is English, not Scottish, as she offers us a variety of traditional and herbal teas. She regales us with stories of her visits to other communities, such as India’s Auroville and Italy’s Damanhur. Violet notes that she was troubled by the Italian community, also known as the Federation of Damanhur, and considers it somewhat cult-like. Since I have known others who have been to Damanhur who have expressed more positive views, I withhold comment. Day 1: We arrive at The Park—the closest Findhorn location to the village—after a vegan breakfast at Violet’s place. The Park is somewhat of a disappointment because of the caravan (or trailer/camper) park that sprawls to our right as we drive through the main gate. But the caravans in Findhorn Bay Holiday Park are an apt symbol of Findhorn’s narrative arc. The caravans are the alpha and omega of Findhorn. It was in a caravan at The Park that the Caddys’s vision began. I am reminded of The Farm, which we visited the year before, and its original settlers, who parked in school buses in the fields and woods of Tennessee (see chapter 3). Today the Holiday Park is one of several enterprises grouped under an organization called New Findhorn Directions, which, in turn, is a subsidiary of the Findhorn Foundation. After Lucille and I register and after a vegetarian lunch, we are given time to rest in a sod-covered guesthouse with some of the other participants. In the afternoon, the group meets in the community room, which is the second floor of a round building that from a certain angle looks like a flying saucer and from another appears to be a grain silo. Be that as it may, it is an appropriate space for the circle thing—that universal, tribal method of seating found in every culture as a means of expressing egalitarianism. So is holding hands while in a circle, an elementary human ritual that the Findhorn community readily employs. This session is intended to bind the group in a harmonious unit, so the first order of business is introductions, which is followed by attempts to elicit feelings from group members. This coaxing of feelings will become a reoccurring theme throughout the week, as is meditation. Together these basic activities are part of the community’s process of attunement.

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Day 2: It is Sunday, the day the group visits Cluny Hill. After breakfast at our living quarters we pile into two small shuttle vans for the 10-minute run to Findhorn’s other site. The route takes us through the village of Forres, which is imbued with Scottish charm and signs of affluence. Shortly the road rises before us as we ascend a small hill. At the top is what appears to be a mansion. This is Cluny Hill, the decaying hotel Peter Caddy bought and refurbished. Inside, the high ceiling and elegant furnishings hint of a more dignified age. The contrast with The Park is remarkable. Whereas The Park can be said to possess a funky charm, Cluny Hill reeks of fashionable selfpossession. The residents here also seem to move at a slower pace, and they appear to be older, although Cluny Hill is not age restricted. It is no doubt the effect of the building working on me. The first order of business is called Sacred Dance. For this activity, the group assembles in a modest ballroom and we are introduced to the focaliser for the event, a dance instructor. So we toss off our shoes, join a circle, and kick back literally and figuratively. For the next hour and a half or so, we are taught a variety of relatively simple group dance steps cribbed from various traditions and cultures. Like most of the group activities over the next few days, the dance is an exercise in group solidarity, and it appeared to be working. Dance came to Findhorn in the early 1970s, and there was a dance festival every summer. A key factor in the community’s cultural life, dance provides a meaningful connection to indigenous lifestyles. A Sunday brunch follows in a large dining room with high ceilings and tall windows looking out over fields that stretch out like a carpet from the hilltop upon which the former grand hotel sits. Several communal tables are occupied by residents and guests of Cluny Hill, and the lack of children confirms my first impression of an older population. Afterward, we remove to the Sanctuary on an upper floor. Shedding our bags, shoes, and other accoutrements in an antechamber, we enter the small room as if it is church, which it is in a New Age fashion. Each morning the sanctuary is used for directed meditation, which some residents and guests attend as an option before beginning work details. Similar meditation periods are held each morning at The Park. Our purpose this day is an exercise that relates to the spirit of Eileen Caddy’s Christian mysticism. Each member of the group picks an “angel card” from an arrangement on a table in the center of a circle. On each card is printed a word representing a character trait, such as tolerance, loving, reverence. Then each person in turn is asked to consider working on that word and then is asked for their comments on the character trait.

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After the Sanctuary we return to The Park and gather for a tour of the separate enclaves within the compound. This includes The Field of Dreams, a subdivision within the community with a few dozen single-family privately owned houses. Findhorn owns nearby property and services the individually owned properties. The houses are impressive, relatively high-end, and incongruous in this setting; the rest of the park feels more organic, as though the much more modest dwellings sprung up by happenstance. But here in The Field of Dreams are homes that would not be out of place in an affluent American suburb. I was told there is controversy within the Findhorn community over the Field of Dreams, centering on the project’s overall place in the community and how communal it is. Beyond the Field are several modern windmills, the large white behemoths that seem to sprout by the thousands in California. Later in the afternoon we gather in another Sanctuary for what our focalisers call the Work Department Attunement. This was the tough-sell part of the day. The group is reminded of a phrase credited to Peter Caddy: “Work is love in action.” The phrase will be repeated at other times in the upcoming week. We are shown a list of work details that will occupy our mornings for four of the next five days. They are menial tasks, such as room preparation and maid service at Cluny Hill, kitchen duty at both venues, and community gardening. As the details are assigned in a kind of musical chairs game, emotions run high. One member is assigned the duty that she least wanted. Another member of our group offers to exchange her more desirable duty with her. The first woman turns down the offer, saying she prefers to abide by what was assigned. The group bonding appears to be working. That evening the focalisers offer up a history of Findhorn that pretty much follows Findhorn’s literature and lore. Day 3: Work details begin. Lucille and I are assigned to Cluny Hill. I am in the kitchen, assigned to help prepare lunch along with two other members of our group. We work under a focaliser who lives at Cluny Hill. We begin the work period with an attunement, nicknamed “tuning in,” which includes a period of meditation followed by an elicitation of feelings about how we see the day to come. After a few hours of washing dishes, pots, and pans and preparing salad vegetables, we tune out, which repeats the process of tuning in. Then we join the rest of our group for a vegetarian buffet lunch. Back at The Park in the community room, Greg and Helen organize a series of “discovery games” aimed at further breaking down group inhibitions. The games are mostly physical, almost like elementary school activities but upgraded for adults. Some are forms of group dancing. Others involve

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massaging another member of the group—clothed, of course. Then there are “blind” games, involving massaging hands or necks without knowing who is administering or who is receiving. For some this is uncomfortable, but most seem to accept the games. That night, we return to the upper room of the community center, where we attend a question-and-answer session on Findhorn by Mari Hollander of Findhorn College. She outlines the structure and organization of the community and comments on aspects of its history. She observes that visitors are a principal component of Findhorn’s lifestyle and an economic prop but that by the end of the summer the resident population begins to tire of the level of activity that visitors bring. Day 4: After breakfast in The Park, we resume our work detail at Cluny Hill, after which we return to The Park for an outing in a nearby forest. Our focalisers gather us under a large tree they imply is a sacred space, and we meditate. Then we all disappear off into a collection of trails that follow a ledge above a set of rapids. Some of the trees are near redwood size in girth, but soon the rain begins. The group eventually returns to the sacred tree wet and muddy. In the evening, we are seated on logs in a half underground pit room covered with a tarp. Craig, Australian though not Aboriginal, is playing a didgeridoo, and the deep moaning sounds are hypnotic. Other simple instruments, such as hand drums and rhythm sticks, are passed around our group, all of whom are huddled around a fire pit Craig has lit. The beats are vague, facsimiles of Eastern and Western traditions. The songs we sing are uncomplicated. Afterward, Craig sets a talking stick near the fire and asks any who are willing to, as usual, express their feelings. Most do in hushed and/or emotional tones. The Earth Lodge originated in the 1970s during Findhorn’s hippie period, and the pit evokes that era, with a touch of the New Age. The whole event is typical Findhorn with its mix of mysticism and pop psychology. In the end, though, the group leaves exuding positive feelings. Day 5: It is midweek, and our work detail of the morning is a bit different and requires more sweat. We are brought to a sloping field used by the community. Not all, but many of the vegetables used at Cluny Hill are grown here. Today we will be weeding an onion field. As we work, a middle-aged Findhorn man wields a small plow pulled by a large, well-muscled workhorse. The man is shirtless but wears a pair of full-length suspendered farmer’s jeans. The scene evokes an earlier preindustrial time, just as Cluny Hill recalls an earlier century. And so it is with Findhorn: the past is ever in the present.

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In the afternoon, the group is introduced to permaculture with a visit to Craig’s modest “barrel” house. Craig’s place is one of several houses in a section of The Park dotted with houses that resemble giant whiskey vats. Craig takes us to the back of his house to explain how his permaculture garden works. Permaculture is the latest buzzword in intentional living and is widely practiced. Essentially, it is a method of integrating gardening or agriculture with human settlements that stresses the natural interaction of each. A permaculture garden is supposed to spring up naturally with weeds, garden plants, and farm animals, such as chickens, all functioning as one unit. Accordingly, Craig’s garden appears to be an overgrown weedy mess, but it apparently works. Later, Lucille and I have a little free time and we walk to the Universal Hall, where there are performances on occasion and a café. Nearby is a hot tub out in the open. A woman is bathing nude. A bit embarrassed to be intruding, we walk in a different direction, although she ventures a friendly wave. In the evening, the group is free—no talks, no feelings to express—and so we drift down to the beach while the light of late summer still shines strong. It is a 15-minute walk from Findhorn through both woods and sands dunes that rise 15 to 20 feet high. Once there, wine and cheese are broken out and the group indulges, though sparingly. The view is impressive, with highland cliffs in the distance and waves lapping the stony shore. The beach winds around a sandy point from Moray Firth into tiny Findhorn Bay. Day 6: On the sixth day, the members of the Eco-Experience Week group are back at their regular work duty posts in the morning. The afternoon is free time, so I join Craig at his barrel home for a chat about the community. Others take care of laundry or head to the nearby villages of Findhorn and Forres. Craig Gibson is a wiry, ruddy man in late middle age. He was the fourth focaliser (1987–1991) of the Foundation, Peter Caddy being the first. Now he creates and sells pottery from his house in addition to conducting workshops and tending his garden. He has been at Findhorn off and on for close to four decades. The Australian-born Gibsone recounts his spiritual journeys from his childhood in a deeply religious household to his spiritual questing in both Western and Eastern religious traditions. He speaks about the Caddys, particularly Peter and the man’s relationships with women and wives. He talks about Peter’s odd mix of businessman and spiritual searcher. And he speaks of how the ecovillage aspect of Findhorn moved him. “I’ve searched all over for Shambhala [Buddhist utopia], but found it in an ecovillage.”

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That evening we hear a talk on ecovillages by Jonathan Dawson, a leader in the Global Ecovillages Network, an organization whose name evokes its purpose. Dawson came to Findhorn a decade earlier and is an ecovillage activist. He speaks extensively of ecovillages in different countries and notes that most ecovillages are profoundly utopian and radical, which tends to upset governments. He adds that ecovillages and the state have recently become less antagonistic or distant and have become more cooperative. Citing a Stockholm Environmental Institute study in 2006, Dawson says Findhorn has the lowest ecological footprint ever measured for a settlement in the industrialized world. He also discusses several other intentional communities that have made progress on ecological sustainability, including Germany’s Sieben Linden and India’s Auroville. Day 7: This is the last full day and to some extent a dénouement, a wrapping up and winding down. The work details go as usual, except at the end of the kitchen detail, as the group gathers for a tuning out, there is a request from our kitchen focaliser to assess the week. We do this by discussing the deeper meaning of our work. The summing up of the week is repeated with the entire group in the afternoon in the upper room of the community center. Feelings, of course, are expressed. Emotions run high. Tears well as some describe the transformational power of the experience. One young group member from the United States says she plans to stay on at Findhorn for further experience sessions. Day 8: In the morning the group engages in a round of goodbyes and a group photo. That evening we stay in the village of Findhorn in the same guesthouse. We return to the same pub for supper. In the morning, before heading south, we discuss American Indians with Violet, who is particularly interested in the Shawnee Tecumseh. Because Findhorn was founded in the early 1960s, the community was not a product of the counterculture but of earlier Western trends in alternative living. As mentioned earlier, when the counterculture did arrive at Findhorn, the community’s founders accepted the new wave without necessarily embracing it. The next chapter focuses on communities that were founded by countercultural folk, a few of whom have kept some of the values and beliefs of that era vigorously alive.

Chapter 3

Last Days of the Counterculture Well, less is more . . . —Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, 1855

The police are patrolling in groups of two or three. On this fair day in July 2006, they almost blend into the crowds of locals and tourists until they stop a suspect and began their routine frisking and questioning. The scene is Freetown Christiania, or just Christiania, one of the world’s largest communes. It is located in the city of Copenhagen, a geographic fact that works both for and against the community, which has been struggling to survive as one of the world’s most populous and longest-lasting countercultural communes. A few days later, the police are back in larger numbers; this is full-blown raid, something to which the residents of Christiania have grown accustomed. The raid is near a back entrance to the community. I see a small troop of police and vehicles and notice several people have been detained. At about the same time —the early 1970s—that European hippies were squatting in the abandoned Copenhagen military base that would become Christiania, a caravan of hippies from the San Francisco Bay Area parked their school buses in a large field surrounded by woods in south central Tennessee near an Amish community. The Farm originated as an essentially urban movement that sought to get back to the earth, so to speak. In doing so, in transitioning from city to country, the movement changed; in a sense, it exchanged a kind of siege mentality for a more pastoral but equally difficult undertaking. Instead of the city, the challenge became the land.

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Christiania’s Urban Dilemma The choice of a major city set Christiania, a common purse commune, on an inevitable course toward conflict, even though the counterculture of Europe and the United States was brewed in large urban vats. Indeed, urban enclaves such as San Francisco’s The Haight, New York’s East Village, Philadelphia’s South Street, and London’s Soho —like Paris’s bohemian Left Bank a few generations earlier—became iconic sacred places in the hippie universe of the 1960s and 1970s. But urban enclaves are fluid, too dependent on the ebb and flow of city life and always subject to the intense control municipal authorities tend to exercise over the population. In this sense, urban living encourages a siege mentality. The physical limitations present a particular challenge if a community opts to become a self-sustaining ecovillage. Simply put, land is at a premium, and “urban farmland” is an oxymoron. So it is that the character of urban intentional communities is shaped by the hyperkinetic life of the city. By shaped I mean both literally in terms of the physical appearance of the community and the resources available and figuratively in the sense that urban communities function very much like ethnic urban enclaves. They are forced to adapt and to readapt to the ever-changing immediate environment and are routinely in friction with neighbors, some of them friendly and others less so. In Christiania’s case there are pressures from the outside to cede the land back to an entity in Denmark. I mention Denmark rather than Copenhagen, because who the property would “go back to” remains an open question. Semiautonomous Christiana is a holdover from another era. As a selfadministrative free state in which residents are not bound by modern legalisms such as local building permits, the community stands in contradiction to some aspects of modern Danish society, and it has been the victim of the waning tolerance and growing ire of conservative Danish federal authorities who have attempted, sometimes with force, to restrict or end the commune’s self-generated autonomy. As a result, the commune’s almost four-decade-old social experiment may be in its twilight, although it survives in 2010 despite predications in the news media of its demise. But what makes Christiania unique among intentional communities is not just its survival amid pressure to fold up its very large tent and disappear, but its support from other quarters of Danish society. “A place like Christiania couldn’t have happened anywhere but Denmark. We let a left-wing group move in and take over a military area. Most

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other countries would have kicked the people out within two days,” Malene Torp, a professor of Danish politics and society at Copenhagen University, told Worldpress.org.1 Torp cited two underlining Danish traits—tolerance and conflict shyness—that allowed Christiania to grow. “Tolerance is something you always connect with Denmark on a positive level. But our conflict shyness is more pragmatic. If we don’t have to make a decision on a matter, just to avoid a confrontation, we’ll sit on it” (Wheeler, 2007).

The Inner, Inner City For two weeks during the summer of 2006 (July 7 to 22), I commuted by bicycle daily to Christiana from my rental apartment in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen. My landlord was a former Christiania resident with definite perspectives on the commune. The bicycle commute from the apartment to Christiania took about 20 minutes. During the commute, I rode past the tourist-packed Tivoli Gardens through the Rådhuspladsen, the plaza fronting the charmingly stern and stolid City Hall. There I dodged street performers and locals gawking at the visitors who were gawking at locals. Then I cycled past other the monumental buildings, aided by bikes lanes that paralleled the city’s streets. After crossing one of the city’s numerous bridges, I pedaled into Christianshavn, a trendy neighborhood that had not always been so. The former military base that became Christiania occupies a section of Christianshavn fronted by old warehouses, although a few blocks away pleasure boats of all sizes line both sides of a long, narrow, tree-lined canal. Cars are parked next to the pleasure craft, and the residential buildings are large and well kept. The neighborhood hints of gentrification and stands in contrast to the drab, ominous street that ends in Christiania. A mounted map of the commune at the main entrance to Christiania gives one the impression of entering a kind of low-key amusement park. Most of those entering and exiting appear to be tourists. Tourists are pretty much a constant at Christiania, which is an obvious difference between this urban enclave and other intentional communities. In fact, Christiania is mentioned in most of the major English-language Denmark travel guidebooks. Tourism draws both positive and negative attention to the community. On the one hand, the tourist trade helps create the impression that Christiania is safe and benign, like entering the grounds of a Renaissance fair. Instead of traveling back centuries, however, the Christiania tourist can

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travel back to the 1960s and nostalgically collect memorabilia of that era from souvenir stands not far from the entrance. On the other hand, some Danes see the tourist trade as one and the same as the drug trade, even through hard drugs have been banned from the community. Marijuana is another matter, but I have been told it is easier to purchase the plant in Copenhagen proper than it is in Christiana, primarily because of the near constant police presence in the community. Christiania is divided into distinct zones. The first, near the main entrance, is the commercial zone, a term not used in the community but used here to emphasize the contrast between this area and the residential areas. This zone is festooned with idiosyncratic restaurants, T-shirt and souvenir stalls, and crowds of visitors both domestic and foreign. On the onceaptly named Pusher Street the atmosphere is thick with gawkers. Some of the large warehouses have been converted into workshops and residences. Teens, children, and adults mingle freely on the car-free cobblestone streets. On a side street, an older man picks through a rather large pile of broken bicycles. The pile abuts a ramshackle structure the walls of which are adorned with psychedelic graffiti and an apocalyptic silhouette of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue. Three men sit conversing on the second-floor balcony, upon which hangs a large banner emblazoned with three yellow hearts against a reddish background. The bottom of the banner reads “Wonderland.” The banner is a whimsical take on Christiania’s flag or emblem, which in banner form hangs next to the three men. Instead of three stars, the official emblem has three yellow dots against a reddish background. It is often accompanied with the slogan “Free Christiania,” a phase that has more than one meaning. On Pusher Street I notice a wire-frame sculpture that looks like a stoned Statue of Liberty. Nearby, a police officer closes in on two young men in intense conversation as two others smile while watching the unfolding scene. Not far down the main drag but still in the Pusher Street area one comes upon an al fresco restaurant/snack bar with picnic tables. My wife, who occasionally accompanies me on the commute, suggests refreshments. Roaming through the restaurant are three police officers. At first they appear to be part of the crowd, but they are always scanning the crowds. I use the rest rooms near the counter where orders are taken. There is a rather large fish tank above the cubicles. When I come out, the police are still there, occasionally stopping and chatting among themselves. Then they spot their

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target—a man on the opposite side of the establishment. The subject is frisked, and eventually the police move on to other targets. Police presence has become a fixture of daily life in Christiania. As if to keep up the pressure on the community, the daily walkabouts of a few officers are interspersed with occasional mass police raids. The continuous intimidation has obviously taken its toll. During my conversations with some of the community’s older members there was a whiff of fatalism. Some clearly envisioned an end sooner rather than later. Some of the short-term residents may have felt more confidence, although the events of the following year clearly intensified the pressure on the community. Afterward, we move along to a quieter area. The second zone is comprised of several neighborhoods, most of which are set apart from the raucous commercial zone. The further one treads into this domestic zone the more one is engulfed in the ambient tones of slower living. The shape of Christiania is hard to describe. A map of the community gives the impression of an inverted, slightly curved pipe, the bowl of the pipe being the downtown or tourist area. A canal runs through the stem of the pipe. Five bastionshaped parcels of land project into the canal. The stem of the pipe contains several semiautonomous neighborhoods. There is no style or pattern of housing that marks these neighborhoods. In one there are children jumping on a trampoline in a common. Small houses surround them. It could be an American small town. The contrast with the downtown area is striking. There are no crowds and few visitors. We saunter over a footbridge to another residential area. The view is pleasant . . . peaceful. On other side of the bridge we see woods and homes. One house in particular catches the eye. It is right on the canal. There is a tiny sandy beach. An umbrella and lawn furniture have been set nearby. A canoe is tied to a small deck. In the background is a fair-sized house with a peaked roof. I marvel at the scene and consider again the contrast between that image and the main street. We follow a quiet path past several more homes, some with fairy-tale touches. We come to a large building in which there are several apartments. We meet a woman who invites us to sit for a while. We relax, and she offers us a cool drink near the water. It is idyllic. Not all living quarters in Christiania are alike. Some areas are quite basic, others quite unusual. There are converted military barracks. There are leantos in the woods. There is a two-story house that seems to be made entirely of windowpanes. It is a sort of a do-it-yourself version of architect Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in my home state of Connecticut. And there are

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houses that appear to be little more than shacks. It is what is to be expected in an intentional community.

Beginnings, Not Endings Christiania’s location is both blessing and curse. The community began with a whimper in 1971 when countercultural squatters gradually occupied a collection of old buildings on an abandoned military base. The old base straddles a canal leading to the sea, which means Christiania’s 85-acre site contains a considerable stretch of waterfront property. The squatters initially lived in trailers but gradually began converting old military buildings for residential use. Eventually, residents began building their own houses, and the community formed 15 distinct villages or neighborhoods. Founding members of Christiania envisioned a self-governing commune, which remains to this day a flash point for those seeking to close the community. At some point the community may have reached a population of almost 2,000, although best estimates today are that the resident population is about seven to eight hundred. Emmerick Warburg moved to Christiania in 1974 after a musician colleague alerted him to the community. By the time he arrived, the area was beginning to settle into a real community; the formative years were behind, although life was not easy. “In the beginning, we had to empty our own shit,” he told me. In those years, the community was committed to communalism and government by consensus. Although Christiania governance is still by consensus and the property is communally owned, Warburg describes Christiania as a “multi low-level bureaucracy.” Warburg and others noted that Christiania’s “leaders” arise out of immediate needs, and he refers to them as “spokesmen.” The spokesman acts to represent people. The spokesman carries out the will of a meeting. “The nature of decision making is difficult to understand,” he adds. “You can’t put your hand on who’s in charge.” Warburg also noted that meetings are frequent. There are several levels of meetings. There are common meetings on issues that involve all 15 geographic areas that make up the whole and area meetings in each of Christiania’s units. An economy meeting takes up the administration of the community’s common purse. Other meetings deal with specialized issues such as community businesses. Warburg also acknowledges that some believe there is a hidden group or elite that decides everything. Dorothea (not her real name) is a former Christianite who lived in the community in the early 1990s and still believes

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in the idea of Christiania. She said there are a governing elite who, for example, decide who may or may not join the community. The question of governance aside, Christiania demonstrates a relative pattern of consistency in terms of its economic and social structures, although the economics of the common purse have been comprised somewhat through actions of the Danish government to bring the community more in line with the rest of the country. Nevertheless, that Christiania has maintained a communal economic system after almost four decades is notable. Similar older communities such as The Farm and Findhorn have had to make considerable concessions to the realities of modern capitalism. Newer communities often begin with semicommunal economies and social structures, and pure communes are rare in secular contexts. In the same vein, Christiania is more deeply connected with the countercultural era than other contemporary intentional communities, with a few notable exceptions, such as Australia’s Nimbin, a hippie community a few hours south of Brisbane, New South Wales. One of the constants at Christiania is its siege mentality, a result of its long and complex relationship with the Danish government and the rest of Denmark. About a year after countercultural squatters began moving into the abandoned military base in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn section, the fledgling community was accepted by the Danish government as a “social experiment,” according to Christiania’s official history.2 A new Danish government the following year was less conciliatory and sought to end the community. A back and forth between the government and the commune continued for several years until 1976, when the government embarked upon an earnest campaign to evacuate the community. The threat drew thousands to the commune, and evacuation plans were dropped. The resultant publicity also drew tourists to the community in addition to an upsurge in hash and marijuana dealing (Miles, 2008, p. 198). A key moment in Christiania history was the commune’s attempt at a self-cleansing of hard drugs and gangs in 1979 and 1980. The drug issue not only framed public perceptions of Christiania, but it forced some to leave the community, such as Marianne Rydvall, a mural painter who now lives in Hawaii. Rydvall, who was staying briefly at the community in 2006, said she left Christiana in 1977 because of increasing problems with gangs in the community. The other effect of the community’s drug reputation was to bring in not only those interested in purchasing drugs and marijuana but the aforementioned non-drug tourist trade, which is still a sustaining factor in keeping the community vibrant.

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In general, the 1980s were a roller coaster ride vis-à-vis relations with the Danish government, culminating in a law moving the community from an autonomous to a semiautonomous state. Actions to bring Christiania under greater control were ratcheted up further in 2004 with the passage of a law by Denmark’s right-wing government to normalize the commune (Miles, 2008, p. 199). Among other events that year, a police crackdown resulted in the elimination of hash dealers from the community. Another major event occurred in May 2007, when clashes between authorities and Christianites turned ugly. The Copenhagen Post on May 14 described the scene as such: A police demolition team rolled into squatter colony Christiania Monday morning and was met by violent resistance that had resulted in at least 15 arrests as of early afternoon. Fires and vandalism had spread to the streets by the afternoon, as activists continued to throw rocks and shoot fireworks toward police, who used tear gas against the unruly crowd. Injuries to both parties were reported, though none were serious as of early Monday afternoon. (A Building’s Demolition, 2007) The event also caught the attention of the international press. Great Britain’s Independent Online eventually caught up with the incident on May 31, 2007, with this more melodramatic report from its World section: On the Barricades: Trouble in a Hippie Paradise

The cloying odour rises from blackened barricades at the entrance to the 36-year-old self-declared “Fristaden” or Free Town in the heart of Copenhagen. These festering blockades stand just feet from gaudy graffiti advocating “eternal peace” and posters advertising products from yoga workshops to organic lettuce. A few feet further, teenagers carry on business as usual by smoking joints of hashish bought on Pusher Street—the ramshackle thoroughfare where marijuana dealers still hawk their wares sotto voce despite a prolonged police crackdown on the trade. This stark contrast between love and war bears testimony to difficult times for Copenhagen’s 800 Christianians, residents of the commune who fear their free-wheeling idyll in a disused naval barracks dotted with lakes and overgrown with woodland is about to be claimed back in what Denmark’s right-wing government describes in Orwellian terms as “normalisation.”

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For two long nights this month the commune has been hit by one of the worst spasms of violence in its history as dozens of youths clashed with riot police in streets immediately outside Christiania’s “border,” marked out by two totem poles declaring “Welcome to Christiania” to incomers and “You are now entering the EU” to those leaving. Such is the fervour with which residents hold on to their self-declared autonomy, they even have their own flag—three yellow discs on a red background. (“On the Barricades,” 2007) The more striking aspects of Christiania’s fight for survival are media perceptions of the community. In this July 12, 2007, article, the influential German magazine Der Spiegel featured the following two-deck headline and teaser paragraph in its online edition: Curtains for Christiania? Lawless Danish Settlement Approaches Date with Fate

By Manfred Ertel in Copenhagen Thirty-six years after it was founded, the “Free State of Christiania” is now being forced to comply with Copenhagen’s local ordinances. Those who wish to remain are being asked to buy their homes—at prices close to the market value. Will gentrification kill the idyllic hippie settlement? (Ertel, 2007) The juxtaposition of the subhead that includes the word lawless and the use of the word idyllic in the teaser paragraph is revealing. With these two words the magazine has captured the duel perceptions of the community that have haunted the commune from its earliest years. In the United States, Time magazine caught up with the news on June 25 and reported on the state of the Freetown this way: Postcard from Christiania Europe’s Last Commune Braces for Battle

By Christopher Thompson There is something different in the air at Christiania these days— the usual spicy aroma of marijuana smoke now occasionally mixes with the smell of tear gas and burning tires. That’s because, more than three decades after Europe’s oldest and largest commune was established as an antidote to “selfish society,” Danish authorities are moving to close it down. More than 90 people were arrested a few weeks ago after groups of youths fought running battles with police, throwing

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bottles and cobblestones and burning homemade barricades. The riot, a rare occurrence in this normally placid Scandinavian country, was prompted by police arriving to demolish a shelter deemed unsafe by the authorities. (Thompson, 2007) In 2009, Christiania made international headlines again, this time with the aid of the United Nation’s climate change summit in December. Because of the community’s intense involvement in climate change issues, The Times of London, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, wrote this negative article on November 26, 2009: 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit Fears Green Christiania Squat Nearby

By Stefanie Marsh Less than two weeks before the start of the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, a counter-cultural enclave in the heart of the capital has again been attracting the attention of the Danish authorities. Christiania, the sprawling commune that clings limpet-like to 32 hectares of prime property in the centre of Copenhagen, has been an anarchist stronghold and municipal headache ever since a group of squatters seized a former military barracks there in the late 1960s. (Marsh, 2009) In fact, Christiania hosted the Climate Bottom Meeting, a parallel event to the summit that stressed finding solutions to global ecological and social challenges.

If Image Is Everything . . . One must pause to ask why there has been so much attention outside of Denmark. Despite its longevity and clashes with police, Christiania is not a cult, a polygamist compound, or a community bent on mass suicide. But it does have key elements that tend to attract the news media. In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published unflattering cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The international controversy that erupted in the wake of that publication still resonates. It was one of the few major news events to come out of Copenhagen in the last decade, the 2009 U.N. climate change summit being another. By comparison, the problems of Christianites hardly seem to invite international news.

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Yet Christiania is probably one of the most heavily covered intentional communities in the world. Again, it is a matter of location. Although relatively small, with a population of a little over 1 million, Copenhagen is a tourist destination on a level with Amsterdam or Prague, and, to the foreigner, Denmark may appear to be a postcard of laid-back Scandinavian tranquility. On January 8, 2007, just before the riots in Christiania, ABC News 20/20, citing two university studies, reported that Denmark was the happiest place on earth (Weir & Johnson, 2007). As a former news editor and reporter, I know there is nothing more attractive to the press than conflict with a spoonful of irony and a pinch of contrast. A story about a hippie commune bucking the police and the government in the capital of the so-called happiest place on earth has legs, as did the cartoon incident in 2005. In both cases, the contrast between the pacific image of Denmark and the troubles within were irresistible. This was, after all, the land of the Little Mermaid. Perceptions are persistent. But by their very nature, residents of urban enclaves easily become victims of persistent and irrevocable stereotyping. It is a kind of isolation under a microscope. The enclave is at once segregated from but a part of city life. Robert Park, a founder of the first Chicago School of urban sociology at the University of Chicago, said that the process of enclave creation establishes “moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” (1966 [1925]), p. 40). As an urban enclave, Christiania’s segregation from the city draws attention to itself. And first impressions of the hippie free state tend to linger. Among those first impressions was the prevalence of drugs in the early life of the commune. It is an impression hard to shake, as this February 22, 2004, article by Anthony Andrew in Great Britain’s The Observer suggests: When Christiania, the world’s best-known commune, first opened in 1971 there were no rules. It was an anarchist’s dreamland that attracted hippies, artists, drug addicts, criminals, idealists, down-andouts and anyone else who thought there was something rotten in the state of Denmark. One of its early mottos was “Black sheep from all classes unite!” Then gradually the rules came. The first was no violence. Then there were no hard drugs. Then following battles between drug gangs, who appeared to ignore the first two rules, another rule outlawing weapons was added. After continued problems, residents were forbidden to wear bullet-proof vests.

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Today, the era of internal violence and hard drugs is a memory—albeit a vivid one for some—and as the community grows older yet is still in the headlines, Christianites seek to be left in peace. But the reality of the outside world has a way of intruding. Indeed, the last five years have been among the most difficult for the community, and clashes with those who would view Christianites as anarchistic occupiers of public property have become increasingly intense. These clashes draw attention to the fact the ex-military base the community occupies is waterfront real estate in one of Europe’s most upscale and expensive cities.

What Lies Ahead In discussions with Danes outside Christiania, there were mixed feelings about whether the community should remain semiautonomous or be fully incorporated into the city of Copenhagen, a process that actually has begun to a minor extent. For some, the community has been an icon of the Danish spirit of independence. Christiania is also a nostalgic representation of a more liberated time and a symbol of a more socially aware society. This is especially true of Copenhagen residents, who tend to favor some continued autonomy for the community. Outside the city, Christiana is often seen as a symbol of the excesses of a bygone era and a haven for drugs, although the community has disavowed hard drugs. Drug use is one excuse the conservative federal government, as opposed to the municipal government, has used to close the community down. Trade in hash and marijuana is still permitted in the community, although it is more or less covertly sold. There are other anecdotal reasons given for the impetus to shut Christiania, including the desire to create a Danish museum on the Christiania site, and then, of course, there is the aforementioned desire of some within the larger Danish society to acquire prime waterfront property near the city’s core. Be that as it may, Christiania remains not only an icon and a tourist location but also a rallying point for those, such as film star Viggo Mortensen, a sometime resident of Denmark, who believe the community is being unduly pressured by the Danish government. Despite Christiania’s other manifestations of communalism, some Christianites have engaged the larger society through various businesses, including the restaurants, souvenir stands, and craft shops in the community’s tourist area. Most notable is the Christiania bike, an example of the syncretism of capitalism and communalism. Enterprising Christianites

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developed a three-wheeled vehicle with a bicycle frame attached to a cart or trailer on the front. The cycle satisfied the need of residents to transport large materials through the automobile-free community. The original company, Christiania Smedie (The Forge of Christiania), was founded in the 1970s but later split into two companies, one an offsite production facility, the other a Copenhagen-based service company. From one perspective, the commercialization of the community might seem antithetical to counterculture values, which traditionally eschew capitalism. But rather than hypocritical, these activities are a survival strategy that offers a nonthreatening patina of acceptability amid the constant pressure on Christianites to abandon their flawed but resilient utopia. As a symbol of freedom and a relic of a bygone era, Christiania also plays a critical role in what amounts to a Danish culture war. Christianites are reluctant pilgrims in the nation’s quest to reconcile its need for order with its tradition of tolerance. And as a nostalgic remnant of the counterculture, Christiania is more than just a tourist attraction; it is also an escape hatch through which citizens in a complex hypermodern society are able to temporarily suspend, as participants or engaged observers, the perceived travails of the outside world for the perceived utopian atmosphere of the alternative community.

American Pastoral: The Farm In the summer of 2007, after driving several miles down a dirt road, we came to a closed iron gate. The road had ended, and my wife Lucille and I thought we had at last reached The Farm. Off the beaten track and up a narrow road, there was a little house just beyond the fence. Typical of an isolated intentional community. We walked around the gate and saw the red brick visitor’s center that we assumed was the entrance to The Farm. Then we were met by a pleasant women who informed us that we were at the right gate, but not for visitors. After backtracking, we arrived at the same building from another direction. Our GPS had redeemed itself. Although not isolated several miles up a dirt road as we had first expected, the geography of The Farm relative to Christiania is striking. Both communities are the same age; both were settled in 1971. Both are products of the counterculture. Both began as communes. They both originated in a major city. They both seek to be left in peace. Ideologically and philosophically, they are relatively on the same page. One could almost say they are mirror images of each other, Christiania an urban version of The Farm. Also like

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Christiania, The Farm has received considerable media attention. I recall seeing photographs of the commune in an April 1977 National Geographic article called “A Walk across America” by writer Peter Jenkins. It was idyllic in a hard-working, dusty farmer sort of way. Other articles about The Farm or its enterprises have appeared in equally large media outlets such as People magazine and the New York Times. But unlike Christiania, The Farm’s media coverage has been positive and upbeat. Within the intentional community network, The Farm is considered an exemplar of the movement and is spoken of frequently in positive terms. On the other hand, Christiania is rarely mentioned in the movement’s literature or circles, a circumstance that may be attributed to the negative media attention and connection to drugs. This is unfortunate because Christianites, for the most part, share many of the values found throughout the movement, including at The Farm. So the difference between the two communities that looms largest is geography. When the squatters set up makeshift homes in the former military base that became Christiania, they settled on a piece of property that eventually became desirable. When the caravan of hippies left San Francisco and circuitously arrived in Summertown, Tennessee, they became farmers on land that wasn’t all that desirable. While so many in the early 1970s talked about getting back to the land, refugees from urbania actually did it on a piece of property far from the confusion and inevitable modernity of Haight-Ashbury. In place of their confusing and conflicted urban utopia they found a fertile breeding ground for their vision of a nonviolent, anti-materialistic New Jerusalem. It is not without a sense of amusement that one observes the area has a fair-sized Old Order Amish community nearby.

The Farm That Isn’t Our goal after reaching The Farm was to find the Ecovillage Training Center, where we were to stay. It is located off the community’s main road. On the brief walk down a narrow road to the ecovillage we passed one of the aforementioned abandoned school buses, which I learned was an iconic reminder of the caravan of 40 to 60 school buses and other vehicles that brought the first Farm settlers. Nearby, we saw the back end of the other school bus. On one bus, a wood-shingled shack appeared to rise out of the roof—a modification seemingly without purpose—and in place of the school bus door was a house door. The bus was not only a vivid reminder of the caravan but also spoke to the difficulties of the community’s beginnings, such as running a school out of the back of a school bus.

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At the end of the road the area opened up into a complex of small structures anchored by a large two-story house, the Training Center, which was established in 1994, about the time ecovillages were becoming the next stage, or next rage, in the evolution of modern intentional communities. We were to stay at an ecohostel within the ecovillage compound. The hostel is a two-story structure topped by solar panels. Running like an external spine, or a giant strand of DNA, up one side of the building is a staircase leading to the roof. In the same compound there are a number of smaller structures and project areas. These include a fantasy greenhouse, a geodesic dome, and a tiny, contained bamboo forest. Two of the buildings are topped with sod roofs and seem to be organic, free-floating shapes, a metaphor for the community itself. In one section of the compound a class in how to use bamboo ecologically is being conducted. The Training Center offers a variety of environmental and/or craft-related seminars and courses. Offerings include courses in permaculture, natural building, and home energy systems with degree credits at Gaia University, a project of permaculture and ecovillage activists. Inside the hostel, several guests, mostly in their twenties and thirties, prepare for a vegetarian/vegan meal. Most are here to take courses. On another day, we tour the community with Vicki Montaigne, a community member from the Visitor Center. The morning is clear, and we take in the surroundings, which strike me as somewhat disconnected from the name of the community. We pass through open fields edged by forests. We see horses, but the fields are no longer farmed. We learn that originally the community attempted to grow everything with the intention of being self-sufficient, but by 1985, about two years after what the community calls The Changeover, those with farming experience had left. Today there are gardens, although deer plague them, which was not the case in earlier days. But there is no intensive agriculture. In the attitude and perspective of its members, however, The Farm, and its 1,750 acres, is still a farm. At some point, we see a three-story white building. It is one of the community’s earliest structures, and it is home, with two nearby buildings, to one of The Farm’s principal enterprises, the Book Publishing Company, which has about a half dozen imprints. Books by community members and nonmembers reflect the general overarching themes that infuse the community itself, such as vegetarianism and natural foods, alternative health, and arts and crafts. One of its imprints focuses on American Indian themes. Looming ahead is a contemporary structure with a roof that seems to be composed of lemon wedges. This would be the community school building, the only school in Tennessee using passive solar energy. According to

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community literature, The Farm’s onsite education facilities serviced about 365 students from kindergarten through high school when The Farm was a commune and at its apex in 1980. Today, the total population of the community, adults and children, is about two hundred. Across the street from the school is a community center, where a wedding was taking place that week. Nearby, a dome rises up; it was intended as a meeting hall, although it is unfinished. Around a bend on the main road is the SE International (formerly Solar Electronics) building. This is the headquarters of an enterprise born in 1979 out of a concern over nuclear energy. The small company, with a workforce of 17, produces handheld radiation detectors, or Nuke Busters. The firm does business with the U.S. Department of Commerce and exports abroad, but it attracted media attention as early as 1982, when the community was still a commune. This May 31, 1982, article in People magazine captures the essence of what the publication sees as an interesting contradiction: The Farm owes its longevity (it was founded in 1971) to the unapologetic capitalism of the high-tech era. These flower children don’t tool leather or make turquoise jewelry or sell loose joints—at least not for a living. Down below the horse pasture, past the two-holer where Farmers sometimes use the Wall Street Journal for bare necessities, stand three mobile homes that house the Farm’s $170,000-a-year Solar Electronics Company. Here a gaggle of flower children solder, calibrate and assemble a variety of intricate electronic devices. (Simmons, 1982) Further on we notice a blue building emblazoned with a picture of a tree—the home of The Farm’s defunct phone system. Called at one time Beatnik Bell, it was managed by a member nicknamed Ma Bell. After The Changeover, the local phone company replaced the old phone system. Then we pass a radio tower with a little studio for a radio station. Down a side road is MushroomPeople, an enterprise specializing in shitake and other mushroom-growing supplies. We pass several houses. One large house, we are told, was home to about three dozen people. Nearby, a log cabin used to lodge about 20 people. In the community’s beginning, many houses that now house single families were communal. Some of the homes, especially the newer ones, are impressive and would be objects of pride in an outsider’s neighborhood. We also pass a trailer and a round building that is the Farm Store. At this point, the Head of the Roads, the main road, branches off in several directions,

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a spider’s web of intersecting pathways. Near the Head of the Roads is FarmSoy Company, which is owned by a member of the community. The firm produces soy products that are sold to, among other places, Whole Foods stores in Tennessee. The company, under another name, has been around since the 1970s. Ahead on Second Road is a large building of great significance to the community. The Midwifery Center and Clinic is a project of Ina May Gaskin, noted midwife and cofounder of The Farm with her husband, Stephen Gaskin. According to The Farm’s literature, the first deliveries by those who became midwives at The Farm occurred during the caravan tour of the United States by the first settlers of the community. The center offers prenatal care, both in-hospital and onsite labor coaching, and delivery services. Some birthings are done in a special cabin at The Farm. One midwife works with the Amish community and helps their midwives. The midwives have good relations with local medical establishment. As we continue on we eventually arrive at a sacred space. We are walking through a lightly forested area with our guide, Montaigne, and the sound of the leaves of a previous season crunch under foot. The cemetery is contained within a small clearing. The gravesites are simple, devoid of ostentatious monuments. A few show a slight depression at the site of the burial. Montaigne explains that The Farm was permitted to have a cemetery because they are considered a spiritual community. She adds that the cemetery is mostly green, or ecologically friendly, with burials in simple pine boxes without vaults. This explains the slight depressions in some older graves. Funeral rituals include Mexican-influenced celebrations, including candles on all the graves, and the bringing and sharing of food. “We tell stories about everybody and laugh. We hold the circle of life precious,” Montaigne says. The celebrations seem to reflect elements of the Mexican El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) rituals, annual events that honor those who have died.

The Pilgrimage to Everywhere The woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. —Revelation 12:14, KJV

George Rapp recited this verse to his followers as he was about to move his community to the Indiana wilderness—what was to become New

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Harmony, Indiana (Pitzer & Elliott, 2002, p. 252). Rapp’s wilderness commune in Indiana lasted only 10 years, after which the group moved back to Pennsylvania. The commune in Tennessee, which was founded by Stephen Gaskin and his wife, Ina May Gaskin, has lasted almost four times that long. It too began as a journey. Our progress across the United States was amazing. The police took us at our word that we were peaceful. We were handed from the Oregon police on to the Washington police, and as we went across each state line, the police in those states would meet the police in the new state and tell them that we were peaceful and we were all right and we weren’t planning to stop and we weren’t taking welfare. (Gaskin, 1972/2007, p. 10) The Farm’s history is not without drama, and its narrative arc is instructive, for it generally follows the stages typical of baby boom communities. It all began with a speaking tour that was really a pilgrimage from San Francisco to the rest of the United States. It ended not in a promised land but almost by accident in Tennessee. But before the move to Tennessee, there was the Monday Night Class, a weekly discussion led by Stephen Gaskin, a former Marine and Korean War veteran who taught creative writing and general semantics at San Francisco State for two years. Gaskin, who was born in 1935 and is thus too old to be a boomer, writes that he began the Monday Night Class after his San Francisco State stint. He claims that within three years the class was drawing about 1,500 people. The weekly class covered issues such as politics, the Vietnam War, psychedelic drugs, religion, and sex. As a result, he adds, he was persuaded to organize a speaking tour of the United States (Gaskin, 2000, pp. 148–149). That tour drew about two hundred others and became known as The Caravan, and it ended when the group settled in Tennessee. The first years were a learning experience. All were committed to communalism. Early members of The Farm took a vow of poverty and structured their economy upon early Christian principles as expressed in Acts 4:32: “The group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but everything was held in common.” As such, the vow (Fike, 1998, p. 9) became an essential rite of passage into the community, although the realities of making the caravan members into productive farmers eventually brought the hopes of a true economic commune to an end. But the spiritual element Gaskin introduced remained.

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Today the community still is regarded as spiritual, although The Farm’s Web site walks a fine line between spirituality and sectarianism: The Farm is a nondenominational church. We like to call ourselves “free thinkers,” because we discuss religion and philosophy in terms that do not exclude any possibilities. People come to The Farm from a variety of religious traditions and disciplines and find those views treated with honor and respect. While individual practices may vary, our group practice is an on-going, free-ranging discussion. We consider ourselves to be a spiritual community. In keeping with our deep reverence for life, we are pacifists, conscientious objectors, and most of us are vegetarians. On Sunday mornings many of us like to gather for group meditation and church services out in the meadow.3 The first few years saw the development of the Farm School and a clinic. By 1975, the community claimed about 750 residents, including about 250 children. By then, Plenty USA had been founded. The outreach program, which gave away food surpluses to the local poor, went global when Farm members heard about an earthquake in Guatemala in 1976. A mission was sent to build homes there, and after four years there were about one hundred Plenty volunteers in Guatemala. Plenty grew from there, expanding its work in Guatemala and initiating other projects in the United States and abroad, including in the South Bronx, Belize, and the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.4 By 1982, the commune had a peak population of about 1,200 to 1,300, grown from an initial population of about two to three hundred. Several small satellite communities in other locations also opened and closed during the first decade. In its heyday, The Farm’s success was felt elsewhere. Kat Kincade, a cofounder of Virginia’s Twin Oaks, said her community lost a couple of members to The Farm, because of Gaskin: “In particular I recall that he [Gaskin] disapproved of whimsical names changes, feeling that they show disrespect for parents and the last generation. Several Twin Oakers heard this and dropped their assumed names” (Kincade, 1994, p. 92). Then, in 1983, The Changeover changed everything. As Montaigne, who arrived in 1977, explains: The Farm had just gotten to a point where it wasn’t supporting itself . . . We lived below the line of poverty. It wasn’t working. Then everyone had to start paying dues. Some, who didn’t like the politics or

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the standard of living, saw the writing on the wall and left before [The Changeoever]. Afterward more folks left. The Changeover marked the failure of the communal economic system and a breakdown of the early idealism that had propelled the community forward. As Cynthia Holzapfel (1998, p. 158) notes: Being communal all those years had given everything we did a certain cachet, a nobility, in that we were doing things together, for each other, as one. By giving up on communalism and making each family responsible for its own economic survival, we became, in the eyes of some members, just a glorified hippie subdivision. After The Changeover, monthly dues were imposed. The land was still commonly held but the dues helped pay for community expenses. Today, when houses are built, they are still considered the property of the residents by verbal agreement, but on paper the community still owns the land. This means the community has to approve any sale and potential buyers. In addition, about half the population work outside the community, and within the community several enterprises are individually owned for profit. Today’s population is about two hundred, almost as it was when the community was first settled. The development of the ecovillage put The Farm in the mainstream of recent trends in intentional living. In addition to the community’s numerous enterprises, The Farm, one of the older of the modern communities, has refused to be swept aside and has embraced the future.

City Mouse, Country House Shaker communities were rural. The need for isolation drove the Anabaptist movements from the Rhine Valley to North America and forced the Mormons to locate their final home near a salt-filled lake. The wealthy have historically isolated themselves to protect what they have; immigrants isolate themselves in urban enclaves as a survival strategy. The desire for isolation, especially in societies with population pressures, is irrepressible. In the early 1990s, I recall wandering casually in daylight with a colleague through an affluent neighborhood in Caracas, Venezuela. We kept to the wide sidewalks and marveled at the architecture and the wealth on display beyond the gates of the homes and at the contrast between that neigh-

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borhood and the ranchos, or barrios, of the poor that clung like a heavy snowfall to the sides of the surrounding hills. Then the guards came out, armed with automatic weapons, and made it clear that we were not welcome in the neighborhood. The reality is some attempts at isolation draw the curious, like myself, by inviting the inevitable question, “I wonder what they’ve got to hide?’ A newspaper article laying out the town’s numerous and arguably successful attempts to discourage tourists and gawkers drawn by the raw beauty of its coastal location drew me a few years ago to Bolinas, California. Indeed, the gawking anthropologist in me had to see firsthand what all the fuss was about. Another inducement to visit Bolinas was a book on the New Buffalo commune in New Mexico by Arthur Kopecky, who had lived in Bolinas and mentioned the existence of a commune there. Once in Bolinas, it was clear why this quirky refuge for aging hippies, artists, writers, actors, poets, and assorted celebrities wanted to keep the crowds away. It was quaint, picturesque, and relatively quiet. It was equally clear why many tourists who wanted to visit never made it there. It was damn hard to find. In Ernest Callenbach’s book Ecotopia Emerging, Bolinas residents are described as “lively and individualistic” with a “pioneering spirit” (1981, p. 2). Callenbach adds, “People somehow became more independent when they lived a 20-minute drive — along perilous cliffs —from the nearest real town.” Indeed, Bolinas has a 19th-century Western feel. The town seems infused with the spirit of the frontier. If inaccessibility due to geographic isolation explains part of why some intentional communities are more successful than others, then the opposite also must be true. But not always. Christiania’s longevity is testament to that. It has survived for almost four decades, a success by some standards. Its accessibility in an urban environment has been both a boon, in terms of tourist dollars, and a plague threatening to wipe out the community. In important ways, Christiania is an ethnic urban enclave. The ethnicity in question is hippie, an idea borrowed from Stephen Gaskin, who has referred to himself as an ethnic hippie. The popular term ethnicity has often been used as a synonym for race, although anthropologists make a clear distinction between the terms. One’s ethnicity is determined primarily by one’s culture, which is a set of values, beliefs, traditions, language, and other commonalities that hold a society together. In the sense that the counterculture reflects a certain set of values, beliefs, traditions, rituals, and a unique way of speaking about the world, it is in effect an ethnicity, and the

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hippie enclaves of New York, San Francisco, and London have functioned as such. The problems of urban ethnic enclaves are compounded by a negative image of urban life in general that dates at least from the Industrial Revolution. The resultant massive migration of workers from rural to urban centers in the 19th and early 20th centuries not only significantly increased the size of urban populations, but it cemented a view of urban life as dehumanizing. Social thinkers such as Marx, Engels, and Durkheim abetted this. It is instructive to note that Karl Marx’s ideas on society and class were honed by his experiences in London, where he lived for more than half his life, while Friedrich Engel’s experiences in grimly industrial Manchester, England, were the foundation of his social views. Carried over into the late 20th century, this perspective on urbanity fed the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s; even today, city living is often negatively referenced, a view that still drives the nostalgic quest for the rural life. Among those who constructed models of social interaction applied to the study of urban life was Ferdinand Tönnies, whose classic dichotomist model of social structures employed the notion of gemeinschaft versus gesellschaft. Tönnies defined gemeinschaft as the traditional culture of societies that are kin based and informal and gesellschaft as the opposite. Tönnies defines gesellschaft as associational interactions, which implies the impersonal relationships one acquires through business or by contract. In a geographic context, gemeinschaft is associated with village life, whereas gesellschaft is identified with city life (1887/1963). In other words, rural life is associated with social relations that are deeper and more personal, whereas social relations in cities are often the result of business contacts— that is, people that one “has to know.” Émile Durkheim (1893/1997) employed a similar model to distinguish between small-scale and large-scale societies, for which we also may substitute the terms rural and urban. The former functions within the context of what he called “mechanical solidarity” in which members of a society are linked by kinship and personal relationships. On the other hand, “organic solidarity” defines large-scale societies, which can be equated with urbanity. As such, urban life is characterized by isolation and impersonal relationships, resulting in a state Durkheim called anomie, a kind of negative marginal state of being. The alienating forces of industrialization did indeed make living in large cities a raw and terrifying experience in the 19th century, and the percep-

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tion that urban life is still dehumanizing persisted into the next century. In her landmark book on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (1961/1992, p. 5) bemoans 20th-century city planning as “helpless to stem decay—and the spiritless that precedes decay—in ever more massive swatches of cities.” On the opposite end, the benefits and satisfactions of rural and small-town life have become mass media clichés. Popular culture, too, has latched onto this reverence for the rural life. I am reminded, for example, of the lyrics to John Mellencamp’s 1985 song “Small Town,” in which the singer/songwriter lets loose with “Yeah, I can be myself in this small town; And people let me be just what I want to be.” Thus small-town life is used both in media and politics as a counterpoint to city life, which is often depicted as more complicated, less pure, and more insidious. If social scientists of the 19th century tended to view cities as dystopias, then mass media of the 20th century sees the nonurban as a touch of utopia. And so, despite the rise of suburbia and the technological miracles of the 21st century that have rendered location almost moot in the Western world, urban life still is a victim of bad press, although not all undeserved. Writing on the hidden messages in the news, sociologist Herbert J. Gans (1979, p. 41) cites several “enduring values” that are a fixture in media reports, among them small-town pastoralism: The rural and anti-industrial values, which Thomas Jefferson is usually thought to have invented, can also be found in the news, which favors small towns (agricultural or market) over other types of settlements. At one time, this preference was complemented by a celebration of the large city and of the vitality of its businesses and entertainment districts; but the end of this period can be dated almost exactly by Life’s special issue on the cities, which appeared in December 1965. The three decades since Gans’s observations have seen the revitalization and gentrification of some city cores in both Europe and North American, and the growth of suburbs in the 20th century have significantly changed and complicated the urban-rural landscape, but the old categories remain with us as phantoms, as imagined history. In film, fiction, and the press, life in a small town or rural environment is still depicted as cooperative, family oriented, clean, quiet, and peaceful and urban life as crime ridden, heartless, overpopulated, alienating, dirty, and hectic.

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However, not all social thinkers viewed cities negatively. Max Weber (1961), for example, saw cities as instruments of social change because they sparked innovation and individuality. Curiously for the urban counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s—including those who yearned to get back to the land—the energy of the city sparked the innovative thinking that drove the movement to seek a better life down on the farm. Rather than enervating, the cities of North America and Europe were seedbeds of creativity, producing the music, the art, and the energy that became the backbeat and driving force of the countercultural movement. But cities were far from utopian, which came as a disappointment for members of the counterculture, who were for the most part middle-class whites. Unlike Weber, Hugh Gardner contends that while most communes of that era began in cities, true innovation came after the countercultural movement began its exodus to the hinterlands: Urban communes were far less innovative forms of social experimentation than rural ones, and ultimately much less serious. Except for co-ops and monastic religious centers, urban communes had largely disappeared or changed into less communal forms by 1973. (1978, pp. 242–243) Gardner also notes that in the early 1970s, the population flow from rural to urban areas had been reversed. This coincided with a substantial growth in rural communes, a great many of which failed (1978, p. 249). So it was that the growth of rural countercultural communes was fed by the cities from which they sought escape. And so it was that the hippie caravan that became The Farm moved iconically from the San Francisco Bay Area to one of the more isolated areas of rural Tennessee.

Big, Sharp Needle in the Haystack The quest for the rural is a quest to recapture the past, or the simple life. Certainly this was behind the lifestyle choices of early communities such as the Shakers and the Amish. And to do so is, in a way, to deny the so-called march of progress. For the counterculture this translated to the mantra “less is more.” In addition to Browning’s poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe also used the phrase to describe the modernist architecture he practiced, which was characterized by simplicity and pure functionality in form. Modernists rejected frills

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or ornamentation of any kind and sought to pare architecture down to its bare essentials, although the results were often just tedium-inducing rectangles. For the hippies, less is more meant paring life down to its essentials, a challenge for middle-class people raised in the complexities of the modern world. As a result, many early communes failed. Like modernist architecture, the struggles of rural life could also be tedious, especially if the ordinary pleasures of modern middle-class life were no longer considered essential. Kat Kincade of Twin Oaks writes that there were folks in her community who seemed to want what they didn’t really need, such as singing lesions, trips to Europe, and camping excursions. “Are these ‘needs’?” Kincade asks. “It depends on what you’re comparing them to. It is absurd to call them ‘needs’ if you’re making comparisons to the lifestyle of the average inhabitant of this planet, or even with that of one’s own grandparents” (1994, p. 44).

Utopia Isn’t There What happens if you move to utopia and it has moved? What if you go back to the land and you find a shopping mall instead? What if you actually find utopia and it is not all you thought it would be? Two of the more compelling examples of communes that failed are Drop City and New Buffalo. The latter was located in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, about 12 miles north of Taos, a town whose metro area was, and still is, a veritable Disney World of communal activity. New Buffalo attracted considerable attention after its founding in 1967. It was obliquely referenced in the Peter Fonda–Dennis Hopper film Easy Rider. The story goes that Hopper sought the New Buffalo site so he could shoot the commune segment of the film but was refused. Instead, he recreated New Buffalo as a set in California. New Buffalo followed Drop City as one of the new breed of communes— the hippie commune. A couple and a friend founded Drop City in May 1965 near Trinidad, Colorado. Drop City took its name from Timothy Leary’s catch phrase, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” and in important ways it defined the counterculture, then in its infancy (Gardner, 1978, p. 35). As much an artists’ colony as a hippie commune, Drop City placed a high value on artistic expression, which was obvious in the modified geodesic domes, called zomes, that dotted the Droppers’ landscape (Miller, 1999, p. 34).

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Drop City’s narrative arc, according to Gardner, established the pattern for communes to come, “a ‘founding’ period of intense energy and optimism, followed by a period of service which ultimately becomes debilitating, and ending with a period of becoming more closed to outsiders or moving out.” Droppers, Gardner adds, had a low level of commitment, with nothing required of members and people arriving and leaving on almost a daily basis (1978, pp. 38–39). Drop City gained considerable fame and/or notoriety, and visitors were said to include Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Peter Fonda, and Jim Morrison. But by 1973, the community had run out of steam. The land was sold in 1978, and eventually the domes began to fall apart (Miller, 1999, pp. 39–40). In terms of longevity, New Buffalo proved more successful than Drop City, although it was not as architecturally inventive, its buildings more or less adhering to Taos’s pueblo-style structures. The New Mexico commune survived as a community into the 1980s. It eventually became a bed and breakfast, and in the 1990s, one of the original founders, Rick Klein, put the property up for sale (Miller, 1999, pp. 64–65). Today, part of the original property is owned by Bob Fies, who as of 2009 was considering ways of reviving New Buffalo as an intentional community, although not a commune. An even longer-lasting hippie commune, although not as well known, is Black Bear Ranch. Founded in 1968, the commune was settled by those seeking escape from the urban life. The escapees, originally political activists, may have gone to extremes in seeking isolation since the commune is located 10 miles from its closest neighbors over poor roads and is surrounded by a national forest in remote north central California. The community survives today although in somewhat modified form (Miller, 1999, pp. 72–73).

New Buffalo’s Roaming Vision Lucille and I interrupted Bob Fies’s silent meditation period when we arrived at New Buffalo in March 2009. Fies, the owner of what was once one of the more famous hippie communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, graciously broke his period of silence to greet us. And he was willing, though reluctant, to talk about his plans to reinvent his iconic patch of what was imagined to be utopia. New Buffalo never became paradise. Today, all that is left are a few buildings, but it all began with three young men. In 2009, there were three older

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men living on the property, and one was slated to leave. The main house is a reconstructed, solar-paneled version of the original adobe pueblo buildings; a few older structures are more authentic reminders of the housing from the early days, which also included temporary Plains Indian–style tepees. Nearby are small farms, some clumped close together in the rolling, sometimes rocky landscape. It is semirural, dusty, rugged, and compelling, like so much of northern New Mexico. New Buffalo’s history is complex and will not be related in this volume. Suffice it to say that the commune’s roller-coaster existence slowed to a crawl by the 1980s. Arthur Kopecky, who left New Buffalo just before that slowdown, wrote extensively about the community in two books, New Buffalo: Journals from a Taos Commune and Leaving New Buffalo. In the latter, he recalls his final days with the community and why he left. In his conclusion, he comments on the communal scene in general: We came close. If the liquor and drugs had been kept to a minimum and if the people had put their resources into the central effort, so much more could have been accomplished. A more disciplined group could go so much further. (Kopecky, 2006, p. 205) Fies says he owns about 20 percent of the approximately one hundred acres of the original New Buffalo commune, and his property includes the building. In a refurbished circular room in the main house, photos of the old days adorn the shelves and walls. They show young people digging in scrubby brown and green fields and men with bare chests surveying the land. They show women, men, children, and animals squatting in front of a long house. They are reminders of a brief episode in a vanished way of life. Fies says he is not sure what to do with the property now. He adds that he is on hold until the economy or the modern world collapses but that he wants to go in a direction that captures some of the original spirit of the community while recognizing the realities of the new century. One idea put forth is a teaching center for sustainable living. He notes that he was influenced by the works of Diana Leafe Christian, the author of books on intentional living and a member of North Carolina’s Earthaven Ecovillage. Drop City and the original New Buffalo are gone, as are hundreds if not thousands of other communes that began in the countercultural era. Estimates vary wildly on the exact number of communes that have come and gone partly because the definition of hippie commune is a bit slippery.

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But The Farm remains. It may no longer be a commune in the strict sense of the term, but its members remain true to the community’s origins in principle. Christiania is something of an anomaly; it has survived the test of time so far. Next year may be different. Be that as it may, the true hippie commune is mostly an artifact of history, but the debt contemporary communitarians owe to the counterculture is significant.

Chapter 4

Ritual as Nostalgia All societies maintain a conscious secular as well as religious awareness of, and concern about, changes in the levels of complexity . . . and orderliness . . . of their institutions, and constantly compare them with those in the past, or elsewhere, or in hypothetical Utopias, both positive and negative. —Anthony F. C. Wallace, Modernity and Mind

Twenty people are seated in a circle in the community house, or Council Hall. As such buildings go, the community house is fairly typical of those found in other intentional communities, which is not to say it is uninteresting. It is a 13-side round-pole timber-framed structure with a yurt-like construction and a soaring interior ceiling that allows light to stream in from above. I’ve seen similar polygonal community houses elsewhere, although the log support beams and adobe walls with a pinkish hue remind one more of the Southwest than North Carolina’s Blue Ridge/Smoky Mountains. On the other hand, Earthaven Ecovillage, with its variety of inventive buildings, feels like the imagined American frontier. About 45 minutes from the vacation city of Asheville, Earthaven is hidden away deep in a forest down a dirt road. It is accessible, but only if you know what you are looking for. It is July 2008. It is warm, and the air is tranquil and redolent with the scent of gardens and farms of another era. Another image comes to mind: Hobbiton, fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit village in the Shire. Like that fictional place, Earthaven is at peace, its residents appear content—at least on the surface—apart from the frenetic pace of the outside world. Nearby, three children climb on a pickup truck awaiting their family, who moved here from the Netherlands. There is a bit of magic here, if only in the imagination. In a heavily wooded area we notice a shrine with a cob statue

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of a goddess. The shrine is covered by a thatched roof. It is at once an odd yet fitting scene. Earthhaven is steeped in various spiritual traditions, but none dominate. Instead, one gets the sense that residents are committed to harmonious living above all. This isn’t an average American suburb. It is in many respects a model intentional community. It is small scale, with about 40–60 residents scattered through several neighborhoods, each of which has about three to eight homesites. It is isolated. It is tranquil. Its residents exude a sense of purpose combined with practicality. Houses use solar panels, and gardens seem to proliferate. In many ways the community seems to live up to its mission statement, “To create a village which is a living laboratory and educational seed bank for a sustainable human future,” and its vision, “In the midst of planetary change the Earthaven experiment helps inform and inspire a global flowering of bioregionally appropriate cultures.”1 Indeed, Earthaven residents seem committed to two things: living in harmony with each other in an egalitarian society and living in harmony with the environment. How these play out in day-to-day life is not always harmonious, however. As in all human groups, conflicts occur. There is no such place as utopia. Some of the conflicts are simply intrinsic to the nature of contemporary intentional communities because they tend to attract welleducated, highly motivated individuals often with deep-seated convictions. Unlike 19th-century communities, however, ideologies are not strictly enforced. A close examination of Earthaven’s mission statement, for example, emphasizes a strong commitment to environmental concerns but leaves great latitude in how it may be achieved and what it means in practice. Earthaven’s founders meant the community to be an ecovillage from the beginning. The community’s location, on 320 acres on the slopes of the heavily wooded Southern Appalachians, required tree cutting to build homes, a process that is ongoing. Each year more land is opened to agriculture, moving the community more toward food independence; in terms of energy, the community is off the grid. The houses use passive solar and are south facing. Houses are individually owned, although the land is held in common. There is no income sharing, although the community has created a local currency that is worth one hour of labor and is used to make purchases at the trading post. “It’s not like the Hilton Hotel. Everything’s not neat and clean, sometimes we’re grasping at straws to get things done,” noted River Otter, a young woman whose rite of passage into the community is detailed later in this chapter.

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For example, one minor source of dissention in the community concerned the use of Wi-Fi. There were some who wanted Wi-Fi access and others who thought Wi-Fi radiation was a community threat. The issue was resolved by permitting Wi-Fi in homes as long as the user indicated the system was in use by putting out a flag. The system would warn those who passed nearby to avoid the area. In another Earthaven neighborhood, on a section of high ground, a rather substantial multifamily, multistory structure is home to 10 people. It is called Village Terraces. One of the enterprises operated by members of Village Terraces is Imani, a cooperative farm raising chickens, cows, and ducks. The animals supply dairy products, eggs, and meat. This particular use of the land, however, is an issue for some community members. I was told this is not a major point of contention just an ongoing disagreement. But it does point out that even a small community like Earthaven may attract those with diverse lifestyle choices. A larger issue, because it is one that has resonance in the larger society, involves the use of home-building materials. In essence, it pits those who prefer “natural building” materials such as timber frame construction, straw-bale walls, cob and clay/straw walls, earthen floors, and earthen plaster against those who prefer a combination of natural materials and materials that are factory produced but highly energy efficient. Natural building means using materials that are available in the immediate environment. The question of whether to go with natural or environmentally friendly hybrid construction is one with which other ecovillages struggle. Some join an ecovillage expecting to find an eco-version of a middle-class lifestyle with some comfort, while others want a smaller footprint with more communal living. An even more fundamental issue cuts to the heart of the nature of an ecovillage. As one long-time Earthaven resident noted, a fundamental disagreement is between those who put living in community first and others who insist on sticking to the community’s ecological principles above all. The latter means placing a higher value on activities such as permaculture, a form of natural gardening, than on keeping the community together. The choice between keeping a community intact versus holding fast to foundational principles has affected communities both past and present. It was a challenge for the Shakers of the 18th century, the Harmonists and the Oneida Society of the 19th century, and the kibbutzniks of the 20th century. In communities that have achieved longevity, all the issues mentioned above, both large and small, manage to either get resolved or at least kept on

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the back burner through negotiation, mediation, or compromise. One of the ways that communities such as Earthaven solve—or at least soothe—these conflicts is through the unifying force of ritual. Although Earthaven is a secular community, there is a spiritual overlay expressed in rituals that, no matter how vague or diverse, cannot be dismissed as a factor in mediating community disputes. Such was the case one Sunday afternoon at Earthaven. Before we confront what happened that Sunday, we must digress to discuss the function and meaning of ritual and its connections to the liminal state of being as mentioned in chapter 1.

The Road to Utopia Isn’t Paved Liminality is a journey. A journey is not unlike a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage is a kind of rite of passage. When finished, the weary pilgrim is spiritually restored. Communitarians, however, are pilgrims on a journey that has no end. Liminality—the state of being betwixt and between worlds, or stages of life — can be a way of life, a culture. Communitarians are liminal folk because they seek a more perfect way of life, but they know the road to utopia is not paved and they don’t mind the journey. They know the destination will always be slightly out of reach, but armed with that dose of realism they can relax because the destination was never the point. True communitarians face social conflict and other seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and success is never a foregone conclusion even in older, established communities. And the reality is that the failure rate of intentional communities is rather high. History is evidence of that, as explained in chapter 2. For many, however, the journey is better that the manic dissonance of the outside. The journey is the reward, no matter how difficult, and that reward is found in the company of other pilgrims who have at least a modicum of shared values. In other words, by living in community, communitarians can touch the ideal if only with one outstretched finger. Anthropologist Victor Turner in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974, pp. 168–169), a follow-up work to his classic The Ritual Process, uses a wellknown quote from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1966, pp. 340–341) to illustrate the impact a pilgrimage, in this case to Mecca, can have. It is worth revisiting that quote. You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen and experienced has forced me to

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rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. . . . During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the “white” Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I had felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana. We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the “white” from their minds, the “white” from their behavior, and the white from their attitude. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then, perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their “differences” in color. Turner writes that white for Malcolm X represents power and authority. Similarly, the larger society represents these qualities for communitarians. But I do not want to overplay the parallels; to reiterate an earlier point, contemporary communitarians, like the counterculture folk of 40 years earlier, were never oppressed, just dissatisfied. Nor are communitarians particularly heterogeneous ethnically. However, most intentional communities do bring together people who are often spiritually and usually geographically diverse. In that context, Malcolm X’s revelatory statement points to the power of undertaking a journey in community and also to the transformative power of ritual activity. Pilgrimages bond, and in the bonding surprising things can happen. Conflicts become easier to mediate and compromises become more productive.

Floating Spirituality No one could agree even on some of the most trivial of issues. So the meeting that was scheduled for about three hours in the evening was extended one more day. Then yet one more day. After the third day, the major issues had been resolved, and the budget to keep the community going was finally passed, but not without a few hair-raising interludes. One involved a person in the gathering of about two hundred who stood up and proposed the school budget be eliminated. It was a protest gesture that had to be taken up

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and considered because in this community every resident had a say. When the vote came on the matter, the proposal was saved and the school system was spared, but not without more than one vote in favor of the plan. The scene above did not occur in an intentional community. It was actually a town meeting in western Massachusetts in the 1970s. I covered the town meeting as a novice reporter and subsequently covered many others like it. Today, town meetings in New England vary greatly state by state and according to the size of the municipality. But the one I covered in western Massachusetts was pure, which means it followed fairly closely the centuries-old model that originated in Puritan settlements of the region.2 In the pure version, every taxpayer who shows up has a say, has a vote, must be heard, and can propose just about anything. The result can be a headache for the town moderator, the only gatekeeper at the meeting, and for reporters facing deadlines, but as a nostalgic reminder of an agrarian past the town meeting does well. Afterward, those attendees I interviewed, whether they got their way or not, felt something good had happened because they had a voice, because they felt invested in a larger whole. It is no surprise that in recent years national politicians of both major parties have co-opted the term town meeting (but not the town-meeting process) as a tool to engage an audience. The New England town meeting is significant in another context because of a striking resemble to governance systems—specifically, the consensus model, widely adopted by intentional communities. Like the pure town meeting, the consensus model of governance permits all voices in the community to be heard. Like the town meeting, the results can be chaotic and lengthy. And like the town meeting, the consensus model feels like an event out of another time. So it was that the Earthaven council meeting I attended one Sunday in July 2008 in North Carolina kicked my memory back several decades to a school auditorium. My wife and I were not the only visitors invited to attend that meeting of Earthaven members. There were a few other observers in an outer circle of seats, including another researcher. The Earthaven council meets twice monthly, and ritual performance marks the beginning, the middle, and the end of the two-hour-plus session. In fact, ritual is the glue that holds the meeting, and by extension the community, together, for the people gathered represented all Earthaven residents who were able and willing to attend. A characteristic of Earthaven’s rituals, as with some other intentional communities, is the lack of religious preference. The community has no

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set dogma outside the ideological underpinnings of an ecovillage, as reflected in its mission statement, and people of strong religious beliefs as well as no religious beliefs are accepted. Thus, the rituals are tied to a general sense of spirituality without defining what that spirituality implies. In that, Earthaven embraces floating spirituality, a term associated with Scotland’s Findhorn community and New Age practices. Floating spirituality is a vague sense of religion that tends to permeate the day-to-day life of the community but without the dogma or obtrusive controls of an overtly religious community. The sense of floating spirituality is clearly an element in Earthaven’s community council meetings. As Earthaven resident and founding member Arjuna da Silva (2009) notes in an article in Communities magazine, In the area of spirituality, we’ve evolved to a diverse state of ideas and choices that can be a challenge to the maintenance of solid common ground. For now, care of the body and the planet—the “temple” and the “garden”—is our unifying spiritual discipline, a way we share a deep consensus about the sacred. In our spiritual diversity, we find a beautiful unity at the core of our realities. Ecovillages are particularly susceptible to conflicts arising from the contradictions inherent in the combination of essentially modern people attempting to live a more tribal lifestyle. Intense conflicts may arise in these communities over seemingly superficial issues, such as the use of cell phones or the aforementioned Wi-Fi problem. This is directly related to the struggle to reconcile these physical symbols of modernity with the quest for a simpler, less modern lifestyle. At Earthaven, these issues usually come to a head, as one would expect, at community council meetings. Such meetings are essential ingredients in communal living, and ritual expressions are a moving presence in such meetings. Even in communities where communalism is minimal, the community meeting and/or the occasional communal meal are indispensable. Although Earthaven has no community-wide spiritual preference, members are oriented to expect ritualistic activities. Meetings include nonsectarian prayers and songs, often with an earth-centered theme. Rituals were clearly in evidence at the July council meeting. The occasion was special because a member was about to undergo the end of the transition stage of a rite of passage into the community—specifically, a lifting ceremony. It also

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was a meeting marked by controversy and conflict, although the conflict was alleviated in part by that rite of passage.

The Lifting of River Otter On the surface, the council meeting was not far removed from the New England town meeting or even a condominium board. There was a moderator, called a facilitator. The meeting opened with a kind of invocation. There was an agenda agreed upon by all members. Items were taken up in precise order. A certain amount of time was allotted for each agenda item. Members spoke when recognized. Although Robert’s Rules of Order, a popular guide to conducting meetings, was nowhere in sight and was not invoked, one had the sense of parliamentary procedure. But there were differences. The consensus form of governance is complicated and can be lengthy—although within the intentional community movement it is widely used and considered highly successful. The basic principle is that everyone in the community has a say. Members have three options: One can support the proposal by silent assent. One can “stand aside” by indicating as such when asked by the facilitator. And one can indicate “stand in the way” of a proposal when asked. In some cases, a proposal can change until members agree on it. In a May 2010 communication with the author, Earthaven’s Diana Leafe Christian noted of the process: “Most proposals at Earthaven pass because people who have concerns say them early in the discussion and the proposal is modified to meet their concerns. So . . . hearing from everyone and welcoming everyone’s input is designed to help a group make a better proposal.” Another difference was in the spiritual dimension to procedures, in particular the introduction of rituals scattered throughout the occasion. The rituals served to periodically emphasize the sacredness of the community center and to remind members they were part of a tradition, albeit a relatively new tradition. To further emphasize the sacredness of the space, a vessel with a flame was placed on the floor atop a small decorative rug in the center of the meeting circle. The meeting proceeded as follows: Those entering the community house all removed their shoes and took their seats. The two women moved to the center of the room and set an arrangement of flowers and candles, then slowly retreated to their seats in the circle.

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Earthaven veteran Arjuna da Silva facilitated the gathering, and some volunteered to be a gatekeeper, a timekeeper, and a scribe. A bell was rung to indicate the beginning of the session, followed by a kind of opening prayer or incantation in which the group was instructed to engage each other and the “energy” around them. Specifically, members and guests were given the following instructions: “Look around the circle at everyone.” “Take a moment to feel our feet, feel energy from the earth.” “Feel our breath; feel the hands we’re holding.” “Be aware of the wavelengths of the earth.” “Honor those who came before and are yet to be here.” Then followed a reminder of the consensus process and the rules of the council meeting. Again, this was delivered as if it were an invocation. The facilitator added that the consensus process was as important as the content of the proceedings, and she asked that those present “recognize unacknowledged energy.” After that a bell rang to open the 10-minute meditation period. Meditation is an extraordinarily powerful form of ritual, although, as Bell (1992, p. 152) writes, some scholars of Zen Buddhism regard meditation as the opposite of ritual since it is inaction, and ritual suggests performance. Be that as it may, meditation involves both the physical and mental activity of maintaining self-control. In this case, it was a reminder of the community’s spiritual underpinnings. With another ring of the bell, the room shook off its contemplative state and prepared to engage the mundane. The facilitator reviewed the agenda, presented the issues to be discussed, and suggested the times to be allotted for each item. This sparked a disagreement. Among the issues was the appropriate time to present a strategic plan. One member, Tom (not his real name), vigorously pursued a position on the matter that appeared contrary to the majority. Tensions mounted, and the anxiety in the room rose. Considerable discussion ensued. A call went out for someone to volunteer to facilitate the dispute. Several members then spoke about their feelings over Tom’s disagreement. A male speaker criticized Tom harshly. Another warned of the “vibes” the dissenter was sending out. Fracture lines began to develop in the group. A facilitator asked everyone to express his or her feelings, specifically asking whether they felt “anger, sadness, disappointment, confusion, distrust.” Two women volunteered to perform a little “guerilla theater” performance

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dealing with the perceptions of the emotional state of the gathering. By this time an hour had passed since the beginning of the meeting. A number of people spoke freely. As the tension continued to build, speakers expressed frustration. This prompted a discussion of the role and ultimately the reason for consensus governance. Tom took exception to how time in the council was used. He suggested spending more time on fewer proposals. Fissures again appeared. A female speaker noted, “Tom’s demeanor triggered a fear in me.” “I feel fear and sadness,” another said. “I’m . . . pissed off,” yet another said specifically about the agenda. And another: “I’m feeling a rapid heartbeat and anxiety with all this energy.” A facilitator of a special period called “process time” shouted, “Does anybody feel pissed? Does anybody feel betrayed by a fellow member? Disgust?” Eventually Tom stepped aside and left the assembly. A discussion ensued about what was “under the rug.” A male participant said, “It feels like right now we’re at a stalemate.” Shortly thereafter, the attention switched toward the visitors in the room, who were formally welcomed. One of the guests, a researcher other than myself, noted that he was studying conflict resolution in intentional communities, which drew laughter from the group, but the tension remained. Then came the formal admission of River Otter into the community. It began with testimonials, some lengthy, from several members. River Otter had been with Earthaven about a year and a half as a provisional member, in effect a transitional stage. Now she was about to integrate fully into the community. When the moment for the lifting approached, barefoot River Otter moved toward the center of the room. Gradually, the members rose from the circle and moved toward the initiate. All crowded in close, and they slowly lifted her from the floor. As they did so, the group chanted: River Otter, you are beautiful. River Otter, you are strong So wonderful to be with; We’ll help you carry on. River Otter, hear our loving song. At the peak of the ceremony, River Otter lay stretched, held aloft by a sea of hands as she gazed upward. After a few moments, the group released her and returned to the circle.

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There was more business to discuss, and the meeting had gone on for just under two hours. But the tension had abated, and the participants appeared united at least for a while. The ritual had served its primary purpose of recognizing a new member but also broke the cycle of anger and distrust. What was evident during the council session was the creative use of ritual performance, such as the guerilla theater and the lifting, to ease tensions. Even a minor ritual, such as the group’s practice of wiggling fingers as a sign of assent, functioned to remind participants they were not just part of a meeting but members of a subculture, with all the traditions, rituals, and trials that went along with the privilege. Although issues remained unresolved at the time, the emotional roller coaster had been effectively slowed. This is not to dismiss the larger issues raised by the council meeting. Underlying the practical matters—the presentations of a strategic plan, the issue of agricultural loans—were deeper questions: How to deal with dissent? One of Tom’s main complaints was that the strategic plan and the process by which it was prepared were only preliminary and therefore presenting it without further scrutiny by the community would be premature. If consensus governance was not an essential ingredient in community, a simple vote at some point would have decided the issue. But the circuitous and somewhat agonizing task of reaching consensus freed participants to openly consider the deeper issues of what the community meant to them. It permitted them an emotional outlet that could be both contained and channeled through ritual expressions. In other words, the consensus system worked to allow a full airing of the issues that a simple parliamentary style vote might have blocked. Meanwhile, ritual served to ease the tensions associated with that airing.

The Power of Ritual Rituals are metaphors in action. Rituals are means of resolving conflicts and establishing identity. Rituals are arbitrary, like language; the same ritual may have different meanings in different cultures, and different rituals may have similar meanings across cultures. Rituals can be both religious and secular. They exist in both modern societies and tribal societies. Rituals bring people together; they sustain community and reinforce identity; they comfort in times of stress. They may be as simple as a greeting or as complex as a wedding or a rite of passage. Rituals have the power to transform, to heal, and to protect, and the knowledge of rituals is power. As Grimes (2000, p. 7) puts it, “Ritual knowledge lodges in the bone, in its very marrow.” Like language, rituals are means of symbolic communication.

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A ritual is, therefore, a cultural signifier. As such, rituals are an expression of cultural distinctiveness. For intentional communities, rituals can be a critical resource, helping to define membership in the group, ease tensions in times of stress, and provide an alternative to the sometimes rigorous routines of communal living. As the lifting of River Otter demonstrated, ritual also can be an effective method of mediating conflict. One fact is clear: no society present or past is or has been devoid of ritual. Rituals—symbolic actions or a series of related symbolic actions that have meaning—are as old as the human species, and some scholars say they are not restricted to our species. There is substantial evidence, for example, that Neanderthal, now considered a separate species, buried their dead in some ritualistic manner, and ritual activities have been observed in other nonhuman primates; the mating activities of birds, reptiles, and even insects have been described as rituals. But the rituals of our species, from the seemingly simple handshake to the complex and varied rites of passage found in every culture, are the outgrowth of the human desire to communicate in a metalanguage with the power to transform both individuals and communities. Not all human actions are rituals; the key is meaning. Take the handshake, for example. It is a basic human action evident in various forms in several cultures although not universal throughout history. But in a modern context the handshake is an egalitarian act, a symbol of two people who for the brief moment of contact are committing themselves to the same action. In other words, they are for that instant equal. In certain contexts, therefore, the handshake is a very potent act. If a person of lesser status shakes hands with a person of greater status, the act brings them into balance with each other. For that brief moment two people of different status are joined and the distinctions between them erased until their hands are released. This powerful action draws the person of lower status closer to the upper-status person, which politicians and other celebrities use to their advantage. Commenting on the depth of meaning attached to ritual performance, Mary Douglas (1966/1989, p. 114) observes: No experience is too lowly to be taken up in ritual and given a lofty meaning. The more personal and intimate the source of ritual symbolism the more telling the message. The more the symbol is drawn from the common fund of human experience, the more wide and certain its reception.

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The Ritual Context Complex rituals, such as marriages and funerals, are named and categorized, but scholars disagree on the typology of rituals. For example, Catherine Bell (1992, pp. 93–137) cities six major ritual types; others propose more. Anthropology texts usually focus on two: rites of passage and rites of intensification. The term rite of passage is well known, rite of intensification less so. I will define the latter as rituals performed in times of crisis intended to provide solace and solidarity to a community. A funeral is an example of ritual intensification, although, depending upon one’s religious tradition, it may also be considered a rite of passage or a pilgrimage. Bell uses the category rites of affliction, which is taken from Victor Turner’s work, to describe rituals intended to alleviate illness or mediate societal distress, which I would place in the intensification category. Sustaining rites describes rituals that are routinized or part of calendrical cycles.3 Praying to Mecca five times a day or opening a meeting with a gavel are examples. The pilgrimage, although it is in a different category, follows the narrative arc of a rite of passage. I mention these broad categories and neglect others because these play a critical role in contemporary societies despite the seeming lack of interest in ritual activity by modern humans. All too often, rituals in postindustrial societies are viewed as primitive or superstitious, which is itself a mark of backward thinking. Groups whose activities, especially their sustaining rites, are pervasive are considered trapped in the past, incapable of moving beyond their cultural trappings, when in fact their rituals help them tap the strength of their communities so they can forge ahead. In commenting on an anthropological description of a Mbuti (a Central African hunter-gatherer group) singing ritual, Tom Driver (2006, p. 153) marvels at the intensity of the performance and “some kind of mystical participation, in which the various members, although interacting with each other only in singing and not with eyes, spoken words, or physical touch, were yet as much united as it is possible for human beings to be.” Driver adds that the modern world offers little opportunity for this level of participation. However, postindustrial societies have not been stripped of ritual, even rites of living. But rituals have been separated to a degree from religion and/or spirituality. Festival rites, such as American Thanksgiving, are acknowledged as religious in origin but not so much in practice. For example, the Thanksgiving feast in a modern context is more nostalgic than

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spiritual, an excuse for some to relax in the living room or den to catch a football game. Thus devoid of spiritual depth, rituals are diminished in their impact. What is left are vague social observances that gratify momentary needs. What intentional communities such as Earthaven do quite effectively is raise the level of ritual activity to the spiritual, even if the community follows no specific religious or spiritual direction. The lifting of River Otter was infused with spiritual overtones and undertones; the raising up of River Otter could easily be interpreted as a resurrection into a new life as a full, not provisional, member of the community. Scholars such as Eliade (1958) and Grimes (2000) have suggested that initiation rituals reenact death, resurrection, and rebirth. “Following this pattern (of death, resurrection and rebirth), initiates achieve a new state of being. Not only are they remade, but the initiating elders and other members of the entire community are rejuvenated as well” (Grimes, 2000, p. 101). In the Earthaven ceremony, River Otter was raised up facing the heavens as if on a funeral pyre. The song of praise in effect brought her back to life, and she was lowered as a new person, a full member of the Earthaven community. The intensity of the lifting was achieved because members of the council were not just residents but stakeholders in an ongoing experiment. Participants needed to work at the task of keeping the enterprise together and, thus, needed a mechanism to maintain morale and seal group identity. This they accomplished through the lifting. Intentional communities are delicate and need to be fine-tuned by the presence of ritual, an inherently communal activity. Community rituals moderate the stress and strain of maintaining group cohesion by momentarily excluding some and including others. As spectators but not participants at Earthaven’s lifting, I and the other guests could but vicariously and perhaps enviously glimpse the unfolding spectacle.

Rituals and Cultural Identity Some rituals persist through time, and others are temporary solutions to immediate circumstances. The well-documented and well-known Ghost Dance, which swept through American Indian nations in the late 19th century, disappeared after the massacre at Wounded Knee in late 1890. Yet its impact was startling. As a ritual that fostered a pan-Indian movement it spread from the Piute nation to other nations of the West, an intensification rite that united disparate societies in common cause. White Americans in-

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terpreted the intentionally peaceful ritual as a threat, which led to the massacre. Today, the pan-Indian Ghost Dance is part of history, but an older ritual, the Sun Gaze Dance, or simply the Sun Dance, survives on reservations of the Great Plains. In 1995, while staying briefly on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, I asked Jerry Farlee, a mixed-blood Ghost Dance intercessor, why the Sun Dance is still practiced but not the Ghost Dance. He replied that the Sun Dance was part of the Plains Indian culture long before the Ghost Dance and was considered a Lakota ritual, whereas the Ghost Dance was not Lakota, as it originated in Nevada among the Piute. Simply put, rituals are only as meaningful as their connections to the culture in which they appear. If the ritual originates within the group, it is more powerful because it is tied to group identity. It becomes part of that culture’s collective memory. The Ghost Dance was part of very brief and quite tragic period of Lakota history that ended with Wounded Knee. It was that massacre—not the dance—that inspired an uprising at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973, when the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over the town of Wounded Knee. But the AIM was a pan-Indian phenomenon, as was the Ghost Dance, not specifically attached to any tribal nation. Therefore, as markers of American Indian identity, AIM and the earlier Ghost Dance were powerful, but they were much less so as markers of Lakota identity. Unlike tribal or traditional societies, hypermodern societies often lack the level of ritual activity necessary to establish a clear-cut identity to bind members together. For that reason, communities such as Earthaven, which was only 14 years old at the time of the lifting, need to establish traditions fairly rapidly. These traditions, beliefs, and rituals become the seedbed of a subculture that at least possesses the sense of uniqueness necessary to differentiate it from the larger society. Bell (1992) and others note that a dearth of clear-cut rites of passage has contributed to the loss of community and growing sense of social alienation in American culture. She adds that some scholars go further by suggesting that without formal initiation ceremonies young adults may be pushed into rash behavior to prove themselves. From that perspective, it could be said that the initiation rites of youth gangs are the result of the larger society’s inability to offer some formal means of saying, “You are a part of us.” On the other hand, I argue that Western societies are rife with rites of passage—for example, a high school or college graduation. But there is a difference in the essential quality, for example, of a Maasai circumcision rite and a college graduation ceremony, both of which, broadly defined, are stages in rituals of passage.

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Tepilit Ole Saitoti writes in his autobiography of his circumcision as a Maasai youth and of the pain he felt during the public ceremony. But he also observes that the pain is symbolic of a transition from one stage of life to another. “Circumcision means a break between childhood and adulthood. For the first time in your life, you are regarded as a grown-up, a complete man or woman” (1986, p. 66).4 The actual circumcision ceremony, however, is the end of a much longer preparatory process that can take months during which the youth may undertake tasks such as herding cattle. The college experience, which for Saitoti contained similar challenges to his circumcision, also marks a passage from one state of being to another. It may also be painful, although obviously the pain is of a different kind. It ends in a public ceremony, after which the initiated is supposed to enter the real world of adult responsibilities. Of course, beyond the obvious, a college graduation and a Maasai circumcision differ in connection to cultural identity. For the Maasai boy, the rite is essential to becoming a man and is a mark of the community. One does not become a Maasai without it. Although college may be tied to a set of traditions and beliefs, the modern academic experience has been largely stripped of the mystical and the reverent. In the Western world, the college degree is regarded as a middleclass requirement but it is not bound to a particular culture or subculture. Devoid of such cultural connections and the meanings attached to such connections, for many the college experience has become only a means of obtaining a better job. This connection between ritual and tradition is logical but it is one with which communitarians struggle. How does one create ritual that can connect with tradition in a community in the making? It is not painless. The lifting of River Otter was Earthaven’s attempt to create and maintain a lasting rite of passage, although the lifting itself represented the final act in the second stage of this complex ritual. River Otter’s passage actually began with her decision to move to the community. In her case, she came to Earthaven as an apprentice herbalist for a few months. An apprentice is expected to work and contribute money to the community. Then she became a work exchanger for a neighborhood—prospective members often work for someone for room and board. At the time of her lifting, she was a provisional member with her own rented place. Older people with good income can become exploring members if they contribute a certain of amount money and also rent from someone in the community. One still must perform four hours of community service a week.5

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Earthaven’s passage to full membership requires its prospective members to prove themselves in some way. But a rite of passage is not supposed to be easy; otherwise, becoming a member of a community, whether it is to become a Maasai warrior or an intentional communitarian, carries less meaning—to use a cliché, no pain, no gain. For that reason, a Jewish brit milah, or ritual circumcision, which is performed eight days after a male child is born, is not in a strict sense a rite of passage. Although the infant may (or may not) experience pain during the brief act, the pain is not the point. A rite of passage is a process the initiate agrees to undertake over a specific period of time. For a male Jewish child, the rite of passage is the modern bar mitzvah ritual, before which the youth is expected to learn the essentials of the faith. In other words, to become a bar mitzvah is a process of learning that ends in a ceremony. In a similar fashion, Christian baptisms may be rites of passages or not, depending upon when the ritual takes place. If the ritual takes places, as it does in some sects, when the initiate is old enough to comprehend the meaning, it is a rite of passage. Other examples of initiation rites abound, from Army boot camp to pledging a sorority or fraternity to coming-out rites, such as the Quinceañera, to various Christian confirmation rituals. All require the initiate to go through something and to knowingly accept the challenge.

Nature of the Passage As mentioned in chapter 1, rites of passage were first explained by Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), who proposed three stages to the process, and the idea of process is critical. Victor Turner’s explication of van Gennep’s work focused on the center stage—the transition, or liminal, stage. The first and third stages are called separation and reincorporation respectively, although the last stage sometimes is also called reaggregation or integration. It should be noted that not all rites of passage neatly fit the three stages. The first stage, separation, is the break. It is the moment the initiate (or an elder) decides to enter the next stage in his or her life. It is signing up for military service or the decision to attend a specific college. It is the first step toward entering the state of being betwixt and between worlds. Once the separation has occurred, the initiate enters the second, critical stage— the transition. It is in this liminal stage, or state, that the transformation of the individual takes place. In the state of liminality, Turner (1969, p. 95)

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says the initiate is symbolically, if not literally, stripped bare in preparation for his or her rebirth. Like military boot camp, the process is intended to force a shedding of the detritus of one’s former world in order to enter the new world unencumbered. The third stage is the point at which the initiate reincorporates into the community as a transformed individual. It is during the liminal stage that communitas takes place. Communitas is a bonding born of a common experience, particularly an experience that pushes the initiate outside his or her comfort zone. If one is stripped bare of the past, close identifications develop with those enduring the same trials. In the Earthaven lifting, it was not just River Otter who was lifted but in a sense the entire community. The ritual may have been designed to bring a new member into Earthaven, but its effect was to further bind and strengthen the community. This binding, or communitas, can be potent. For example, Maasai youth who undergo circumcision together usually are bonded for life in friendship and in the social order of the community. According to Turner, communitas is the opposite of structure. Structure, or social structure, is what anthropologists refer to as the institutions, the hierarchies, and the social organization of a society. Communitas and the liminal state are antistructural, although Turner writes that the term is not meant in the negative. Instead, antistructure implies the condition of being “between the categories of ordinary life” (1974, p. 273). Ordinary life, in this sense, is life that conforms to the rules generated from a society’s structure. Antistructure, on the other hand, can be liberating as well as fraught with uncertainty. It is an inversion of structure. Liminal folk, thus unencumbered from the constraints of structure, are free to generate new patterns of living, just as the Earthaven members do. Probably one of the more striking examples of antistructure is the rite of passage among Old Order Amish called Rumspringa, which was featured in the 2002 Lucy Walker documentary Devil’s Playground. This period of “running around” begins when an Amish youth reaches the age of 16 and ends when the youth makes a decision to become Amish—in other words, to commit to baptism and therefore become a member of the community. From the Amish perspective, one is not truly Amish until the baptism, just as one is not truly Maasai until the circumcision. During Rumspringa, which may last several years, both Amish boys and girls are permitted to indulge in otherwise forbidden behavior. They (usually boys) may wear modern clothes, drive cars, drink alcohol, date girls—in other words, act modern or “English” (Mazie, 2005, p. 745). Despite the freedom, about 80 to 90 percent of those who have experienced

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Rumspringa are baptized and become Amish (Mazie, 2005, p. 752).6 By permitting Rumspringa, the Amish run the risk of losing members, thus putting the community in danger of collapse. On the other hand, as Shachtman (2006, p. 14) observes, without the safety valve of Rumspringa “there would be a higher probability of loss, of many more Amish youth succumbing to the lure of the forbidden, perhaps even after marriage and baptism, with resultant defections from the sect and havoc within it.”

Between Two Worlds The contemporary Amish and other communitarians, such as Earthaven, share a few instructive similarities. Both balance betwixt and between tradition and modernism. Both are antistructural in the context of a larger society. In this sense, intentional communities as a whole function as though in a continuing state of liminality. In relation to the outside world, these communities exist perennially within a transitional state in which there is an ongoing negotiation between the need to maintain ideological purity and the need to keep the community intact by engaging the outside world on various levels. Earthaven’s goal, like most ecovillages, is to create an ecologically self-sustaining community. This requires a degree of selfcontainment and implies a degree of separation and detachment from hypermodernism. Yet to achieve that goal often means there must be a level of practical engagement with the outside. To engage the hypermodern while at the same time partaking in a lifestyle marked by simplicity, ritual, and the tribal is ongoing process. But that is the nature of the liminal experience for those who opt for communal living. As Kat Kincade, writing in 1994 about life at the Twin Oaks Community of Louisa, Virginia, observes: We wear used clothing made of natural fibers, and we don’t throw it out when it becomes stained. When we buy new shoes, they are likely to be Birkenstocks. We have built geodesic domes, enjoy a rustic cabin and a tipi, and one of these days will probably get around to making a yurt. We depend on wood heat and cut our own firewood. We go in for underwater births, mud pits, nude swimming, sweat huts, and pagan rituals. We think seriously about animal rights. Some people won’t even kill flies. A closer look reveals that these surface features, though the may well represent the dominant culture at Twin Oaks at this time, do not

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command the loyalty of all of its members, not by a long shot. More than half of us do several of the following: eat meat, drink coffee, read Newsweek, go to regular AMA physicians, wear clean neat clothing, ignore the tipi, take rituals with a grain of salt, and kill flies with a clear conscience. (1994, p. 200) Founded in 1967, Twin Oaks is one of the oldest continuously functioning communities from the counterculture era. The synergy between the traditional and the new, between the tribal and the modern, was key to the survival of Twin Oaks. Kincade writes that the “blueprint” for Twin Oaks was Walden Two, a science fiction novel written in 1948 by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s novel describes a utopian community where the ills of society had been replaced by satisfying work and artistic expression. In founding Twin Oaks, Kincade (who died in 2008) and a few others combined the utopian and the practical into a community that was socially, if not economically, sustainable. She writes: The reason we didn’t collapse within six months was that we also had some common sense, and our vision included economic stability and tolerance of diversity. We built a house, went to work to earn money, took in new members to replace people who left. (1994, p. 10) Today, Twin Oaks remains between worlds, between the simple life and the hypermodern. Like The Farm, it is enterprising. The community has produced a line of hammocks and hanging chairs for most of its existence. Other business ventures include the Tofu Hut, the center of the community’s tofu business. Twin Oaks Community Foods, a cooperative owned by the workers, produces and markets tofu and related products such as tempeh and soymilk. A book-indexing service for publishers is yet another enterprise. Profits from these businesses are plowed back into the community. Despite these business arrangements, Twin Oaks restricts certain signifiers of modernity, such as television sets, which are available for video viewing in some of the community rooms but not for network broadcast. Cell phone and personal computers also are allowed, blurring the line between what is and is not acceptable. One community member explained the distinction by noting television broadcasts put the viewer at the mercy of advertisements. With a computer such advertising is under greater user control, at least in theory.

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Passages of a Third Kind Not all communities have such highly formalized ceremonies for new members as Earthaven. But there is usually some kind of transitional phase before formally joining a community. The EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI), New York, has an “Exploration Process” for those planning to become members. Settling into the community means one intends to either buy or rent a home, so the ecovillage offers what it calls a “structured learning process,” which means becoming familiar with all of the information on EVI’s extensive Web site, touring the community, staying overnight or longer, and at some point joining community activities, such as the weekly communal meal.7 Prospective members also may volunteer for work in the community or attend community meetings. Then it is a matter of buying a home and moving in. The process on the surface appears less complicated than at Earthaven, which is reflected in the physical appearance of each. Earthaven looks unique. In its mixture of unusual dwellings, from Hobbit houses to rambling shambling multifamily dwellings to its “mud hut,” Earthaven is distinctive. Although within commuting distance of Asheville, the community’s back-road, deep-forest isolation means there a few casual visitors. Although its geography is rural and the community is perched on a hilltop, EVI does not feel isolated since one can see Ithaca College and Cornell University from certain lookout points. The community’s duplex homes are quaint and built close together as in a village. In addition to its relatively normal appearance, EVI lacks intense ritual activity, although there are attempts to generate celebrations that reinforce community identity. Liz Walker, a cofounder of the community, writes: We celebrate Easter with an egg hunt and Chanukah with potato latkes (cooked by the dozen). Other Jewish holidays, Christmas tree decorating, a big Thanksgiving feast (complete with the option of vegan turkey), and occasionally a Buddhist-inspired ceremony or Earthbased spirituality ritual all take the spotlight during the year. We have corn roasts in the fall and a strawberry festival on the summer solstice. . . . What makes our community extraordinary is that we often invent our own celebrations, drawing from many traditions—or creating a new one. (2005, p. 66) Among these invented celebrations is the Winter Spiral, a winter solstice celebration held in the common house. The event begins, according

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to Walker, in a darkened space, which is gradually lit by children and then adults walking in a spiral to reach candles in the center of the room. The group sings, “Light is returning, even though it is the darkest hour. No one can hold back the dawn. Let’s keep it burning; let’s keep the light of hope alive. Earth Mother is calling her children home.” Other celebrations include jocular titles such as Guys Baking Pies and Women Goin’ Swimmin’, both held in August, and Oafs Baking Loafs, in February (2005, pp. 67–68).

Tuning In, Tuning Out Despite the intensity of ritual, or at least ritualistic, activity during my EcoExperience Week at Scotland’s Findhorn, there was little evidence of ritual expression in the day-to day life of members. There may be a few reasons for this. The sizeable population of Findhorn seems to depress the level of intimacy that might be expected in a smaller community. Also, the division of the community into The Park and Cluny Hill may be a further obstacle. Even within The Park, there were clear divisions. The Field of Dreams, for example, is separated from other sections of The Park both geographically and in a vague sense of style in the size and design of the homes. The membership process, however, does offer opportunities for considerable bonding primarily because many prospective members are initiated into the community through Experience Week programs, an Exploring Community Life week, a Living in Community month, or a three-month Foundation Programme. All are fully immersive and acculturative experiences. Nevertheless, during my week stay I could not avoid asking a focaliser to describe rituals that were mutually practiced at Findhorn beyond the initiatory programs. The answer surprised me at first. “We have no rituals.” It was an odd response because spirituality has been an undercurrent in the community since its founding. What the focaliser meant, however, was there were no large-scale, complex rituals regularly practiced throughout the community. That made more sense until someone else pointed out that there was a ritual, seemingly minor, that was universally practiced and in effect a symbol of considerable consequence. It was morning at Findhorn’s Cluny Hill, and I sat down with five others at a small table in the former hotel’s well-stocked kitchen. As recounted in chapter 1, morning KP duty was my job for the week. Our focaliser, the leader of any activity, lit a candle, and in turn we talked briefly about how we felt. It was a simple ceremony but critical to establishing a sense of group cohesion. It was intended to bring a sense of purpose to the otherwise

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mundane work of preparing lunch for a roomful of strangers. Each of the other groups in our Eco-Experience Week party conducted their own tuning in. As mentioned in chapter 2, attunement is a form of silent meditation and an expression of feelings that begins any activity in the Findhorn community; it means basing activities on inner guidance. In the kitchen where I worked, the attunement involved asking everyone in the group what was upmost on their minds, a simple “share your feelings” activity that moderated the impact of the work. The effect was profound. In the same way that helping out in a soup kitchen can deeply affect volunteers who have ceded their leisure time to engage in a redemptive act, the tuning in gave meaning to the drudgery, whether or not there was real meaning to be had. At the beginning of an activity, the attunement ceremony is called tuning in. At the end of the work session in the kitchen a similar ceremony was conducted, a tuning out. Like the tuning in, participants were asked to reflect on what happened during the preceding few hours. Answers varied and became more open toward the end of the week.

Looking Backward If rituals may be used to mediate conflict, as at Earthaven, they may be used to lighten the burdens of everyday experience as at Findhorn. But communitarians today are less inclined to cede their desire for individual self-expression than their 18th- and 19th-century spiritual ancestors. In part this has much to do with the level of ideological purity in early utopian communities. Shakers, for example, not only held non-negotiable religious beliefs as set down by Mother Ann Lee, their founder, but day-to-day living was strictly regulated. Contact between sexes, which was limited, was chief among the elements of life so regulated. This was the case with each Shaker village (Freisen & Friesen, 2004, p. 109). Shaker rituals were complex and unequivocally signified theological concept. From a certain perspective, one can say that all of Shaker life was ritualized. Work was especially valued in order to complete Mother Ann’s instructions to “put your hands to work, and your hearts to God.” Thus so highly and tightly organized, Shaker society was able to produce complex and highly ordered rituals, although one of their primary spiritual experiences, laboring, began as a highly individualistic shaking during songs. Over time, laboring became more formalized and rigid (Pitzer, 1997, p. 39).

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Since ritual is linked to spirituality and spiritually to religion, religious communities are hardwired for ritual activity. However, recent trends in communal living tend toward secular communities such as ecovillages. While attempting to maintain some ritualistic binding through floating spiritual beliefs, the reality is that unifying rituals are more difficult to create and maintain without a specific religious tradition. To make up for this deficit, modern communitarians create rituals that are eclectic, drawing from several religious traditions. This New Age mish-mash of ritual activity, if disseminated through other intentional communities, may over time develop into syncretic forms of new religious experience.

Chapter 5

Dream a Little Dream Utopian Communities juxtapose freedom and social organization; they exalt the individual and represent a search for communal perfection. . . . They connect the subjective and objective, the inward and outward, contemplation and action. —Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden

In a remote rural area about an hour northwest of Toronto, Canada, a handful of dedicated people farm a patch of land to support their space-age, ecofriendly communal home. Just outside Ithaca, New York, residents of an ecovillage plan a third neighborhood on a hilltop overlooking one of the nation’s most progressive cities. In the Cape Cod town of East Falmouth, Massachusetts, a resident of a cohousing community opens up his solar greenhouse, which is more than half the size of the large home to which it is attached. Finding community in the 21st century is more complicated than in the 1960s and 1970s, when putting up a tent or a makeshift cabin would do. Today, intentional communities tend to be rather sophisticated operations that may be planned years in advance. There seems to a community to meet every taste. And each genre of intentional community—cohousing, ecovillage, elder commune—has its own network and Web site. In this chapter, I examine contemporary communities—and their ideological underpinnings—that seem to point to the future of communal living. I begin in the Arizona desert with an experimental city that drew inspiration from the preindustrial past in a flawed but noteworthy attempt to create an intentional community of tomorrow.

Arcosanti: A Postopia There are bells in the high desert. About an hour south of the New Age Mecca of Sedona, Arizona, a dirt road winds off the main highway in a

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seemingly aimless fashion. Eventually it ends at a collection of novel and futuristic buildings that run down the side of a cliff like ivy on a wall. There are half domes, arches, cubes, and buildings of indeterminate shape. There are walkways that zigzag down an escarpment and a multistoried block-like structure with enormous round windows. But it is only when one is within a few yards of the complex that the bells can be heard. The bells are an apt symbol of Arcosanti, a would-be city that was to ring in a new age of urban living. The bells also function as wind chimes, and the wind at Arcosanti can be brutal. Some communitarians dream of turning the good earth into a village. Their vision of utopia is rooted in the simple life on the land. Others, like Arcosanti’s Paolo Soleri, have grander visions. Soleri, an architect and urban visionary, had a vision of a city rising out of the desert populated by five thousand permanent residents. In 1970, construction began, and it is continuing incrementally. But the people have yet to come in the numbers Soleri had anticipated. Instead of a small city, Soleri got a small village. There were only about 75 people staying in Arcosanti as of late March 2009, and I am told the population never reached greater than a few hundred. For the traveler who stumbles upon it unexpectedly, Arcosanti is a surprise, even for those who have spent time in Sedona, with its famed power vortices and striking red rocks. It is sometimes mistaken for the Biosphere 2 experiment further south in Oracle, Arizona, although the Arcosanti and the Biosphere bear no physical resemblance and have different purposes. Now back to the dirt road. Why was it not paved if it is supposed to lead to a city? Simple answer: to make car travel difficult. And what about those wind chime bells, or windbells, as they are marketed? It happens that they are the primary source of income in what is in essence a company town, with Soleri as the head of the foundation, Cosanti, that operates Arcosanti. Windbells helped build Arcosanti, as did the architectural perspective, called arcology, that is Soleri’s brainchild. More than any other place, Arcosanti is the result of Soleri’s perceptions of how urban life should be designed, not just lived. Soleri intended Arcosanti to resemble an updated version of a preindustrial Italian village, and that he achieved after a fashion. To understand the why and how of arcology and the Arcosanti community one has to know who Soleri is. He was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 and earned a PhD in architecture there in 1946. He arrived in the United States the next year, where he studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West. After returning to Italy in 1950 and becoming known for his architectural designs, Soleri was involved in the construction of a ceramics factory, which

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inspired his design of ceramic and bronze windbells. He moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1956. Among his projects was the theory he called arcology, a word coined from ecology and architecture. The central principle of arcology is the creation of dwellings and other buildings in a close-knit pedestrian community with a minimal environmental impact.1 Soleri’s Cosanti Foundation is the organizational hub of his projects, including Arcosanti. Cosanti is also the name of the futuristic complex in metropolitan Phoenix where Soleri lives. Funds from the sale of windbells are handled by a forprofit group, Cosanti Originals, which is operated by the Cosanti Foundation, of which Soleri is head. These funds are plowed back into ongoing construction at Arcosanti. About two thirds of the community’s income comes from the sales of the windbells; tourism supplies much of the remainder. Since the recession of 2008, bell sales are reportedly down 35 percent, leaving some in the community uncertain. As one resident noted, “Maybe with less income we’ll be more sustainable.” Most of those living at Arcosanti work on site, many making windbells. A significant number are young people, students who come to work for a few months and leave. Some stay on. There are six children living here; I was told they attend a local school. If members of Arcosanti feel they need a change of scenery and if they have a car, the small town of Cordes Junction is minutes away, and Phoenix is about 70 miles to the south. Soleri himself comes to Arcosanti from Cosanti once a week for his School of Thought, a kind of discussion group he leads. The School of Thought, which is held on Wednesdays and is open to anyone, is intended as a forum for Soleri’s ideas and philosophies. One new resident described the session as akin to a weekly church service for some.

What One Sees It is my second day at Arcosanti. My wife Lucille and I and two other professors spent the night in guest rooms near the bottom of the cliff. A dirt road winds down the side of the cliff to the simple, inexpensive rooms, but to get to the main complex and the large, oddly shaped multistoried main building that houses a dining area, visitors center, and offices we have to follow a series of walkways up the cliff. It is scenic and almost like a resort in the morning light. The previous night was not as easy. Negotiating the walkways in the dark with a small flashlight carried a slight risk of falling. As we all walk up to the dining room we look over the landscape and notice a field, which we were told is not farmed on a regular basis and does

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not support the community’s food needs. We pass near a swimming pool, which is unused since there is still a slight chill in the late March air. Further on there is an amphitheater. It is empty, but we can imagine the concrete space filled for a performance. One thing is clear; the amphitheater is not large enough to hold 5,000 people. Within a few minutes and puffing slightly, we make it to the dining room. After a swing through the cafeteria line, the four of us are sitting at a small table, and I am gazing through a giant circular window into the desert beyond. The wind is rising, and the dining room is filling up for breakfast. One of my colleagues, a geographer, says he is surprised Arcosanti has not made better use of the wind. We are both disappointed considering we were told Arcosanti is not fully sustainable. We also have been told that the primary purpose of Arcosanti is to experiment with architecture as a means of creating a pedestrian community. In other words, it is not an ecovillage, and to be fair Arcosanti does not advertise itself as one. Later in the day, we are at another table discussing the project with a group of residents. Most are young and have been at Arcosanti for only a short time. Like other young adults and students they came for a five-week workshop or internship and stayed on. The workshops are an entry path to living in the community. Wages are low, about $160 a month, but rent and utilities are free. I think of Robert Owen and New Harmony. In both Scotland and Indiana Owen was essentially building a utopian company town. Arcosanti is more of a worker community. And I wonder how that plays out in terms of building a local culture. I speak with a few people who have been here for some time. One is Kathy (not her real name), who has lived at Arcosanti off and on since 1979 for a total of about 20 years. “Before I came there were people living in tents,” she says, adding that people at Arcosanti back then were more enthusiastic, more “gung ho.” “We worked until we dropped,” she says. Today, Kathy notes, there is less enthusiasm. Justin, who is in his late twenties, says he came to Arcosanti for a workshop because he likes the idea, even though he is working for very little. “I really believe in what they are doing; I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Christopher (not his real name), who is in his early thirties, says he was intrigued by the idea of a community like Arcosanti before he knew about the place. He was especially inspired by Portmeirion, a nostalgic Italianate fantasy village in Western Wales built in the 20th century by an English architect. Portmeirion was used a set in the 1960’s TV series The Prisoner and other shows. Christopher says he read about Arcosanti in an architectural magazine and with

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Portmeirion in the back of his mind came to the Arizona community, where he has been working for about two months. As we are talking, the tall cypress trees and the walkways and the science fiction architecture are changing as the light of the day changes. With the surrounding desert as a backdrop, Arcosanti looks like a postapocalyptic refuge built by the last surviving humans. The wind starts to whip more fiercely, and Arcosanti is becoming like a refuge. It feels as if one of the circular windows is about to be blown in or out, and the doors to the building are shaking ominously. But I am assured by others that nothing will happen. Outside, the trees are bending with the wind. The trees combined with the bizarre architecture now make Arcosanti look like a Tuscan village built by the Jetsons, and I wonder if the wind is going to pick up the place and fly off with it.

Arcosanti and New Urbanism The notion that architecture plays a distinctive role in utopian communities is not recent. Thomas More was specific about the design of houses in his Utopia (Lewis, 1987, p. 109). In 19th-century America, both the Harmonists and Owenists at New Harmony had clear ideas about the look of their communities. Shaker architecture is still admired by architectural students today. In the 20th century, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and architectural thinkers such as Le Corbusier were eager to apply design to utopian community concepts. French-Swiss thinker and designer Le Corbusier’s 1922 design for a Contemporary City (Ville Contemporaine) was intended to house 3 million inhabitants (Lewis, 1987, p. 126). Thankfully, Le Corbusier’s ideas were unrealized, for he intended to flatten much of central Paris and construct antiseptic towers connected by highways. Le Corbusier’s interest seemed to lie more with the idea of progress and the machine than with people and community. Arcosanti comes from the same impulse to reshape the urban landscape but its underlying sentiments are quite the opposite; they are human centered. In terms of sensibilities, Soleri’s arcology resembles the two contemporary movements aimed at reimagining urbanity, the American-born movement known as New Urbanism and the Italian-born Slow City movement, a byproduct of the Slow Food movement. Slow City (Citta Slow) proponents seek to turn cities away from the tyranny of the car and return city streets to pedestrians—in other words, slow down the frenzy of the city. “The movement is about creating an environment where people can resist the pressure to live by the clock and do everything faster” (Honoré, 2004, p. 87).

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New Urbanism is similar. New Urbanists design towns or villages that incorporate the more positive aspects of cities. Like Slow City advocates, New Urbanists celebrate the pedestrian street and the pedestrian lifestyle. New Urbanist communities are designed so that work, home, shopping, and entertainment are all within about a 10-minute walking distance. Houses are designed with front porches and small front lawns to permit interaction with passersby. Homes are close to each other and apartments and single and multifamily houses are included in the same neighborhood (Hutter, 2007, pp. 417–418). New Urbanist villages are meant to inspire the sense of community that preindustrial villages and urban centers were supposed to have had. Most of all, New Urbanism is a reaction to the growth of suburbia and suburban sprawl, especially in the latter half of the 20th century. It was the lure of the suburbs that drove the Second World War generation from the cities and farms to the netherworld of cars and faceless neighbors. And it was the lure of something better that drove the largely middle-class counterculture generation to reinvent the rural communes. And it was the charm of the traditional New England village combined with a disgust for suburban sprawl that prompted James Howard Kunstler (1993, p. 10) to say this of the American landscape: Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call growth. Three of the founders of the movement, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth PlaterZyberk, and Jeff Speck, appear to echo Kunstler, although with less vitriol: Suburban sprawl, now the standard American patter of growth, ignores historical precedent and human experience. It is an invention,

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conceived by architects, engineers, and planners, and promoted by developers in the great sweeping of the old that occurred after the Second World War. (2000, p. 4) .

This impetus to erase the past was also evident in the work the aforementioned Le Corbusier and the International style of architecture that arose in the early 20th century. New Urbanism, on the other hand, uses the past to reconceptualize the future. Duany and Plater-Zyberk, for example, at one time lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and were said to have been inspired by that city. With its large city green and 18th- and 19th-century houses close to the street, New Haven is pedestrian friendly, a fact aided by Yale University’s campus, which dominates downtown and adds an aura of the ancient, even if the buildings are faux ancient. Among the notable examples of New Urbanist projects are Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; and Poundbury in Dorset, United Kingdom. The latter is a project supported by Britain’s Prince Charles, who is well-known for his disdain of modernist architecture and his deep interest in environmental issues and sustainable communities. Poundbury builds on New Urbanist principles such as walkability, and it is designed to resemble a traditional English village. It is about a third complete with about 1,500 residents. But it is not without critics, who complain that Poundbury is being turned “into an isolated ‘ghetto’ with residents hemmed in by busy roads and unable to get easy access to the surrounding countryside” (Morris, 2009). In the United States, Seaside, Florida, is probably the best-known example of New Urbanism. Designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the town was used as a set for the 1998 film The Truman Show. The film focuses on a man who grows up in a seemingly perfect town only to discover he is living in a reality show rather than utopia. One wonders how much of the New Urbanist dream is just a dream, much like Arcosanti. For New Urbanism it is too early to say mainly because there are few examples, and suburban sprawl is still the dominant American landscape. New Urbanism is utopian in nature, and as a consequence its communities are at risk balancing between what is possible and what is not.

The Bottom Line It may well be that Arcosanti’s time has passed, and the chance to negotiate with the real world has been missed. It might be called a postopia, a utopian community that has lived past its ideal state. In television jargon Arcosanti

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may have “jumped the shark,” a phrase used to describe shows that have run out of fresh ideas but keep going. The failure to evolve and transform is not in itself a negative, for it could mean members of the community are holding fast to their principles and are willing to disappear or become irrelevant rather than change. There are still a few Shakers left, but as a movement their refusal to compromise core beliefs such as celibacy led to their inevitable decline. Some communities, such as Owen’s New Harmony, jump the shark when their founders leave or die. Indeed, members of Arcosanti have told me they have no clue what will happen to the community after Soleri passes on. To keep from jumping the shark, communities such as The Farm and Findhorn have engaged relevancy by strategically reimagining their mission or purpose. At The Farm, this reimagining meant giving up communal economics at the cost of losing a significant number of members. Like Findhorn, The Farm gradually embraced the ecovillage concept and has become an important education center within the intentional movement. Arcosanti, on the other hand, is overly dependent on windbells, in part because they were the economic foundation of the community and also because they are what it does best. But as a long-term survival strategy, Arcosanti’s windbells do not appear to be adequate. Therefore, in order to claim a degree of success, compromises between reality and the dream may be necessary. The communes of the counterculture learned this lesson, sometimes at a great price. To his credit, Soleri has not compromised, but Arcosanti is unlikely to ever boast a population of 5,000. Despite Arcosanti’s grand plan that wasn’t, there are examples in the world of utopian communities of dreams on an even more ambitious scale. One is Auroville, an ecovillage in the state of Tamil, India. Begun in 1968, Auroville, which is near Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), is supposed to eventually become a city of 50,000. Its current population is about 1,700, about two-thirds of whom come from other countries. But it is Auroville’s strong economic base that offers the possibility for growth. Another important distinction between Auroville and Arcosanti is the former’s robust commitment to spirituality, which serves as the unifying force (Dawson, 2006, pp. 24–25). In contrast, Arcosanti lacks a sense of the spiritual or any uniting principle other than Soleri’s architectural concept of a car-free built environment. A noble goal, but is it the cement that will hold the community together when the harsh winds of an economic storm approach? Despite uncertainty over its future, Arcosanti has been influential. Although it is an architectural rather than environmental experiment, Arcosanti

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was a model for at least one notable intentional community, the EcoVillage at Ithaca, which in turn has been a model for other ecovillages.

New Age to Green Age The inn offered a sweat lodge. Charming, we thought, and not particularly surprising, for we were staying in McCloud, California, one of several resort towns near the imposing 14,000-foot Mount Shasta. Nor were we surprised to find a vegetarian menu at a German Restaurant in the town of Mount Shasta. This was, after all, the early 1990s—the apex of the New Age movement—and Mount Shasta was the site of an energy vortex, just like Sedona, Arizona. To understand the evolution of contemporary intentional communities, it is helpful to follow some of the major trends that influenced them. As noted in chapter 3, the counterculture was a driving force behind communalism both during that era and to a lesser extent today. But the counterculture has faded like a tie-dyed shirt washed too often, and much of the passion of the era has aged with the baby boom generation. Although the image of the aging hippie in today’s intentional communities has some basis in fact, for the most part contemporary communitarians neither dress nor act the part of hippies. What remains are reminders of counterculture in updated configurations. There are reasons for this. When hippie culture began to dissipate, some of the ideas and interests of the counterculture were absorbed into the New Age movement, which reached its apex in the 1980s and 1990s. The New Age movement appropriated some countercultural sensibilities and interests, such as the search for alternative spiritualities and Eastern religions; a fascination with indigenous cultures; a passion for the arts and crafts, or at least the artistic; and a greater openness and more tolerant attitude toward sexuality. These sensibilities, however, were not adopted whole cloth but were reassigned similar though distinct new meanings. Consequently, New Age traditions and beliefs are, in important ways, extensions of countercultural diversions filtered through a boomer population growing older. These diversions are expressed in the studied vagueness, diffuse nature, and panspirituality of the New Age, characteristics also evident in the attitudes of contemporary communitarians. Some of the interests associated with the counterculture, specifically Eastern and Western mysticism, were evident in Findhorn before the hippies arrived. In fact, one of Findhorn best-known residents was one of the

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pioneers of the New Age. David Spangler, who was also a leading figure in counterculture circles, made Findhorn into an early hub of New Age ideas after he arrived in 1970 (Pike, 2004, p. 88). But the origins of the New Age are deeper than Findhorn. Pike explains the evolution of New Age beliefs out of the counterculture by citing several seminal events that had an impact on the baby boom generation. Among the most influential events of the period were the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King; the publications of Black Elk Speaks (1961), an interpreted memoir of a Lakota medicine man; the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); and the paperback edition of Lord of the Rings (1965). She also included the LSD experiments of Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary (Pike, 2004, p. 73). But she notes there were other narratives relating to the evolution of the New Age. In other words, the New Age phenomenon was not just the counterculture 2.0. It is also the result of many other strands of thought and popular trends. While New Age and Neopagan assumptions about the self emerged most directly out of shifts in American religiosity that took place in the 1960s, in other ways they were continuous with the alternative traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that included spiritualism, psychic readings, Theosophy, and mental healing.” (Pike, 2004, p. 73) New Age–patterned ideas spread through a variety of networks in the 1970s and 1980s. These included health food stores, bookstores that specialized in metaphysical literature, alternative health care centers, specialized periodicals and academic journals, and other organizations and commercial outlets whose ideas or practices were in harmony with the movement (Melton, 1988, p. 42). Celebrities also helped enlarge the audience for New Age ideas. Some celebrities were seminal figures in the movement, such as actress Shirley MacLaine and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although he did not become a celebrity until after his death in 1945, the psychic Edgar Cayce could be thought of as a godfather of the New Age. Cayce was said to have psychic abilities that allowed him to detect illness, predict the future, and interpret dreams. Cayce’s repertoire of interests included psychic healing, reincarnation, and the lost continent of Atlantis (Puryear, 1982; Stern, 1967). Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of transcendental meditation, became a counterculture icon because of his association with the Beatles’ prominence, which helped

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popularize meditation in general and not just the Maharishi’s practice. MacLaine’s fame as an Academy Award–winning actress, aided by the popularity of her books on spirituality, made her into one of the most persuasive spokespersons for the New Age. Despite their connections with the New Age, neither MacLaine, the Maharishi, or Cayce defined the amorphous movement. In fact, the label New Age was largely ignored by those who embraced the various beliefs huddled under the umbrella movement. As Bloch notes: Many of the people who participate in [New Age] activities do not dwell on whether what they are doing is “New Age” or “Neo-Pagan,” and they are not interested in such distinctions. In fact they often prefer not to label their spirituality, even if it involves much of their discretionary time and money. (1998, p. 1) The reality is that the New Age is not a church or an organization but more of a trend with characteristics that are non-dogmatic. York (2004, p. 309) argues that this fluid nature of the New Age makes it more of a consumer than a traditionally religious phenomenon. Indeed, one may or may not be a member of a specific religious institution to buy into some New Age enthusiasms such as the occult, alternate realities, reincarnation, shamanism, ancient prophetic visions, and natural healing. Of course, all these are elements in other religious and spiritual traditions that the New Age has brought together into a salad bowl of beliefs from which interested parties can pick and choose. It is, in fact, the non-institutional nature and marketing choice of New Age that appears to be its underlying appeal. New Age is a spiritual consumer supermarket that is steadily superseding the appeal of traditional religion in the West through its affirmation and celebration of free spiritual choice. (York, 2004, p. 309) It is precisely because it is vaguely defined that New Age has played a significant role in the development of modern intentional communities. Since the movement is not tied to any particular location but a wide assortment of sacred places, centers, and communities, it is easy to be absorbed but not held fast. Since it draws from many cultural and religious traditions but lacks a canon of specific beliefs, it is hard to even call it a movement. Like Bloch, Pike describes New Age as an “umbrella term that encompasses multiple

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beliefs and practices,” adding that practitioners “are committed to a host of practices that include channeling, visualization, astrology, meditation, and alternative healing methods” (2004, p. 22). This is not to suggest there are no common themes. Participants tend to express interest in mystical aspects of major religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, often without intimate knowledge of the traditions behind them. North American Indian traditions, such as the sweat lodge and Navajo sand paintings, are also found in New Age literature, as difficult as that body of literature is to pin down. As Saliba (1996, pp. 23–24) points out, New Age is a “rather complex amalgamation of thought and practice that unites Western and Eastern religious beliefs and practices.” Hanegraaf (2000, p. 291) suggests that despite the wide variety of beliefs and practices under the New Age umbrella, participants have a common interest in critiquing Western society, and all New Agers tend to agree “society should be different.” This critique is expressed, he adds, in “dissatisfaction with exiting daily realities, a feeling that mainstream culture leaves no room for certain important dimensions of personal human experience.” Intentional communities satisfy one of the primary defects of hypermodern life—the lack of intensive and rewarding human interaction. Indeed, New Age–associated phenomena drift through modern communalism like a warm breeze on a spring day.

The Beat of New Age Arguably one of the most pervasive forms of New Age culture is music. Just as music helped define the counterculture, so it provided the backbeat to the New Age. Like everything associated with the movement, New Age music is ill defined. The music so tagged generally encompasses a variety of genres, from jazz to soft rock to contemporary classical, all emphasizing creating an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and meditation. This style of music became particularly popular among jazz musicians and some rock artists in the 1970s and 1980s as both modern jazz and rock began to lose direction. Artists such as Brian Eno began experimenting with new sounds and rhythms, called ambient music, that were atmospheric and possessed a trance-like quality. Popular jazz musicians such as Pat Methany developed a soft, smooth jazz style that also blended well with New Age directions. Jazz flutist Paul Horn incorporated American Indian sounds and music from other cultures into his tranquil, fluid music, and thus his work has been classified as New Age. Although the music can be quite different in both form and execution, New Age became a product category for music.

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The widespread use of New Age–style meditative and calming music became popular in self-help seminars, yoga and Reiki classes, and innumerable other venues. The New Age became so widespread by the end of the millennium that it has almost blended itself out of existence. In all my contacts with intentional communitarians, the term New Age comes up only rarely. Yet New Age CDs can still be found on the shelves of bookstores at the large intentional communities. Such outlets also usually offer a slew of magazines and guidebooks on subjects such as inner healing and vegan cooking. Part of the reason for this inclusion might be mainstreaming. Despite Hanegraaf’s (2000) positioning of New Age in opposition to mainstream society, the ideas and practices associated with the movement have become, to a certain extent, so well established in popular culture as to be no longer as visible or unique. Nevertheless, New Age–inflected ideas linger even if they are no longer specifically identified with the movement. For example, in 2008, Oprah Winfrey vigorously sponsored and promoted the work of spiritual educator and author Eckhart Tolle in a series of webcasts based on his book, A New Earth. Tolle also led a two-day retreat at Findhorn and subsequently used the community’s name on an audio CD of the event. Tolle’s combination of spirituality and self-help and borrowings from the major religions without endorsing any in particular fits wholly into the New Age paradigm. But Tolle does not mention the movement in his literature or talks. Tolle and other spiritually oriented self-help sages may represent the residual effects of an ongoing interest in any alternative systems of knowledge.

Greening of Spirituality The environmental movement is not a vast conspiracy of tree-hugging activists aimed at toppling governments in order to save the California sequoias, despite what some critics say. Rather, it is a broad spectrum of scientists, philosophers, politicians, educators, and ordinary people interested in preserving the natural world and finding solutions to human-created environmental problems. Within that spectrum are those who see environmentalism as a religious responsibility, those who are committed to environmental activism, and those who simply think recycling is a pretty good idea. And there probably are a few who would like to topple a government or two to save a tree. Environmental concerns are also strong within the intentional movement, whose views on the subject are diverse. There are those who believe

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the proper use of modern technologies can save humankind from environmental disasters, those who believe environmental concerns are one and the same as spiritual concerns, those who believe the environment can be saved by rejecting all that is modern and by living basically, and those who may be concerned about the environment but whose interests are elsewhere. Among the more radical perspectives on environmental issues is the philosophical position called “deep ecology.” Hinchman and Hinchman (1989, p. 203) define deep ecology this way: Deep Ecologists aver that people should value nature as an end in itself rather than a mere means to satisfy human desires. . . . Human desires enjoy no privileged status; they are legitimate only insofar as they are compatible with the preservation and flourishing of the non-human world. Indeed, for Deep Ecologists man cannot attain his own full development so long as he thinks and lives in opposition to the natural environment. The person who scorns, exploits, or ignores nature, his original home, can only achieve a stunted and deformed existence. Gus diZerega (1996, p. 699) adds that many deep ecologists “conclude that modern society is both ecologically unsustainable and ethically immoral.” This position may not define the intentional community movement, but it is popular enough to be considered a growing trend. To expand the point, deep ecology and other less radical forms of environmentalism are becoming pervasive among communitarians, which accounts for the rapid growth of ecovillages. Furthermore, as both a philosophical and ideological trend, environmentalism has absorbed some of the energy of the New Age movement in the same way that the New Age movement absorbed the residual energy of the counterculture. Deep ecology also bears a resemblance to a new formulation of an ancient idea, what Bron Taylor calls Dark Green Religion in his book of the same title. Taylor (2009, p. 10) describes Dark Green Religion as a spiritual perspective “in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.” Dark Green Religion is distinct from—and more dynamic and radical than—counterculture and New Age thought, in which the environment also was a critical concern and the Earth was respected but not the central focus. Instead, both the counterculture and the New Age were more concerned with self-actualization and self-discovery within the context of environmental sensitivity. Compared with deep ecology, the latter perspec-

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tive can be termed “shallow ecology,” which stresses “conservation and efficient use of resources, but only to serve more effectively de facto human desires and purposes” (Hinchman & Hinchman, 1989, p. 203).

An Ancient Concern Respect for, love of, and worship of nature digs deep into the well of human history and prehistory. Elements of nature or earth worship have diffused into the cosmologies of many cultures and their religions, from ancient Greek mythology to both ancient and modern Hindu beliefs and traditions. It is fair to say that reverence or at least respect for the natural world is embedded in the past, if not the present, of most contemporary religions. But as Taylor points out, respect and reverence for the natural world are distinct categories. In modern terms, some new religious forms have evolved from early forms that place nature—or, more specifically, the environment—as a primary spiritual focus. Some of these forms are collectively placed under the umbrella of paganism. Paganism often has a pejorative connotation in the Western world, especially among mainstream religions, because it is sometimes confused with Satanism, although the two movements are different (Partridge, 2004, p. 271). Paganism, also called neopaganism, is used by scholars to describe a variety of contemporary nature-centered practices that include Wicca and Druidism (or neo-Druidism). Paganism is often conflated with the New Age, and to some extent there is some crossover, but the New Age was not a naturecentered belief system per se; rather, New Agers tend to focus more on selffulfillment and self-realization. Neopaganism and other new religious trends that place nature foremost borrow from earlier religious forms that anthropologists identify through categories such as animism, animatism, panthesism, or panentheism. Animism is the belief, evident in many tribal or indigenous traditions, in the spirits of flora, fauna, rivers, and other animate or inanimate natural things. Animatism, which is also found in traditional societies, is the belief in an impersonal natural power that may take residence in natural objects or even humans. Pantheism is the belief that God and the natural world are one. According to Rowe (2007, p. 65), panentheistic beliefs hold that God permeates the natural world but also is apart from it. Therefore, the universe is finite, but God infinite. In fact, elements of all these beliefs can be found in Dark Green Religion, which can be viewed as an amalgam of nature-centered spiritualities.

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One of more interesting expressions of Dark Green Religion is not a religious notion at all but a scientific concept—the Gaia theory, previously known as the Gaia hypothesis, the brainchild of British scientist James Lovelock, a former NASA consultant. Lovelock suggests that the Earth is a complex entity with all of its systems working in harmonic balance. Lovelock says he was inspired by the search for life on other planets, which led to a study of the Earth’s highly complex atmospheric system. Our results convinced us that the only feasible explanation of the Earth’s highly improbable atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis from the surface, and that the manipulator was life itself. (Lovelock, 1979/2000) It is a small leap from accepting the theory that the Earth functions like a living thing to the belief in the Earth as a living thing to be reverenced or worshiped. This view, thus, can easily be aligned with both pantheistic and panentheistic beliefs. Recently, the Gaia theory was most evident in the 2009 science fiction film Avatar, in which the fictional planet Pandora and all the living things on it act as one to repel an invasion force. It should be no surprise that the Gaia theory also has had an impact on the environmental movement, of which Lovelock has become a voice. The Gaia theory and other Dark Green concepts also are popular among communitarians, but not as distinct religious beliefs or spiritual practices. Instead, reverence for the Earth may complement existing traditional religious beliefs and practices. This is especially evident in ecovillages, where practices often include permaculture, the horticultural technique that integrates humans, flora, and fauna into an organic whole. Whether or not Dark Green Religion is actually a religion or an adjunct to spirituality is unclear. But it is clearly another step in the recent evolution of communitarian spirituality. Just as the enthusiasms and passions of the counterculture were absorbed and superseded by the New Age, the latter may be giving way to greener pastures of belief. In the next section, the greening continues with a discussion of the ecovillage movement.

Ecovillage Evolution We are sitting on a patio overlooking a field that slopes toward the city of Ithaca, New York. I walk to the edge of the field and can see Ithaca College

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in the distance on a hill overlooking Cayuga Lake. I amble back to the patio and notice a magazine on the patio table. It is titled Reminisce, and its subtitle is “The Magazine That Brings Back the Good Times.” Articles in the July 2009 issue cover pop culture from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is odd to find it here in a bed and breakfast at the EcoVillage at Ithaca, a community that drew this comment from a September 6, 2007, Time magazine article: “At EVI, the future is now.” The presence of a nostalgia-laden magazine in a cutting-edge intentional community is not just amusing; it is also a metaphor for the central issue of the ecovillage movement: how to reconcile the modern and the traditional. Liz Walker, a cofounder of EVI, is not unfamiliar with the dilemma. When asked about the matter in an August 2009 interview, Walker bemoaned, “We’ve lost the sense of tribe.” In her 2005 book on EVI, Walker promotes the community’s resemblance to rural villages in other parts of the world. She adds that EVI was part of a global movement to reclaim “the traditions that connect us to each other and the earth.” People are beginning to say no to the increasingly homogenous, consumer-driven, globalized culture that is so strongly promoted by multinational corporations. Instead they are saying yes to traditions that bring a sense of purpose and belonging. (Walker, 2005, p. 191) Nowhere is the conflict between past, present, and future more evident than in ecovillages. Ecovillages such as Earthaven and EVI may be the next step in the evolution of the intentional community, but it is not easy to define what an ecovillage is or should be. For some, an ecovillage is an intentional community in which ecological concerns are foremost. To others, a true ecovillage must be entirely off the power grid. Since the latter is difficult, ecovillagers often simply aspire to live sustainably. Jonathan Dawson (2006, p. 13) of the Global Ecovillage Network uses the following definition culled from the work of magazine editors Robert and Diane Gilman: [An ecovillage is] a human scale full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way in that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future. This definition has been widely adopted in the ecovillage movement, but Dawson is quick to point out that the Gilmans’s formula was not intended

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to portray the ecovillage concept as “some attempt to return to an idealized past.” Instead, he adds, the Gilmans’s aim was to “create a synthesis that would draw on the best of human expertise in treading lightly on the Earth, community-level governance and the application of modern, energy-efficient technologies” (Dawson, 2006, p. 13). Ecovillages may include a variety of political, ideological, or spiritual preferences. They may be strongly communal or only give lip service to communalism. They may be consensus driven or hierarchical. They may be urban, suburban, or rural. An ecovillage may encompass an entire community or it may be part of a large intentional community. In other words, ecovillages are almost as diverse as intentional communities as a whole. Despite that diversity, most adhere to the Gilmans’s principles.2

The Ecovillage Thing Ecovillages are popular for several reasons. First is their obvious appeal to those seeking an alternative to the status quo in this age of climate change. Second, ecovillages often become environmental training centers, thus providing a steady source of income for the community and a raison d’etre beyond their own existence. Third, ecovillages bridge the gulf between nostalgic agrarian practices and modern technologies. Thus, participants can practice older forms of horticulture, for example, armed with modern knowledge. Ecovillages directly confront a critical challenge of contemporary life with the goal of sustainable living through agrarian experiments combined with community living facilities. They exist in several countries, including India and Australia, although they are predominately a North American and Western European phenomenon. Ecovillages are distinct from earlier forms of intentional communities, such as the Shakers or the Oneida colony, in that they do not require adherents to follow a specific religious or spiritual dogma. Instead, members are driven simply by the desire to adopt a greener lifestyle. Essentially utopian, ecovillagers nevertheless have adapted to the realities of hypermodernism by seeking a compromise between succumbing to the outside world and achieving a perfect society. They are not isolationist, as were utopian communities of the past, but they are intended to be models for the larger society. They are not escapes from hypermodernism so much as attempts to scale back and slow down the pace of it. Despite their engagement with the outside world, Jonathan Dawson argues that most ecovillages are radical, which tends to upset governments. This was especially true in

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the formative years of the ecovillage movement. But he adds that more recently, ecovillages and the state are less antagonistic or distant and are more cooperative.3 Ecovillages not only serve as a model for green living but also as a placebo for those who feel energized by the thought of living green. This is based on the observation that ecovillages, for the most part, are not green utopias but rather imperfect examples of what is possible—that is, templates for the future rather than necessarily stellar examples of successful green living. Because ecovillages represent not just a retreat from hypermodernity or a temporary fix but also an example for the larger society, they represent particularly creative remedies to issues that have an impact beyond their domains. To members of these ecologically oriented communities, the larger society offers an ever-changing multiplex of customized technological and ideological options disengaged from the more sedate pace of normal human interaction. This disallows the imprint of close human contact and the ritual activity such contact engenders. Instead, ecovillages offer a sense of moral achievement within the context of a moral community committed to a common end. Ecovillage proponents are ambitious. Author and activist Duane Elgin (2005, p. xvi), for example, sees the ecovillage movement as a critical counterpoint to globalization because they are “compatible with both the villagebased cultures of indigenous societies and post-modern cultures.” Moreover, he writes enthusiastically, “with a social and physical architecture sensitive to the psychology of modern tribes, a flowering of diverse communities could replace the alienation of today’s massive cities.”

Ecovillage at Ithaca The EcoVillage at Ithaca has a distinct advantage over some other communities: its location on a hilltop a short drive from downtown Ithaca cannot be more ideal. It has the advantage of a rural setting within reach of a small but cosmopolitan city. The proximity of not only Ithaca College but also Cornell University offers collaborative opportunities. For a city, Ithaca is very much like an intentional community. It has its own local currency, the HOUR; it is relatively isolated; and much of its population’s sensibilities are very much aligned with the nearby ecovillage. Of course, the fact the area has a student population of 20,000, not much less than the city population of about 29,000, helps.

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EVI is divided into two neighborhoods, called FROG and SONG. A third, TREE, is in the planning stage. Our bed and breakfast is in FROG, the first neighborhood. Both existing neighborhoods spread out in a linear fashion from the common house. FROG contains 30 residences divided into duplexes in a densely packed area. The main street is a narrow, tree-lined pedestrian pathway. Our bed and breakfast host, Gail Carson, who is in her mid-sixties, tells us that the kitchens in FROG were all designed to look out on the pathway and, thus, facilitate a communal spirit. You can see your neighbors as they pass by, and they can see you, she says. “While we are a model, this is not the way to do it for everybody,” says Kurt Pipa, who has been living at EVI since 2008. Although new residents are self-selected, Pipa says the membership process at EVI tends to filter out those for whom the community it not the right fit. The process includes a stay at the community for a minimum of five days, reading the EVI Web site and a book and other articles about EVI, attending two community meetings, and attending community meals and social events. There is also an orientation. Whereas the FROG neighborhood is tightly packed, EVI’s second neighborhood, SONG, looks similar to Findhorn’s Field of Dreams, with fairly large homes and more space between the homes. Relative to FROG, on first impression SONG appears to be almost too suburban. But, on closer inspection, one sees that the homes are also duplexes, and the main street is pedestrian. Like FROG, there are 30 homes, for a total of about 60 EVI homes and a total population of about 160. Pipa, who is guiding me through the neighborhood, explains that SONG residents wanted more space and also wanted to design their own homes. Much of the community is designed specifically for communal interaction. In addition to the common house for weekly community meals, parking areas are in a common area rather than attached to homes, and the pathways are designed to pass in front of the windows of each home. Privacy is not at a premium. Members are asked to do two to four hours of work for the community a week, such as shoveling snow, cooking in the common house, or maintaining the community composter.

Thinking Small in a Big Way START “The American dream is always big. . . . Americans dream of having all this space and all this privacy and a big shopping mall . . . and it no longer suits the environment we live in. . . . Socially we need to learn to live and work together more cooperatively,” says Liz Walker, cofounder of EVI.4

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Walker is a soft-spoken woman in her mid-fifties with the bearing and assurance of a leader in a community where hierarchies are not encouraged. I am sitting across from her with a few other guests. It is the afternoon on our second day at EVI, and it is a bit hot in the common house. Walker jokes, “The first rule of sustainability is that you don’t melt.” Walker was a cofounder of EVI and is regarded as the de facto steward of the community. After introductions, she speaks about the founding of EVI, which was rather pedestrian—literally, not figuratively. As Walker tells it, the inspiration for EVI was what she and a friend, Joan Bokaer, discovered on a hike from Los Angeles to New York City in 1990 called “The Global Walk for a Livable World” (Walker, 2005). The Global Walk took the group of 150, including Bokaer and Walker, through Arizona. There they came to Arcosanti, where they stayed briefly. Walker said she was particularly impressed by the community’s “densely clustered housing, lots of open space, organic agriculture.” Later, she and Bokaer read a book on cohousing. The combination of the book and Arcosanti proved irresistible to Bokaer, who conceived the idea of creating her own community. From 1991 to 1995, the community was in development, and the first families moved into FROG in 1996 (Walker, 2005). Walker is enthusiastic about the enterprise she helped Bokaer launch, but she is also guarded about its future. She says she fears the possibility of it becoming an affluent suburb, a kind of exclusive bedroom community, and she fears the rising price of housing. “I don’t want this to be a rich person’s paradise. That’s not why I put my life’s blood into this place.” She notes that in six special cases, families were subsidized to support home purchases, but Walker bemoans the fact the community has yet to develop an overall strategy to keep housing prices down. A second issue the community faces, Walker says, is the need for greater ethnic/racial diversity at EVI. She notes that this is an issue endemic to the environmental, intentional community movement.

Cohousing or Suburbia? EVI has received a fair share of publicity, in part because of its proximity to a noted university. And this publicity, in turn, has made it a model for the future of communal living in that it combines popular intentional trends: the ecovillage and cohousing. The cohousing formula is simple: at EVI, homes are clustered, leaving small yards with plenty of common open space. Parking areas are separated from the homes, and pedestrian

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pathways are the primary thoroughfares. A common house for regular or occasional community meals and activities is the nexus of the community. In cohousing communities, homes are individual owned, but the land may be held in common. If land is individually owned, the lot is small to encourage interactions between neighbors. The first and oldest cohousing community is Sættedammen, a community conceived by Danish architects in the 1960s and opened in the early 1970s in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen. The community was designed for close communal interaction within the context of individual housing units in reaction to the alienating character of suburbia (Christian, 2007, p. 39). The prototype for cohousing, as it was for the hippie commune, is the preindustrial or traditional village. But the cohousing model is not just built on nostalgic recreations of the past. Cohousing is, in a sense, a compromise between the true commune and the modern suburb. In addition to owning their own homes, many of those who live in cohousing communities work outside the community and still need cars to commute. The compromise with modernity comes at a cost, and the danger is that these new communities may modify the model further as the desire for more privacy and more individualized space grows. In time, cohousing may become just another variety of suburb or condominium complex. For now, physical structure of the community aside, what distinguishes EVI from suburbia is mind-set. The people who move to EVI are motivated by the desire for a greater sense of community. It is that desire for community that helps create community. Lacking a specific spiritual tradition or ideological bent other than a commitment to a low carbon footprint, the intention to live in community may be enough for the moment.

Whole Village The city of Toronto, Canada, sprawls. Its municipal population of 2.5 million is doubled if one includes the city’s vast suburbs. Even for someone such as myself, who has lived in New York City and has spent considerable time in Southern California, Toronto’s sprawl is impressive. Its web of highways weave and twist and are hampered only by Lake Ontario to the south and the Niagara Escarpment to the west. It is what James Kunstler (1993) called a “geography of nowhere.” Some of these suburbs are old, such as Brampton, an edge city that has spawned its own city, a new town neighborhood called Bramalea with local

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roads that are six lanes wide. Heading northwest from Brampton, which is about 28 miles west of Toronto, tract after tract of suburbs and shopping centers fill out the flat scenery. Then it all abruptly ends. The land is open. There are fields, and the flat land gives way to a gentle roll. After a few miles of country lanes past homes, farms, and meadows, we find the entrance to Whole Village and a dirt road beyond. After a short, dusty drive, Lucille and I arrive at what appears to be a typical farm near a most atypical one-story building. The building is Greenhaven, the centerpiece of this tiny ecovillage/farm. This is where the Whole Village members live. It is July 2008, and there are about a dozen people living here, including four children; in the recent past, the community lost a number of residents for a variety of reasons. The population has fluctuated from about one to two dozen residents. Greenhaven is hard to describe because from the outside it is a flat, single-story amorphous structure with swellings on the roof that are part of a passive solar heating system. The 15,000-square-foot structure has a central community area and connecting apartment suites built around it. Whole Village is a cohousing ecovillage similar to EVI, but Greenhaven provides more of a true communal feel. Residents move in and out of the common area more frequently simply because it is hard to avoid. Housing units are individually owned, but the farm is commonly owned. Some members commute to work outside the farm, some work from the farm, and some are retirees. The community’s weekly meetings are consensus driven, and as one member put it, “Everyone is a leader; everyone is a follower.” Spiritually seems to be rather low-key in the community, and I was told that beliefs range from humanist to pantheist to Roman Catholic. However, there is some ritual activity. Every May Day, for example, the community gathers for a maypole dance in which everyone writes his or her wishes for the year on ribbons tied to the top of the pole. There are also shared meals Monday through Friday in the common area. The Greenhaven building is relatively new; Whole Village members moved in only two years earlier. On the community property around Greenhaven is a working farm. There is a barn with outbuildings and a farmhouse that housed the community members before Greenhaven was built. I see chickens in the barnyard and a farmer on a tractor in a field. The community grows its own food on over 100 acres of cropland and a total of 191 acres. Participation in farming is an option; some are more able than others. The farm itself

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is supposed to be biodynamic, which is a holistic approach to agriculture similar in principle and approach to permaculture. Whole Village literature describes biodynamic agriculture as a system in which a farm is regarded as a “complete organism in harmony with the living earth and the universe.”5 In one of the fields there is a scarecrow wearing a black shirt and jeans. It looks surprisingly real. There is also an apiary, a greenhouse, pear trees, and a pond. In addition to chickens, there are ducks, a few sheep, and cows. Although farm production is far short of the community’s goal of providing two-thirds of the food needed, it is real and working. “It feels and smells like a farm,” one member said. Inside Greenhaven, I meet two people in their twenties or thirties; one is from Poland, the other from British Columbia. I ask the gentleman from Poland what brought him to the hinterlands of Ontario. He says he found out about Whole Village through the Internet and became a resident about the time Greenhaven was finished. Later, I meet an older woman from India who serves us tea. She says he is negotiating with other members of the community over the construction of a memorial to her late husband. Later, we attend an orientation session with several people interested in joining the community. A veteran member of the community, Brenda Dolling recounts the history of the community and their recent struggles to survive. “We have somewhat different interpretation of our founding principles, and that is causing a bit of conflict,” Dolling notes. Working out conflicts, of course, is the purpose of the monthly meetings. The group she is addressing seems engaged and interested in the community. Some will likely return. Whole Village is an odd mix of the old and the new. Ultramodern Greenhaven does not quite fit with the older farm buildings, but that is the nature of many ecovillages. They attempt a synergy between new technologies and old values. Sometimes it is a matter of putting new wine into old wineskins, and sometimes containers burst. For those living at Whole Village that July the challenge was to find a balance, and they appeared up to the task. To the south, back in the United States, another small community has different challenge: how to instill a sense of community where it seems lacking.

Alchemy Farm Cape Cod conjures images of beach, ocean, and an architectural style. But the beach and the ocean are on the other side of town from Hilde Maingay and Earle Barnhart’s solar house, which looks nothing like a Cape Cod cottage. It is called the Cape Cod Ark House, and about half of it is an enor-

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mous greenhouse. Moreover, the house produces its own food, such as lettuce and lemons, and it has a fishpond, a sitting room, and a scenic overlook in the form of a walkway on the second level of the structure. The Maingay and Barnhart solar house is the stand-out building at Alchemy Farm, a cohousing ecovillage in East Falmouth, Massachusetts. The 16-acre community is home to about two-dozen people in 8 individually owned homes. There are 12 home sites altogether. Two-thirds of the property is commonly owned and includes a common house, gardens, fields, and some woods. Alchemy Farm was founded in 1991 after the demise of the New Alchemy Institute, which ran out of funds. New Alchemy was a research facility focused on organic agriculture, aquaculture, and solar greenhouses. Maingay and Barnhart were part of the Institute, and, with others, they purchased the New Alchemy property to establish Alchemy Farm. Their greenhouse employs New Alchemy principles. Barnhart, who is in his sixties, is plainspoken and candid about the challenges of living in community. Alchemy Farm members hold monthly meetings and monthly meals. “Otherwise people have outside jobs and they come and go and they are fairly busy, and we don’t have a lot of social events.” He noted that the critical factor seems to translate to numbers. “In Europe the typical cohousing community has 30 to 50 households, or about 150 people. It’s extremely active. There are always 50 people hanging around willing to do anything. And they have meals every day together.” Community member Brian Jesienski seems to agree. Lindsey Close and Brian have a young child and two dogs and live in a three-bedroom home equipped with six solar panels on the roof facing “solar” south. Jesienski says he would like to see a greater sense of community. He blames the realities of the modern workaday world. Both he and his wife work outside the community, as do some others. As Barnhart suggests, the size of a community does seem to matter. Both Whole Village and Alchemy Farm are not only small, but they are limited in their ability to expand—the former by the size of Greenhaven, the latter by the number of building lots. On the other hand, Greenhaven’s more intimate space encourages greater social interaction, although this also can lead to greater conflict. Barnhart’s observation about European communities rings true based on my own experiences in Northern Europe. A lack of space and denser populations have accustomed people to act more cooperatively. But there are other factors at work. Alchemy Farm, like EVI and Whole Village, is not a

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spiritual community aside from a commitment to creating a sustainable environment. But the question remains: is that enough to create a sustainable community bond?

Sirius Community: Findhorn West At the opposite end of Massachusetts, in the deep forests just a little north of the college town of Amherst, is a slice of Scotland’s Findhorn. There is a Findhorn-style community center and Findhorn-style spirituality. It is the most traditional intentional community in this chapter and in some ways the most successful. Like other ecovillages, Sirius members are committed to creating community within an environmental context. The difference is in its spiritual underpinnings. The Sirius community was founded in 1978 by former members of Findhorn, including Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, Gordon’s brother Bruce Davidson, and Linda Reimer. The group imported Findhorn’s version of floating spirituality to Massachusetts. Sirius is slightly larger in population than Alchemy Farm, with about 30 people in nine houses on 90 acres. Most of the homes were built by those living in them, although all houses and land are owned by the community’s nonprofit entity. Some of the food consumed is grown on site in a fairly large organic garden. Houses are constructed of nontoxic materials. Residents use composting toilets and vegetable oil for fuel. Power is generated by both solar and wind, the latter by a 109-foot wind tower. The community house has a passive solar greenhouse not unlike the Maingay/Barnhart home at New Alchemy. The community house is an architectural delight. From the exterior it vaguely resembles Findhorn’s community center with the addition of a greenhouse and an impressive array of solar panels. Inside there is a vast central space with a roof support that looks like an enormous spider with two sets of eight legs. The roof seems to be suspended upon a two-tier arrangement of eight beams that radiate out from a complex central support. The community house hosts conferences, retreats, and symposia in addition to community meals. Common meals and weekly meetings help maintain group cohesion, as do meditations before meetings. Community governance is by modified consensus in a two-tiered system. Some decisions are made by the entire community while other decisions are given to a core group of five members of long standing.

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Bruce Davidson is a heavily bearded, wiry older man. He is seated next to his partner, Linda Reimer, outside the community house. He says Sirius is a spiritual community that practices meditative attunement, like Findhorn, but no particular religion is stressed. Davidson’s spiritual sentiments also are reminiscent of Findhorn’s founders, particularly Dorothy Maclean: God, or the Spirit, exists in all things, including all of us. The way you live your life you can come into direct contact with God, Jesus, Christ, Buddha, the Force, whatever you want to call him. We also believe in spirits in the natural world, trees, plants, animals. You can dialogue with them. Davidson also feels the outside world has a long way to go and may have gone too far. “Society has just gone off the rails. There’s no integrity, no honesty, no morality.” Reimer agrees: “People before they come here have made that decision to simplify their life and pursue values that are more internal than external.” One of the problems of communities that have been in existence long enough to be multigenerational is keeping the second and subsequent generations within the community. Sirius has been around long enough to spawn at least a second generation, who were the subject of an article by Boston Globe correspondent Naomi R. Kooker (2003), who wrote the following of the adults who grew up at Sirius: Sirius’s seclusion felt safe to the kids who hung together like one big family. Still, there were drawbacks. When the children, then grown, stepped out into mainstream America, some found themselves out of the loop on pop culture; others were shocked to find young people their age using drugs, something they were not exposed to along the course of community living. Those who left the fold often found themselves going back to Sirius, if not physically then in reference to a childhood, if imperfect and unique, that helped shape them as young adults. In 1999, community members prepared for the so-called Y2K crisis, as reported by CNN on December 28 (CNN, 1999). Ten years later, in its spring 2009 newsletter, the community reacted to the current economic crisis by

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writing that whether or when a social or economic collapse occurs, their sustainable lifestyle has prepared them for anything: Welcome to Y2K09. The impending nature of the crises now gripping our society seemed obvious to us, even if not widely perceived, since prevailing methods of financial, ecological and social governance are and have been plainly unsustainable. With the course set as it has been, consequences were predictable, and the only real question was when. . . . Here at Sirius, there is no consensus on what that year will hold, just as there was no certainty in our minds in ’99 how things were going to actually look in 2000. The one thing that appears assured is resurgence in sustainability’s appeal, and for that we are once again ready.6

Of Seniors and Cul-de-Sacs Ecovillages are recent forms of specialized communal living, but other equally new and specialized forms are beginning to appear on the intentional scene. Communities that cater to seniors are a natural outgrowth of the aging baby boom population, although many of those who are now joining senior communities were born before 1946, considered the start of the boom. That means these communities, not to mention other forms of communalism, are likely to grow significantly in the next decade or so as the great boomer demographic drifts into the twilight years. According to Charles Durrett (2009, p. 9), seniors now represent 12.4 percent of the American population, and the percentage is expected to swell to 20 percent by 2030. Intentional communities for seniors, however, are not all that new. At Tennessee’s The Farm, Stephen Gaskin created a senior community a year after the 1983 Changeover. A pet project of Gaskin’s, Rocinante is named for Don Quixote’s horse and is essentially a community for aging hippies next door to The Farm. Writer Tim Neville (2007) describes this scene in the Travel section of the New York Times: When Gayla Groom scoots the cats from her bed and walks outside to check on the yard, the neighbors don’t care if she is minus her clothing. Nor do they mind living next to her 20-by-20-foot slab-wood cabin that cost $14,000 to build. It is also perfectly normal for one elderly neighbor to call her each morning, as a courtesy, to say she has not died. Ms. Groom, a 50-year-old book editor from Portland, Ore., lives in

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Rocinante, a community in Summerville, Tenn., southwest of Nashville, designed for aging hippies. All of her immediate neighbors—there are fewer than a dozen at the moment with more on the way—have similar cabins and similar attitudes about nudity and toxin-free living. Each has come to spend the rest of his or her years in a low-impact, earthy manner, living as many did in the 1960s. The headline in the March/April 2006 edition of AARP The Magazine (Yeoman, 2006) said it all: “Rethinking the Commune.” For the baby boom generation this has meant rethinking the rest of their lives. As Abraham and Delagrange (2006, p. 63) put it, “Baby Boomers who began turning 60 in 2006 do not want to retire or grow older in the same kind of aging institutions in which they placed their own parents.” And the AARP article goes on to say: It’s a sad irony that the generation of boomer Americans who popularized the commune in the 1960s and ’70s went on to live through the most uncommunal period in the nation’s history. As cornfields turned to exurbs and job security dwindled, more people found themselves drifting far from their childhood homes, never developing deep roots. For seniors seeking to lay down new roots in a more communal, less isolating environment, cohousing is a compelling option. True communes can be challenging because adjusting to the intensity of communal life may be difficult for those who have spent most of their lives in the modern singlefamily home. Instead, cohousing offers a compromise between independence and community. Durrett, credited with introducing the cohousing model to North America, rather hyperbolically writes: I am convinced that 20 seniors stranded on a desert island would do better at taking care of most of their basic needs than the same 20 left isolated or in an institution. (2009, p. 9) Indeed, like a true commune, cohousing has a support system built upon a community of like-minded individuals. That last point is conditional. How does one ensure a community of like-minded individuals? If a cohousing community is organized simply on the basis of age and not upon a firmer foundation, such as spirituality or ecological awareness, then where is the meaningful cornerstone upon which the community can build? Although senior cohousing may be a path for some, for others a multigenerational intentional community is preferable. According to Christian

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(2007, p. 47), the multigenerational ecovillage or intentional community feels more like a village, which some seniors prefer. On the other hand, she adds that multigenerational communities often lack the hospice and nursing care of some elder communities. Be that as it may, the reality is that multigenerational communities are becoming grayer and are beginning to resemble de facto elder communities. In other words, the aging boomer population is arguably one of the most challenging issues facing the intentional movement.

Chapter 6

Communities in Motion Any accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities; or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane. Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is brighter in sunshine than it is in substance. —John Ruskin, Unto This Last, 1881

It is July 2004, and I am speaking with my friend David Snyder, a Protestant pastor of a church in New Jersey, about the house we had just walked through. We admired not only its construction but also the dedication of those who helped build it. The house is close to completion and ready to be dedicated by Habitat for Humanity. Most notably, the house is in a Catholic neighborhood. Ordinarily this would not raise eyebrows, except that this is Belfast, Northern Ireland. David and I are visiting Belfast to see firsthand what Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI)’s Northern Ireland affiliate is doing to build communities in a starkly divided city. What is striking about the near-completed house is that it was built by Protestant volunteers, an accomplishment some observers thought highly unlikely. Here in Belfast—more than three years before the 2007 power-sharing agreement between Northern Ireland’s opposing factions and the withdrawal of British troops—Belfast’s Habitat joined together Catholics and Protestants in a unique experiment in two single-identity neighborhoods. New home construction in the workingclass Catholic Ligoniel neighborhood began with labor provided by Protestant volunteers, and something similar occurred in the Protestant Ballysillian neighborhood of North Belfast with Catholic volunteers. By 2006, Habitat claimed to have built 50 homes. Indeed, Habitat volunteers are a quiet but

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persistent sort. They work all over the world, in safe as well as in dangerous places. They are dedicated, and they are tireless, and they build communities literally and figuratively. The Habitat experience in Belfast is a pointed example of what Peter Caddy, cofounder of the Findhorn community, always said, “Work is love in action.” And the experience is a reminder of the struggles of Koinonia Farm, an intentional community founded in 1942 in Georgia that gave birth to Habitat. More importantly, Habitat volunteers are not just literally building communities; they are a community. Although a community of volunteers working on a specific project may be temporary, the experience of working with others for a higher purpose fulfills some of the same needs as a residential intentional community. The intentional communities of the previous chapters are bound in time and space. They are about communal living. But, increasingly, modern people are seeking new, more temporary means of forming community as the hectic pace of hypermodern life quickens. Rather than full immersion, participants in these fleeting communities wade in for the temporary relief of an imagined communal utopia. The reality is that intentional communities are too few, too isolated, and too idiosyncratic or too unconventional to fill the void. Consequently, this chapter treads the diverse, more momentary paths to finding community in the 21st century, from volunteer communities to communal gardening to Internet communities. We begin with volunteerism using Habitat for Habitat as the primary example.

The Volunteer Experience The growth of Habitat and other older and younger volunteer organizations and charities has been significant in the last half century. Interest in the Peace Corps, for example, is on the upswing in the 2000s despite a funding drought in the 1980s. Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement claims 97 million members and volunteers worldwide, including some 20 million active volunteers.1 In addition to these large organizations, smaller volunteer venues, such as soup kitchens and homeless shelters, have attracted those seeking both long- and short-term commitments. According to Wuthnow (1998/2002, pp. 4–5), the complexities of contemporary life have led to a “climate of unsettledness” manifested in the

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fear of loosening communal ties and an attendant sense of isolation. To recapture the sense of community traditionally expressed in civic engagement, Wuthnow suggests Americans are experimenting with what he calls “loose connections,” or “more sporadic, ad hoc connections” as an alternative to long-term commitments of formal participation in traditional institutions (2002, p. 5). Allahyari (2000, p. 149) writes of the “moral community” of routine volunteers in charitable organizations, noting that such phenomena provide a counterexample of what some would say is the “eclipse of community” caused by the disjointed nature of contemporary life. The decline of moral foundations is thus tied to the ascendance of modernity. Charitable organizations, such as Habitat, attempt to restore an individual’s sense of moral achievement within the context of a moral community. Through this restorative function, and especially in the case of Habitat, these organizations fulfill a social function that recalls earlier traditions—the sense of cooperative village life or a 19th-century barn raising. As Baggett (2000, p. 10) suggests, these organizations also may function as new social forms of religion. In that sense, volunteerism becomes the critical performance factor in religious identity (Park & Smith, 2000, p. 274). This restoration challenges contemporary society in ways that are both profound and familiar, providing reactions to sociocultural change that both look back and look forward. The moral context of charitable work thus provides a counterweight to the sense of disengagement, estrangement, and existential impasse accompanying modernity. Furthermore, as Wuthnow and Hodgkinson (1990) imply, contemporary charitable work tends to deny the commercial by subverting the chief characteristic of the business organization—the profit motive.2 It is this characteristic—the critique of the commercial and the material—that, among other things, links Habitat to late 20th-century phenomena such as New Ageism, which despite its best intentions eventually became commercialized. Significantly, volunteerism is a communal experience that permits the creation of new forms of cultural revitalization, which, like Habitat, are in effect multisituated intentional communities (i.e., they are not ethnically or geographically bound).

Locating Habitat Not far from the house we visited in Belfast, David and I stand on a road at the top of a hill staring at a vacant field. Down below, Protestant neighborhoods are constructing celebratory bonfires. In a few days it will be the

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Twelfth, or Orangemen’s Day, a holiday and a show of strength by the Protestant majority that is marked by bonfires and parades. By the following January, Northern Ireland would make international news over a brutal murder in a Belfast pub that was blamed on the IRA. Later, the IRA undertook an historic disarmament, although by September 2005 Protestant rioters took to the streets of Belfast, leaving parts of the city with the pale look of skirmishing. But in summer 2004 the future was hopeful, and the Troubles were in the past, more or less. The field we are looking at is nothing extraordinary, just a field. But for members of Belfast’s Habitat affiliate, the field represents a shattered dream. In this field, the affiliate had hoped to build an integrated Catholic-Protestant neighborhood. But their plans were put on hold. Habitat staff had been told that Belfast was not ready and that it would be another 15 years before they could hope to realize the dream. During our visit, Habitat housed us with other volunteers in a Catholic neighborhood a block from one section of the Peace Lines, a remarkably bleak reminder that much of the city, as well as Northern Ireland itself, remains strongly divided. The Peace Lines are a series of barriers, or walls, that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The lines stood in contrast to Habitat’s volunteer work, but they also symbolized the difficulty the volunteers faced in their efforts to bring the two factions together.

Communing in Mexico Nevertheless, there are subtler and sometimes smaller but more meaningful rewards in volunteering for Habitat. One of those occurred six years earlier in the state of Morelos, Mexico. There we made a game of who could push the wheelbarrow the fastest from the mound of gravel at the road through a jungle path to a small house that lay a half mile away down a small hill in the small village of Xoxocolta. The gravel was to be used as the foundation for a bathroom/latrine to be built alongside the house. Other Habitat volunteers had recently finished the house, which was intended for a mother and her three children, who had previously had lived in a lean-to. In another nearby village, other members of our college Habitat group applied pickaxes to a barren, rocky field to gather ballast for the foundation of a home. It was 1998, and I was co-leader of one of two groups of about 12 college students who had surrendered their spring break to build houses in Mexico. It was my first experience with Habitat, which a friend

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had introduced me to. During the week we worked hit-and-run style in three villages. The work was basic and in tempo with Habitat’s goal of providing simple housing for those who could not otherwise afford a home. It was also a reminder that the ritual of common labor could bind a group together, creating a sense of group identity, albeit a temporary one. In effect, a Habitat “build” temporally re-creates the American pastoral experience through its emphasis on “building community,” which in turn conjures the image of village folks gathering for a common cause. Indeed, the reward our group received for our efforts was well worth it. As we gathered around the small central room in the unfinished house, the mother offered us bowls of chicken soup. It was the best she could manage, but as we reverently accepted the gift, some of us welled up. The experience was transforming and the moment priceless and precious. We had, for that brief period of time, become a community bound not only by hard labor but by meaningful labor. It was through my association with Habitat that I began to view the organization in a new light. Because of its rapid growth both on my university campus and internationally, Habitat was not easy to explain simply with the category “charity.” Clearly something more complex was at work, and the more deeply I became involved the more intrigued I became by the attraction of Habitat across sociopolitical, religious, and economic spectra despite its grounding in a specific theology and ideology. Indeed, as I examined Habitat’s history and the mythos surrounding its founders, the link between the organization and certain other social movements became increasingly apparent. My attraction also stemmed from the opportunity to do charitable, highly physical work in a communal setting in the context of an organization that seemed to function like a short-term version of the Peace Corps. But I also noticed that the work itself—home construction that usually included the future owners of the house3—became a transformative experience for volunteers. The act of building a house alongside the new owners created a sense of community in the context of another time and place. In fact, Habitat usually builds within a neighborhood with the intention of creating Habitat villages. This transitory experience seemed to provide me and other volunteers with a nostalgic escape from the commercialism and materialism of the hypermodern world. I also interpreted the experience as a critique of the ubiquity of that commercialism and materialism.

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Volunteerism is crucial to Habitat’s success, and volunteers come from various background. Habitat volunteers may be church groups, college student groups, or unaffiliated individuals.4 Work on a Habitat project may range from one day a week for a few months or, in the case of some student groups, a week during spring break. Becoming a volunteer offers not only an opportunity for chartable work and a respite from the commercial world but also a strategic entry into the communal experience, albeit momentarily. Habitat may not be a commune, but it is communal, and the organization’s mission, vision, and sensibilities began in one—a commune by the name of Koinonia. The story of Koinonia Farm is long and full of high drama, and it is not over.

From Community to Organization It is June 2001, and I am looking out on another field, not in Northern Ireland this time. This field is not vacant but productive, a stretch of agricultural space farmed by residents of Koinonia Farm, a more than six-decades-old intentional community. It is less than 10 miles southwest of Americus, Georgia, the world headquarters of Habitat. Travel a few miles northwest and you arrive in Plains, where former President Carter reportedly still conducts Sunday school about half the year. In one section of the Koinonia complex is a large garden where two lean and fit men work quietly, almost monk-like. Inside a community house, a group of residents and guests prepare a lunch. It is here—on this farm, within this community—that Habitat was conceived. As an offshoot of Koinonia Farm, Habitat still reflects some, though not all, of the values and beliefs of the agricultural community. Koinonia’s ideological underpinnings can be summed up as Christian with a strong emphasis on racial justice, pacifism, and anti-materialism. Founded in 1942 as a pure commune by Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England, Koinonia at the time represented a bold experiment in Southern Christian liberalism embedded in the generally more conservative religious environment of Sumter County, Georgia (K’Meyer 1997, p. 4). In its broad outlines and commitment to common ownership of property, early Koinonia was clearly connected to a tradition of American utopianism that predated the counterculture. The presumptive torchbearer for Koinonia until his death in 1969, Clarence Jordan was a Georgia-born scholar, minister, and writer with a penchant for challenging traditional Southern Baptist beliefs. K’Meyer notes

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that Jordan as a boy had been particularly struck by an experience with a mostly African American chain gang near his home (1997, p. 27).5 Jordan walked by the camp, visited with the prisoners, and made friends with the cook. One night after attending a revival, Clarence woke to the sound of a man groaning. He knew it was a prisoner being tortured. He also knew the man responsible for it was the warden, who had been praising God at the service just a few hours earlier. Jordan recalled that night: “This started a great conflict in me—almost against religion. I was bitter against God.” Ultimately, Jordan held fast to his religious beliefs and incorporated the themes of racial equality and social justice into Koinonia. As a result, Koinonia attempted partnering with the local African American community. The themes of racial harmony and social justice were carried over to Habitat and have been an undercurrent in that organization ever since. Koinonia’s official history—which is posted in the community’s small museum in an old building on the farm property or on its more 21st-century Web site6— expresses the community’s commitment to confronting racism, militarism, and materialism as such: “Treat all human beings with dignity and justice; choose love over violence; share all possessions and live simply; be stewards of the land and its natural resources.” Indeed, K’Meyer (1997) notes that Koinonians used their Christian beliefs to resolve racial issues in the post–Second World War south.7 She writes that Koinonia Farm differed from other white liberal attempts to thwart segregation gradually through legislative efforts by building an interracial community based upon economic equality. As such, Koinonians in the late 1940s and 1950s became targets of the KKK and others who were angered at the group’s close association with African Americans (K’Meyer, 1997, pp. 86–87). In the 1960s, Koinonians formed alliances with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), although there was some disagreement between the groups over the shape and form of nonviolent activism (K’Meyer, 1997, pp. 147, 156–157). In the 1960s, the community suffered financial setbacks that forced Jordan to give up communal economics for a partnership approach. Instead of pure communalism, K’Meyer explains that the approach meant those coming to live at Koinonia “would not be part of a full Christian community sharing out of a common pot. . . . Instead, families would work in separate

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partnership enterprises, while living together and sharing socially and spiritually” (1997, p. 172).

Habitat Begins Although the Koinonia community still thrives in modified form, its most notable achievement was providing a haven and seedbed for Habitat’s founders, Millard and Linda Fuller. From its founding by the couple in 1976 until 2005, when he was ousted in a painful power struggle, Millard Fuller was the internal voice of Habitat, just as former President Carter was the public face of the organization. A dynamic speaker with a minimalist lifestyle, Fuller possessed a missionary zeal that eventually, along with other factors, cost him control of the organization. Despite his ouster, the story of the Fullers is told and retold within the organization and among its affiliates throughout the world. It is told to full-time staffers and advisory board members of Habitat affiliates. It is told to campus chapters and at Habitat regional conferences, and it is loaded with all the accouterments of high drama. Its short form goes something like this: Millard Fuller, an affluent Alabama lawyer who ran a highly successful mail-order business, began to rethink his upscale lifestyle after his wife left him. Eschewing the accoutrements of wealth, Millard reunited with his wife, Linda Fuller, and the couple proceeded to give away all their money to charities. In 1965, the Fullers visited Koinonia Farm. Moved by Clarence Jordan’s radical communalism and spirituality, the Fullers eventually joined the community. In the late 1960s and in part energized by the Fullers, the Koinonians acted on their missionary zeal by forming Koinonia Partners, an outreach that seeded Habitat for Humanity. In 1968, the Koinonia community began building homes on the property, allowing families to pay in small amounts over time at no profit and no interest (K’Meyer, 1997, p. 45). In the early 1970s, the Fullers moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) intending to apply the Koinonia housing experiment abroad. After three years and the launch of a home-building program in Africa, the Fullers returned to the United States, and in September 1976 Habitat for Humanity was formally organized based on the idea of building homes partly with donated materials and mostly with volunteer labor to keep costs low. Homeowners would pay back the remaining cost of the house with a nointerest, no-profit loan. The organization established its headquarters in Americus, Georgia, a few miles from Koinonia. The organization now builds in 102 countries and claims to have constructed about 225,000

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homes as of this writing. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter first joined the group’s building operations in 1984, significantly raising Habitat’s visibility.8 Despite its success, in 2004 and 2005 Habitat faced both an organizational and an ideological crisis when Millard Fuller, under fire, stepped down from his leadership post. Although there were other, unrelated issues, one reason for the founder’s disagreements with his governing board was that Fuller did not see Habitat as an organization because “he thinks it’s a movement,” according to a source in the organization. As a movement, Habitat retained a religious fervor that belied financial and pragmatic considerations. It is perhaps the fate of any movement that, with time, the human need to organize and minimize risk begins to transform, or perhaps transmogrify, the entity into a formal organization with as much interest in self-perpetuation as in the original mission. It could be said the process of corporatizing began when Habitat in effect separated from Koinonia by gaining its own identity in 1976. In a sense, the exit of the Fullers pushed the organization more clearly into the formal realm and more distant from the sense of being a social movement, or what Fuller (2000, p. xii) called a “hammering movement.” In 2005, the Fullers formed a new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing, using Koinonia Farm as the center’s launching pad. The choice of Koinonia was significant in that it brought the Fullers’s “hammering movement” home to its communal roots.9 Millard Fuller died in 2009 at age 74.

Work as Ritual For Habitat, work is ritual. Habitat rituals include formal practices that are clearly bound to preexisting identities and the more inclusive category of ritualized actions, to borrow a term from Bell (1992, p. ix). In other words, rituals can be liturgical or can arise from the more organic experience of the build itself. In terms of the former, for example, the Habitat tradition of passing a Bible to new homeowners during the home dedication ceremony tends to reinforce group identity since it is bound to the organization’s Christian mission. On the other hand, less structured ritualized actions such the home construction itself, linked as it is to the idea of barn raising, permit the inclusion of both religious and secular meanings. Indeed, contemporary spirituality places a significant emphasis on “peak experiences” as opposed to established religious traditions, which tend to emphasis asceticism (Hexham & Poewe, 1997, p. 148). The act of construction (i.e., the physical labor itself) is one of those peak experiences, and it both drives

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the success of Habitat and reinforces the organization’s mission. The acts of construction are embodied in what Millard Fuller calls the “theology of the hammer,” which suggests that purposeful human action creates and enhances unity in diversity (Fuller, 1994, p. 7). The theology of the hammer, in essence, recognizes the unifying power of labor, which when organized around a common altruistic purpose becomes a potent ritualized experience. In essence, the communal action of building a house creates the symbolic conditions under which new, though temporary, group identities are constructed. Indeed, Fuller’s theology both implicitly and explicitly acknowledges the power of ritual activity to not only reinforce group identity but also create new identities. Because of its communal nature, a ritual may define a group’s sense of mission, whether that group is a formal organization or a political system. Therefore, Habitat rituals reproduce an ideal egalitarian society on one level by inverting social statuses on another level, with affluent volunteers working not just alongside but for the usually less affluent Habitat homeowners. In effect, the routines of work create the conditions for communitas, the bonding experience that provides a sustaining engine for any social movement.

Habitat on the Reservation The power of ritual is an undercurrent on South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux (Lakota) Reservation, which I visited in 2005. Eagle Butte is the administrative center of the reservation, and it encompasses most of two counties—Ziebach and Dewey, two of the poorest counties in the United States. Most of the 8,000–10,000 Lakota tribal members belong to one of four bands of Lakota—Minicoujou, Siha Sapa, Oohenumpa, and Itazipco— although about a quarter of the reservation population is white. The white population is largely centered in Eagle Butte, the reservation’s largest town. This fact has created a complicated political situation. Eagle Butte is also the tribal headquarters and houses an office of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. The small city of well under 1,000 is also the headquarters of Okiciyapi Tipi Habitat for Humanity, the reservation’s Habitat affiliate—and the first on an American Indian reservation—which began in 1994 with a Jimmy Carter work project.10 Carter work projects are annual HFHI events that involve large numbers of volunteers and “blitz builds,” the apex of Habitat’s ritual experience. Jerome Baggett described the ritualized frenzy of the 1994 blitz build at the

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Cheyenne River project as such: “Even as a purportedly objective ‘participant observer,’ it was difficult for me to avoid being caught up in the camaraderie that comes when people unite for a shared purpose” (2000, pp. 34–35). The project produced 30 homes in a matter of days. As mentioned earlier, the physical act of building along with the recipient families, who tend to be of a lower social status than the volunteers, generates a leveling of social roles, recreating the conditions of communitas. If the build happens to include celebrities—such as former President Carter and others who were on hand at the 1994 Lakota blitz build—the experience becomes an even more transcendent inversion of societal norms, with former world leaders and celebrities doing physical labor for those whose socioeconomic standing is considerably lower. When ritual works, Victor Turner (1974, p. 56) notes, a catharsis is achieved, creating “in some cases real transformations of character and of social relationships.” Like the ghost dance of the late 19th century, an Okiciyapi Tipi build is a pan-religious experience that blends and freely incorporates other ideologies even though Habitat is Christian. It is no surprise, then, that Okiciyapi Tipi director Jerry Farlee is also an intercessor at the yearly Cheyenne River sun dance. Farlee’s role places him betwixt and between worlds. Part white, part Lakota, he has gone on vision quests and claims to have sun dance scars. As an intercessor, he essentially directs the ritual activity of the sun dance’s various events. This commitment to the organizational mission but not necessarily the underlying religious mission is not uncommon among affiliates. As Roland Lewis, New York City Habitat executive director, said in 2005: “I’m Jewish and I’m running a Christian organization. Go figure!” As a member of the Habitat affiliate board in New Haven, I found that both paid staff and members of the affiliate’s advisory board appeared to be diverse in their levels of religious commitment though uniform in their fidelity to the organization’s housing mission. Millard Fuller claimed that the work of Habitat was intended to bridge Christian sectarian differences and to appeal to “people of other faith persuasions and people of no professed faith” (2000, p. 299). This ideological/spiritual tightrope is reflected in the tenor and narrative arc of the daily build, which typically begins with a generalized Christian prayer that volunteers can opt out of but is otherwise free of evangelizing. This “doctrinal minimalism” and emphasis on inclusivity are products of the organization’s “staunch refusal to fixate on theological and ecclesiological minutiae” (Baggett, 2000, p. 61) and stems directly from Fuller’s theology of the hammer.

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The Jimmy Carter work project is just one form of blitz build that Habitat sponsors, but blitz builds represent the apogee of Habitat rituals. Essentially they are what the name implies—the construction of many homes in a short period of time, such as 27 homes in five days, which is what Habitat planned in September 2007 for the city of Radauti in northern Romania.11 Like the Carter builds, other blitz builds usually involve political or entertainment notables, which serves to heighten the publicity for the organization and, of course, for the celebrity or politician involved. The 1994 blitz build in South Dakota, for example, drew current NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw and then Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros in addition to Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. The blitz build is also the summation of the organization’s history, its mission, and its mythos. This sense of history was reflected in a Habitat Martin Luther King blitz build rally I attended in January 2005. The event brought New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a chorus of other city officials to Salem Methodist Church in Harlem. The rally audience of a few hundred Habitat volunteers and supporters was split into two groups, those working on the blitz build and those attending a Habitat-sponsored conference on social justice at Columbia University. Bloomberg and other speakers echoed the theme of social justice through decent housing. The luncheon event ended with a group sing of “We Shall Overcome.”

Habitat as Antidote A Habitat build is intentionally communal. By pairing volunteers with prospective homeowners to work alongside each other, the bonding is temporary but meaningful. After the volunteer leaves the work site, something profound is carried away. The build is an antidote to hypermodernity. In place of a netherworld of disconnectedness and a denial of community, Habitat crafts a compensatory strategy based on the strength of ritual to build communities that are of the moment, in the case of volunteers, and permanent, in the case of homeowners. The builds are defining moments that, in turn, become instruments for momentary interpretations of identity. The organization’s set of binding rituals, such as the build itself, evoke an imagined past and imply a continuity with earlier mythologies such as the frontier community. Thus it is only within the context of such activities that community exists. As such, Habitat represents a creative affirmation of, and nostalgia for, a more communal society.

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The appeal of volunteer movements such as Habitat may be their syncretic character and the egalitarian and liminal nature of their rituals. These attributes enable the rapid spread and reach of these movements, which in some cases can create conditions the larger society may perceive as threatening. But these same attributes also hold the seeds of personal transformation for those involved. Such is the case with Habitat, which began as an outgrowth of a pacifistic, anti-materialistic, interracial commune in Georgia but became a global village of volunteers. According to June Nash, the predominant theme running through social movements of the 21st century is the need for autonomy, for “participants to be themselves” (2005, p. 22). Whereas the need to expresses oneself, to be distinctive, is clearly evident in the volunteer experience, it is the need for community that lies at the heart of that experience. How do these two seemingly opposing forces exist within the same phenomenon? In the case of Habitat, the answer is simple. Because Habitat volunteers do not engage in home building as an all-encompassing lifestyle, Habitat becomes a creative choice that allows the participant to take on transient communalism as a mark of individuality. For some volunteers, therefore, Habitat provides the means to dip into a communal building experience without permanently renouncing or relinquishing the more positive accoutrements of hypermodern life. Like a hippie commune or Koinonia Farm of the late 1960s or early 1970s, Habitat volunteerism does what volunteerism is supposed to do—it provides the sense of meaning. It does so, however, with the added benefit of disassociation, or the ability of the participant to at some point walk away holding onto the communal feeling as a treasured memory.

Communing with the Arts In one class, the children are learning the rudiments of pottery; in another, older girls and boys are receiving instruction in comic books. Outside the classroom and exhibition building, the ceramics kilns are fired up under the pole barn. In the main gallery there is a glass exhibition. At another time the exhibit might be photography or rugs or sculpture. For artists—some struggling and some not—and craftspeople, the Guilford Art Center (formerly the Guilford Handicraft Center), on the shoreline east of New Haven, is a refuge and a sacred space. The nonprofit center is also a gallery, exhibition hall, arts and crafts school, and fairly pricey gift

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shop. It is not a residential intentional community, but it might as well be. Those who work and teach there are united not just by a love of art but also by a desire to seek the community of other artists. Less than a mile from the center is the Guilford Town Green. It is the largest green or common in New England, and it is crowded with the tents of about 170 artists and crafts people. The tents are both the workspaces and show spaces of participants in the summer Guilford Crafts Expo, the largest crafts show in Connecticut. The green dates to the town’s English settlement in the early 17th century. In fact, the town itself is something of a museum piece. Buildings representing more than three and half centuries surround the green. At the head of the green is a large white Congregational church. At the other end are the local hardware store, the ice cream shop, the bookstore, and the tiny local grocery store with hardwood floors. There is also a spattering of small, quaint eateries. A modest hike to the waterfront reveals an offshore lighthouse perched on a cliff on a town-owned island. As with so many other photo-worthy historic New England towns, Guilford recalls another time and place, which is why the town draws its share of visitors, especially when the weather cooperates. For these reasons, the town prides itself on its strong sense of community. Unfortunately, since this place looks to be a little slice of utopia, looks can be deceiving. With a population of about 21,000 and within an easy commute of the vibrant college city of New Haven, Guilford is also a bedroom town, a suburb. And not all the folks who amble in and out of the local hardware store or bicycle shop or chocolate shop are known by name. And that is why living in Guilford is not quite the same as being in a community. Like so much of the hypermodern world, communities are rarely communities. They are soulless suburbs with anonymous neighbors and cities whose vibrant and often communal ethnic enclaves are besieged by economic despair or diminished by the lure of the suburbs. Guilford may not be the community it appears to be, but it is not soulless because it is lucky and affluent enough to offer the temporary sense of community if one looks toward the niches, places and organizations like the arts center. These niches serve people like Claire Hurley of Guilford, who used to work in the gift shop when the arts center was called the handicraft center. Her friends include center staff, artists, and teachers who were, or still are, connected to the center. She says it was her interest in the arts and her previous work with schoolchildren that brought her to the center. Hurley recalls: “[The center] opened me up and broadened me in the arts. I liked talking to artists and being part of that milieu. I enjoyed it more and more as I went

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along. It didn’t pay much but it was nice to be around the artists. The crafts people were so talented that I spent half my salary buying their stuff.” My wife Lucille and I have lived in Guilford for more than two decades, and since she is an artist I have had the opportunity to observe the arts scene and understand how important that community has become to artists or artistic types. But the Guilford Arts Center is only one part of the scene. There are other scenes within scenes. There is, for example, the Shoreline Open Studios event in which artists from Guilford and neighboring areas open their homes to visitors for one weekend a year. New Haven for many years held a similar event on a much larger scale sponsored by a group of local artists and art admirers called Artspace. In a sense, the fine arts and arts and crafts scenes in Guilford and the surrounding towns—with an art center and art networking—are modern, more commercial variations of the artist colonies that once thrived on the Connecticut shore and the Maine coast in the early 20th century. These included Connecticut’s Old Lyme Colony and the Cos Cob Art Colony on the state’s Gold Coast. Another major influence from an earlier time was the arts and crafts movement, which spread from Great Britain to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century and was exemplified by such places as Byrdcliffe, a utopian community in Woodstock, New York. The Old Lyme Colony is now a museum, and Byrdcliffe rents studio space and offers short-term stays for artists in residence, but their spiritual descendents in Guilford and elsewhere, with their kilns and work barns, provide a sanctuary from the frenzied pace of liquid life, at least for those who can afford the leisure time.

Of Arts, Crafts, and the Past In 2007 I finally got to Woodstock, but not the festival. Instead, it is the town in upstate New York from which the 1969 happening got its name, but in which it was not held. I was in Woodstock not for the quaint shops on the main drag nor to check out where Bob Dylan used to live but to see what remains of Byrdcliffe, one of America’s pioneering arts and crafts colonies. The colony was what put Woodstock on the cultural map and set in motion the kind of passions that in another era would be realized in more modest enterprises like the Guilford Arts Center. As we walk through the grounds I imagine what the community was like a century earlier when it was alive with artists, craftspeople, and intellectuals

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living in communion with their creativity and with each other. A hint of that remains as we enter the studio of a young artist staying at Byrdcliffe for a few months. We admire her work and talk about her ambitions. Further on we amble up to the Villetta Inn, planked in dark wood and resembling a more modest version of one of the great lodges of the National Parks. It is here that Byrdcliffe still blooms as a one-month residential creative center for artists, writers, and others. I was pleasantly surprised to find many of the other buildings from when Byrdcliffe was a more vigorous community still intact and still being used for the arts. Byrdcliffe sprang from alternative ideas about the meaning of work and the nature of progress, reactions to the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Great Britain. The arts and crafts movement was born of these ideas in part through the writings of John Ruskin. As expressed in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, Ruskin had specific ideas about the accumulation of wealth and what constituted progress. So did others, such as poet William Morris, whose furniture decorative arts firm set the stage for the production of arts and crafts. For Ruskin, Morris, and others, Industrialization had brought with it the total destruction of “purpose, sense and life”. . . . [They measured] the cost of mechanical “progress” in terms of human misery and degradation; they saw the destruction of fundamental human values reflected in poverty, overcrowded slums, grim factories, a dying countryside and the apotheosis of the cheap and shoddy. In such conditions, they maintained, the good . . . whether in art or life, was strangled at birth. (Naylor, 1971, p. 8) So it came to be assumed that arts and crafts, which elevated the status of labor and exulted individual achievement, were the cure for the ills of a world of industrialized progress. In Britain and elsewhere, the arts and crafts movement also represented nostalgia for traditions of an earlier period—that is, folk art. In Britain, the interest in folk art and traditions corresponded with a renewed need for national identity. In Ireland, the crafts industry was associated with nationalism as well as “a longing for what was perceived as a purer, less complicated era” (Kaplan, 1987, p. 59). In the United States, the arts and craft phenomenon also found expression in indigenous crafts, such as Navajo blankets, but the movement split into two directions. The first reflected the British disdain for industrialization and the longing for a preindustrial age. The second was less nostalgic

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and was more inclined to embrace the tools of modernity to create craft cultures (Kaplan, 1987, pp. 59–60). This dualism is reflected in the conflicts found in some ecovillages, where those who believe modern technologies and building materials are an acceptable route to sustainability are juxtaposed against those who prefer more traditional methods and natural building materials.

Fine Arts Communalism Another of the antecedents of Guilford’s artistic scene is the European art colony, also a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The arts and crafts movement came to America from England, but the notion of communities devoted to the fine arts was decidedly French. One of the most notable of America’s art colonies was located in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the mansion of one Florence Griswold. Old Lyme is about 20 miles east of Guilford, and outside of the state it may be best known for lending its name (along with the neighboring town of Lyme) to a nasty tick-borne disease. But the colony—founded at the end of the 19th century at about the same time as the founding of a similar colony in Taos, New Mexico—was, according to one scholar, the ne plus ultra of art colonies of its time (Falconer-Salkeld, 2005, p. 7). I sensed no ghosts in the Griswold mansion when I was there last. There should have been. The late Georgian-style mansion with four imposing Greek columns anchoring the portico was ready-made for ghosts. Maybe the ghosts were hiding from the flocks of tourists who regularly visit the old house because the site of the Old Lyme Colony is now a museum complex overlooking the winding sweep of the Lieutenant River, which works into way into the broad mouth of the Connecticut River. The river, the woods, the light, and the generally serene geography of this section of the town of Old Lyme attracted American artists such as Henry Ward Ranger and Childe Hassam to the home of Florence Griswold, in addition to the hospitality of the host. In fact, Ranger came up with the idea of an art colony while staying with Griswold because he thought the area resembled Barbizon, the French village that gave its name to a school of art (Denenberg, Lansing, & Danly, 2009, p. 12). French impressionism also was an inspiration for the Old Lyme Colony. Another French village, Giverny, also played a role in advancing American art. Giverny, a village near Paris, was often frequented by American artists because of its charm and the presence of Claude Monet (Bourguignon,

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2007, p. 17). Connecticut’s Cos Cob Art Colony in Greenwich, down the coast from Old Lyme, was similarly affected by French impressionism and is considered a progenitor of the Old Lyme Colony (Larkin, 2001, p. 4). Like other art colonies in both France and America, Old Lyme artists usually came for a few months and then left, but the works they produced sometimes did not leave with them, such as the painted impressionistic panels on some walls and doors on the main floor. The colony was no more by 1936, just before Florence Griswold’s death, but within the museum complex is a modern and rather large gallery as a reminder of what was. Other famed creative arts colonies, however, live on, albeit in other forms. Like Byrdcliffe, the Yaddo community at Saratoga Springs, further north in New York State, had its brush with past glories. Founded in 1900, Yaddo has hosted a many famous writers, poets, and other artists. Today, creative people are chosen by committee for stays from two weeks to two months. In southern New Hampshire, the equally noted MacDowell Colony, founded in 1907, also has hosted a pantheon of notables—including 65 Nobel Prize winners—in various arts. Creative folks still come to the colony on fellowships for stays of up to eight weeks.12 It is comforting to think that places such as Byrdcliffe, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony still exist, but the reality is they are luxuries beyond the means of many who might profit from living in community with fellow artists. For so many others, places such as the Guilford Art Center or New Haven’s Artspace substitute a transient, scattered sense of community for the more intensive experience of another era.

Novel Forms of Community There are some intentional communities in which residents have little in common, where communalism is more an ideal than a reality. But even in those communities, the communal meal, if only occasional, is indispensable. One might say that without some form of periodic communal meal, you do not have a community. The reason is self-evident. Eating together is the central ritual of our species. Sharing food has not only religious significance but important social and economic functions as well. Anthropologist Karl Heider writes the following of cultures in which resources are marginal: Sharing one’s surpluses with others, in the expectation that food given out will eventually be returned, is a way of safeguarding against the inevitable bad times. This has been called the social refrigerator. We can

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see the double outcome of sharing. Food is distributed, and the social network is strengthened. (Heider, 2007, p. 209) Although modern societies and their cultures may not be as concerned with surpluses, the social networking factor is consequential. Combined with a deepening interest in locally produced foods, it is not surprising that food has become the focus of several social movements with an overarching concern of building a more community-oriented future. Among these are the local food movement, the community garden movement, and the Slow Food/ Slow City movements.

Community Gardens The pace of life in the Dutch city of Utrecht is a little slower than in the tourist mecca of Amsterdam, less than an hour’s drive north. There are no long queues to visit the Dom Church and its skyscraping medieval tower. Residents take a long time to eat. Pleasure craft and working craft ply the slowmoving canals that hardwire the city like a circuit board. The main canal that leisurely snakes through the center of the city, however, is unique. Through much of the city’s Centrum, or center, the canal dips below the street level. In one section of the canal, al fresco restaurants line both sides of the lower level. Utrecht does have its crowds, especially on market days when the stalls of herring, cheeses, and vegetables draw the hungry and curious to the center of the city. And the city can feel crowded if you are living there. With a population of over 300,000, Utrecht is space hungry, as is the rest of the Netherlands, a nation with one of the highest population densities in Europe and about a fifth of its land reclaimed from the sea. There are waiting lists for apartments, and if you are not walking or riding a bike, then parking is going to be the bane of your time in the city. As in so many other places with space issues, residents develop novel strategies to cope. One of these is the common garden. In fact, one can be seen from my sister-in-law’s house in the southern end of the city. Community gardens in the area typically accommodate between 50 and 100 gardeners, each with one- to two-hundred-square-foot plots. Garden implements and facilities are shared. Gardeners are inclined to assist each other—for instance, by watering a neighbor’s plot. The community garden just described is one of two basic arrangements. The gardens typically found in Utrecht and many other cities and towns are

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divided into separate plots, which are typically rented. The second type is more commonly found in intentional communities. In this type one large plot is communally owned and tended. Community gardens are not just the province of highly populated areas. In my home state of Connecticut, community gardening has taken off even in rural towns such as Killingworth, in the south central part of the state. The Killingworth garden is owned and administered by the town. The town charges a registration fee and doles out the plots on a first-come, first-serve basis. The town opened the land in 2008 with 24 plots and more than doubled that number the following year.13 In New Haven, a community garden gave residents of one neighborhood a chance to get rid of an eyesore, a vacant lot filled with trash; with the aid of a local nonprofit, the New Haven Land Trust, the lot was transformed into a community garden. In 2009, the movement in America was rejuvenated by First Lady Michele Obama. In a February 19 speech to the USDA, she affirmed that she was a “big believer in community gardens, both because of their beauty and for their access to providing fresh fruits and vegetables to so many communities across this nation and the world.” The White House also promoted a farmers market that opened near the executive mansion in September 2009. Farmers markets are at the center of a loosely organized movement aimed at promoting local foods. This movement is an outgrowth of a collection of trends, including green politics and antiglobalization sentiments. In Athens, Georgia, a spacious restaurant with the unusual name Farm 255 pushed the idea of local food to a logical conclusion. The restaurant grows its own food on a nearby organic/biodynamic farm. Farm 255 announces: “We are the folks sowing turnip seeds in the morning and cooking turnip greens in the evening.”14

Eating Slow In addition to community gardens, the Dutch city of Utrecht has another connection to a food movement. The city has a Slow Food convivium, or chapter. The Slow Food movement began in Italy, where eating is an art and a critical factor in community life. The seminal act in the founding of the movement was a protest in 1986, organized by food writer Carlo Petrini, against the building of a MacDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. The protestors objected to the standardization and globalization of food, of which MacDonald’s is the most recognizable symbol (Waters, 2001, p. ix).

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To members of the movement, which now has a global reach, there is more at stake than good, nonstandardized food. It is a matter of lifestyle. Anyone who has ever dined out in Italy, or almost anywhere in Europe outside of major cities, knows the pleasures of a long, slow meal and the opportunities such meals offer for social interaction. Fast food is the opposite. It transforms time into a commodity and dining into an isolating, mechanized act. “As soon as we start to parcel up time, the tables turn, and time takes over,” Carl Honoré (2004, p. 21) writes, adding, “We become slaves to the schedule. Schedules give us deadlines, and deadlines, by their very nature, give us a reason to rush.” And this excerpt from the Slow Food Manifesto, adopted in 1989, states the case against fast food thusly: Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. (Petrini, 2003, p. xxiii) In the wake of the Slow Food movement, a complementary movement evolved—the Slow City movement. As noted previously, the Slow City movement attempts to slow the race of urban life and recapture the more relaxed and gentle pace of a perhaps imagined past. One of the goals of the movement is to ban cars from city centers. The pedestrian areas thus created are intended to recapture the character of preindustrial village life. Pedestrian city centers are by no means a concept foreign to European cities and were a centerpiece of American urban renewal long before the Slow City movement. Nevertheless, the movement has reinforced preexisting notions of what urban life should be.

Potlatching Identity Several years ago, while passing through a small town in British Columbia that has a large Salish Indian population, I was privy to a lunchtime conversation about the potlatch, a keystone ritual among native peoples of North

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America’s Northwest Coast. I was not surprised that the potlatch was alive and well, but I was surprised it appeared to be less elaborated than the potlatch of the 19th century. As described to me at that lunch, the potlatch seemed to be a little more ordinary, unlike the endless feasting and giftgiving extravaganzas of which early anthropologists wrote. Nevertheless, the persis-tence of the potlatch even in modified form and despite attempts to suppress it was reassuring because the potlatch is an important means of sustaining cultural identity and keeping community ties alive for Northwest Coast peoples. It is also a critical link to a disappearing past. More to the point of this book, the potlatch is a striking example of how essential sharing and gifting can become to sustaining community identity. Like a modern potluck supper (the terms potlatch and potluck are probably not related), the potlatch broke down the barriers between people and provided a means of building community. The traditional potlatch was practiced widely among the Haida, Tlingit, Coast Salish, and others of the region. Any major event, such as a wedding, funeral, or construction of a new home, could trigger a potlatch. The ceremony itself involved feasting, dancing, and, most significantly, the giving away of gifts. The higher the status of the individual or family hosting the potlatch the more extensive the gift giving. In pre-contact times, gifts could be simple, such as shells or blankets, or not so simple, such as canoes or even slaves (Sutton, 2000, pp. 128–129). Most notable among the potlatch societies were the Kwakwaka’wakw (also known as Kwakiutl) of British Columbia, who created elaborate ceremonial masks and costumes for the rituals, some of which are now museum pieces.15 With European contact, the nature of the potlatch changed somewhat and became more extravagant, with villages potlatching other villages. To non-Indians of the late 19th century, the potlatch represented waste and moral degradation, and in 1885 the Canadian government banned the practice (Niezen, 2000, pp. 137–137). The potlatch continued to be practiced in secret, often resulting in arrests and the confiscation of masks and other ceremonial regalia. The ban on the potlatch was lifted in 1951. Today, jewelry, money, and household items are given away in the potlatch, which usually lasts a day and a night.

Of Common Pots If the Kwakwaka’wakw can keep community alive through periodic gettogethers, why not a neighborhood. Communities magazine reports that

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neighborhood dinners are a growing trend that take several novel forms. One of these forms, the progressive dinner, involves a small group of neighbors who move from one house to another for different courses of a meal (Chiras & Wann, 2006, p. 23). One group, Progressive Dinner Party in Long Beach, California, even has its own Web site, which offers advice on how to set up a neighborhood dinner. The group says it holds monthly parties at different homes and contributes the amount saved by not going out to eat to charity.16 In a neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, regular barbecues are held to accompany neighborhood meetings and garage sales. The events are held in local parks, one of which was slated to become a community garden (Chiras & Wann, 2006, p. 23). Food also plays a key role in one of most popular ways of establishing a sense of community: the book discussion club. Churches sponsor them; so does Oprah Winfrey. Book clubs appear to be growing in number, and often they involve the reading of real solid objects—that is, books with pages you can touch—although audio books and e-books are not without their partakers. Book clubs often involve sharing meals that coincide with foods mentioned in a book, as we do in the book club to which I belong. It was formed by professors who taught at a university and who lacked much of a social life. The book club was, in effect, a substitute for that social deficit. Common meals, neighborhood dinners, and book clubs are just a sampling of the more modern trends in finding community. Communal eating is at the heart of these activities. Of course, many other strategies have emerged to confront the fracturing of community living. There are sports retreats, Tai Chi camps, yoga classes, and hiking clubs, and there are music camps, spiritual centers, and wilderness retreats. All represent challenges to the anonymity of hypermodern life. They are safety valves from the pressures of multitasking and the confusion of multimedia. They subvert the tyranny of suburbia and the complexities and confusion of urban life. They are liminal acts born of social need in the face of antisocial structures.

The Cul-de-Sac Option For communitarians, suburbia is the great adversary, but what if it were possible to transform a suburb into utopia, or at least into a place where neighbors know each other? Samantha Smith, an architect, thought it was possible, and she put her idea into action. Her invention is a novel but logical form of finding community by reimagining a suburban tract as a commune.

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The idea is not to reinvent the wheel but to redefine the notion of commune. The cul-de-sac commune is just such a redefinition. The idea is not complicated, although it can be. It envisions the typical suburban cul-de-sac as a source of communal activity. After all, the houses within a cul-de-sac are, in a sense, isolated and easily accessible to each other. On October 15, 2009, Dave LeBlanc, writing in the column “The Architourist” for Globe and Mail of Toronto, had this to say about Smith’s concept: In her reinterpretation of the commune, there wouldn’t be any relocation to the desert or a push to trade in the sedan for a VW microbus, but, rather, life as usual with minor adjustments. To conduct her initial research, she contacted people living on three cul-de-sacs in suburban Los Angeles and set up potluck dinner parties. “I like the idea of five or six houses all facing each other,” she says. “It’s a kind of automatic community waiting to happen.” There were no presuppositions about the kinds of resources neighbours might share—sustainable stuff like a vegetable garden was a great idea but so too was a babysitting club—since the “goal” of the project was to help people save money by buying less, which, ultimately, is environmentally responsible. Smith runs Ecoshack, a lab facility for testing new architectural ideas. She got the idea of the cul-de-sac communes from her interest in Central Asian yurts. She apparently connected the nomadic lifestyle associated with the yurt to the notion of sharing and applied it to the development of the culde-sac commune. Her idea first made news on an NPR broadcast. She is quoted in an excerpt from that June 24, 2009, broadcast: In the past, utopian communities have often failed because people who started them have really insisted that the best way is to leave your old community, leave society, leave culture and start over, and it’s a valid idea in many cases, but, it also leads to failure. . . . So what we’re interested in doing is make them effective as part of a culture, not a counterculture this time. (Sharpe, 2009) The synergy between the traditional village and the suburb, which is what the cul-de-sac commune is, bears a connection to the cohousing concept. Both bridge the wide gap between communalism and hypermodern life. In a sense, this bridge action is fast becoming an important tool in reconciling the frenzy of contemporary living with the need to find community.

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Cyberspace vs. Face-to-Face As I power up my Mac, I resist the immediate temptation to log on to my Facebook account. And I do so by first perusing a few select news sights, but then the pull is inevitable. Once on the site I am troubled by the endless stream of daily minutiae from friends and relatives. Does the minutiae bring me closer to them? To the extent that I learned things I probably would not have otherwise learned, even in a face-to-face conversation, the answer is yes. But the reality is that I do not need—I do not want to know—a lot of what appears on my news feed. But others need to know my thoughts, which I express rarely. In fact, I have had requests from students at my university to join their Facebook network, which, of course, means allowing them into mine. Not a bad move on their part, to get into the mind of their professor by sorting through the daily snippets of his thinking, but not a good move on my part to allow it. It is apparent that some people depend on Facebook as a means of finding community. Facebook and the multitude of other social networking sites that have gone viral in cyberspace in recent years are a way of both drawing people together and a means of self-expression. In effect, Facebook recreates, rather than creates, the communal experience by replacing spatial proximity with informational proximity. This is the essence of what has been termed “ambient awareness,” the subject of a New York Times Magazine article on September 7, 2008. Writing for the Times, Clive Thompson explains that the incessant online contact on sites like Facebook, the constant updates on the minutiae of life, is “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye.” It is assumed cyberspace is a useful tool in building community. But is it? Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005, p. 851) believe the opposite may be true. They contend that instead of linking people separated by geography, cyberspace may create new barriers that lead to “more fragmented intellectual and social interaction.” They add, Just as separation in physical space can divide geographic groups, we find that separation in virtual knowledge space can divide special interest groups. In certain cases, the latter can be more insular. They base their observations on two assumptions. The first is that because so much information is available, the mind creates boundaries; thus, filtering is obligatory. This filtering can lead to greater information

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specialization, thus decreasing the range of overlapping information. In other words, the preponderance of information and social networking possibilities may force users to fixate on a few highly specialized networks to the exclusion of others. The second assumption is similar. The authors contend that users who restrict themselves to specialized networks may seek cyberspace contacts and/or relationships that or more focused, or limited, than they would in the real world. “Thus, local heterogeneity can give way to virtual homogeneity as specialized communities coalesce across geographic boundaries” (Alstyne & Brynjolfsson 2005, pp. 851–852). This is intriguing, especially because the authors were writing before Facebook and Twitter became the phenomena they are. It forces the question: do these networks offer social opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable locally, or do they distract users from the availability of increased face-to-face interactions? The temptation is to compromise and say cyberspace opens up both possibilities. There are circumstances, however, when the second possibility comes to the fore. But let me be clear on one point: cybercultures are real communities. Over the last several years I have frequently asked students about online communities and resultant relationships. Those who have met future mates and spouses online appear to be almost commonplace. For example, the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft has become wildly popular since its release in late 2004. But the game also has spawned a virtual community in which participants interact with each other through in-game characters. And I have heard enough stories of people whose free time from school or work was consumed by online gaming to know there is truth to the tales. As online gaming demonstrates, cyberspace derives power from its capacity to create virtual realities and communities where identities can be optional or invented. Madge and O’Connor (2005) equate cyberspace with liminal space in that the rules and roles of physical space are suspended and the participant in cyberspace is betwixt and between worlds. Fred Turner, a communications professor at Stanford, makes a rather stunning observation. Turner (2006) suggests that countercultural types and the military industrial complex created the conditions under which today’s cybercultures are thriving. Accurate or not, it is possible to see a complex of motives and sentiments behind cyberspace. On the one hand, cyberspace is both intimate and public at the same time. Identities can be stolen, privacy invaded. On the other hand, it is egalitarian, a feature of most intentional communities, even those with active or charismatic founders. Cyberspace is a social leveler. It allows bloggers to become the equal of newspaper edi-

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tors and politicians, which can be a bane or a comfort depending on how one views the press or politics. But in a universe where identities can be constructed out of nothing, what can be trusted? And if the most popular reference source among large swaths of the world population is a consensusbased Web site, how reliable is our knowledge base? Another issue is speed. Cyperspace is constantly in flux; change is a daily routine. Therefore, rapid and constant change is endemic to cybercultures. Cybercultures embrace hypermodernism; they use the tools of the hypermodern world to expand the boundaries of the possible. Geographically bound intentional communities embrace slow living. That is the point. So how does one flee the frenetic pace of liquid life if one is swimming in it? By the time this is published, or a short time thereafter, Facebook will probably be a relic of the continuing cyber revolution, probably replaced by an even more compelling and quixotic cyber community.

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Chapter 7

Utopian End Game If I were to give you, in one sentence, a key to what may seem the mysteries of our civilization as compared with that of your age, I should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity. —Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, chapter 12

It is June 2004, and a fellow researcher and I are walking through the home of two doctors in a new community in Biskek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, was on the cusp of a bloodless revolution during the few weeks I was there. My colleague had been there since January, teaching at a university. The community was built by Habitat for Humanity. What I observed was a rather curious alliance of would-be homeowners and a post-Soviet government that had turned to Habitat to solve the nation’s dearth of urban dwellings. The government supplied the land, a former apple orchard with room for 50 houses. When the first houses were built, the president of the republic and other officials showed up for the dedication. Despite the fact Kyrgyzstan is predominately Muslim, the local affiliate gained acceptance because Christian-based Habitat is nondiscriminatory in terms of religion, and affiliate staff members present in both churches and mosques. The neighborhood created by the affiliate was isolated and distinct from the surrounding neighborhoods and was, in effect, a Habitat intentional community. It also was one of the more desirable housing quarters I observed in the city despite the fact that Habitat neighborhoods were usually built for lower income residents. The neighborhood, in effect, became the centerpiece of a movement for housing reform in the nation’s

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capital, and the people in the tightly knit Habitat community were part of that movement.

From a Yurt A few days later we are sitting in a yurt at about 10,000 feet in the Tian-Shan mountains, which rise to more than 24,000 feet. Our hosts offer us horse’s milk from their small herd. The yurt is just off the main route from Bishkek to Naryn, a small city of about 50,000. My colleague and I have been invited to speak at a university in Naryn, most of which was built during the Soviet era. It is a modern town with a statue of Lenin still in its center, and the city is home during the colder part of the year to the family who otherwise reside in the yurt. Not far from Naryn is Tash-Rabat, an outpost in centuries past on the famous Silk Road from China to the West. During warmer weather, the family — a grandfather, grandmother, and grandchildren — move from Naryn, which is in a river valley, to a higher elevation and greener pastures. Near their yurt are other families, many with horses. Further down the road I see a woman tending Bactrian camels; in another direction there is a boy on horseback with a herd of yak. Also along the road, Kyrgyz are selling large plastic containers of horse milk. Back in the yurt, the grandfather tells us how he and his wife came to raise three of their grandchildren. He explains that the children’s parents, including his daughter, whom he put through college, were killed in an automobile accident. Now, he says, he is hoping his grandchildren will go to college and get jobs in the modern world because he realizes his traditional way of life is coming to an end. The grandparents come to the high country each summer to try to maintain ties to the past, to recreate in some small way the semi-nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors. He says that although he lost his daughter to the modern world, the intrusion of that world was inevitable. He says he is hoping modern medical procedures will help his grandson, who suffers from a heart condition that may be corrected by a surgical procedure. What I took away from the experience in Bishkek and the Naryn region was the impulse to live in community, whether as a semi-nomadic horseman or a doctor (physicians are not well-paid in Kyrgyzstan) in an urban Habitat community. It is a fundamental human drive. But hypermodernity offers challenges that can both threaten and enable that impulse.

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What follows in this chapter is a discussion of some of the more pressing challenges, both practical and abstract, to living in community.

Individualism vs. Communalism The first thing to make clear is that communes, ecovillages, cohousing communities, and other forms of intentional community are an organized system, a collective with patterns of living that are, after a fashion, as rigid as any organization in the outside world. It is one of the ironies of the counterculture that the core of modern communalism was built on a foundation of antiauthority—a rebellious, nonconforming individual. This is the person who expresses his or her individuality by joining a commune, a collective, an organization with ideals but also a set of rules to which one is expected to conform. It is a contradiction with which the Danes struggle, as symbolized by Christiania. How does a society become tolerant and permit individual expression while maintaining a sense of group identity? In this sense, the modern intentional community is a microcosm of a fundamental struggle within most democratic societies: the struggle between freedom and social control. It is odd that those with the most robust nonconforming personalities are those most likely to join an intentional community. It is as if the joining, the separation, the act of rebellion from the outside world were the point. The living is often a different matter. The tough part is the liminal stage in which one must bond with the collective. I do not mean to imply that those who join intentional communities are acting hypocritically, trading one set of restrictions in one social order for the restrictions of another. But I do mean to suggest that the terms individual and collective are in dialogue rather than two opposing dimensions. As anthropologist F. G. Bailey (1993, p. 3) points out, there is no easy way of separating the notion of the individual from that of the collective. Individuals acquire the sense of being individuals from the society in which they are raised. For the hippie, the act of leaving society to go into the imagined wilderness and set up a commune was an expression of freedom, but the notion of freedom was a creation of the larger society. Yet the leaving is still a fact, and the new society that is joined then creates its own more acceptable definition of freedom. Bennett, writing in 1975 during the early stages of modern communalism, notes that the intentional movement had two missions: the “search for

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the integrity of the gemeinschaft on the one hand, and the flowering of the identity of the individual in the group, on the other.” It is the contradiction between these two goals that creates conflict within communities and resulted in the demise of many early communes. Bennett adds: But the pathos of the human condition is hidden in these two goals: the fulfillment of the personality and the consolidation of group culture are not inherently or always compatible, and the achievement of one may negate the other. . . . The communal group is no paradise; it replicates, in slightly different, often accentuated forms, the basic dilemmas of the individual in society, and even at its most ideal, the commune, or any small group, contains most of the frustrations of human existence. (1975, p. 64) Much has changed since Bennett wrote those words. Today, the true commune is perhaps the least popular of intentional communities precisely because it demands the most severe form of cooperation and, thus, heightens the friction between individual choice and community imperatives. Contemporary communities for the most part search for a balance, but they are not always successful. But the reality is that utopian societies need an ordering principle. Donnelly (1998, p. 95) explains that the classical concept of utopia is the relevance of order that is “whole, fixed and organic” and leads to an end. Writing about early hippie communes, Timothy Miller (1999, p. 192) observes: Central to it all, really, was the ongoing project of melding separate and often strong-willed personalities into a real community. As one participant-observer noted at the time, any subway rider knows that physical closeness doesn’t automatically imply emotional solidarity — and the people’s solidarity was, after all, what it was all about. Central to the community-building process was the sense of dropping out of a decadent society and building a new and better order on the ashes of the old. The more perceptive of the commune-dwellers clearly understood the process of coming together and knew that it happened by direction, not accidentally. The problem in the 1960s and 1970s was that joining a commune was often an act of youthful impulse rather than perception. The era when all

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one had to do was pitch a tent to become part of the tribe has passed, and, in my experience, those who commit to an intentional community do so as perceptive individuals who have made a considered choice. They know the issues. They are well aware of the disharmony between the need for order and the need for self-expression. For this reason, contemporary communities in general have entry requirements that usually involve some sort of trial period so the prospective member knows the lay of the land, literally and figuratively. In addition to an awareness of the issues, contemporary communitarians are willing to redefine the terms, rules, and perimeters of their new society. And they are aware that the new society they are creating can never entirely separate itself from the troubling aspects of the rest of the society they tend to disdain. The challenge is “to ‘re-embed’ themselves in ways that will not do undue violence to their freedom or autonomy, while simultaneously trying to find sources of shared meaning and purpose” (Vaisey, 2007, p. 866). Contemporary communitarians as a whole seem to be up to it.

Macro vs. Micro Authority One of the legacies of the counterculture has been a distrust of authority. Americans have always placed a high value on individual achievement and self-reliance, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his two-volume work Democracy in America (2000 [1835, 1840]). Since then, the culture of the individual has reached much of the Western world and beyond. As mentioned earlier, the cult of the individual infused the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. It expressed itself in a critique of the establishment, and it utilized catch phases such as “Do your own thing.” Communes of the counterculture offered both community and unrestricted individuality, thus ensuring conflict. Utopian communities of 19th century and earlier clearly did not value individualism. In the United States, in particular, communities such as the Shakers and the Harmonists sought order, which meant an insistence on conformity because the outside world was disorderly and chaotic. This is not to suggest these communities did not question authority. They did; they questioned the authority of the outside world but had no issue with imposing an internal authority. In the 1960s and 1970s, the questioning of authority was embodied in various movements—the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the American Indian Movement are obvious examples. The counterculture,

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spurred by the Vietnam War and a general sense that society had gone off the rails, spawned several antiestablishment and antiauthoritarian movements, such as the Yippies (Youth International Party), the Jesus Freaks, and the Flower Children. The questioning of authority was immortalized in another hippie catch phrase co-opted by the media: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Today, entrepreneurial communitarians have a slightly different agenda. They tend to be less antiauthoritarian but more antiestablishment. Communitarians accept the need for authority but reject macroauthority, the kind of controls imposed by the larger society. Instead, they embrace microauthority, or local control of the essentials of life, often expressed in a consensus form of governance. As seen in chapter 4 at Earthaven, consensus-driven microauthority can be messy, diffuse, and difficult to pin down, but it is a form of social control nonetheless. Such was the case at Findhorn, which is overseen by the Findhorn Foundation. The foundation functions like a loosely knit corporation without overly obtrusive controls over the operation of its units. Although communitarians generally prefer consensus decision-making, some long-lasting communities, such as the Sirius Community and Christiania, have modified that system of governance to give deference to elders with longevity in the community. Nevertheless, leadership is sometimes inevitable even in communities dedicated to egalitarianism. These firsts among equals usually come to prominence from two circumstances: either they are the founders of their communities or they are the most proficient spokespeople. Yet despite their status, community founders such as The Farm’s Stephen Gaskin and EVI’s Liz Walker lead not so much by fiat as by influence.

Balancing Hypermodernity Today’s communitarians tend to avoid the pitfalls of choosing between hypermodernity and their community by not so much rejecting the outside world as rejecting the more egregious parts of it, such as excessive materialism and waste, while incorporating those aspects that are helpful. Living smaller does not mean living in complete isolation. A more radical view of the connection between the outside world, or larger society, and the kind of person most likely to join an intentional community comes from Heath and Potter. In their book Nation of Rebels, they suggest that modern consumerism and capitalism and have something in common with countercultural people:

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The restless, individualistic, free-spirited bohemian is, in many ways, much more in tune with the true spirit of capitalism—where fortunes are gained and lost in an afternoon, where flows of capital are unleashed across the world at the click of a mouse button, where commerce moves too quickly for anyone to put down roots and, most importantly, where everyone’s money is the same color. Unlike so-called bourgeois values, which are basically an imitation of feudal social norms, hip values are a direct expression of the spirit of capitalism. (2004, p. 202) On one point, this perspective seems to be off the mark. The implication that the bohemians of the past and the neo-bohemians of the present embrace the fast life contradicts strong evidence that suggests the opposite. But the authors may have something to add to the discussion nevertheless. In reality, in the modern communitarian there is an element of the entrepreneur. I am using the term entrepreneur very broadly here to represent anyone, businessman or hippie, able to think outside the box, so to speak. In an early work, F. G. Bailey (1960, 1969) defines an entrepreneur as an agent of change — that is, someone who is able to effect change because he or she can innovatively bridge contradictory systems. “Communities which have survived the test of time,” Smith (1999, p. 129) notes, “are those that have found some balance between maintaining social order and personal autonomy.” To affect that balance requires an understanding of two social worlds, the outside and the community. An entrepreneur is someone who understands both the world of hypermodernity and the world of communal living and is able to do two things: recognize the limitations and use the resources of both systems to cobble together a new direction. For better or worse, the newer of forms of communal living, such as ecovillages, cohousing communities, culde-sac communities, or charitable associations, are that new direction.

The Next Generation As noted previously, defining an intentional community can be difficult if the community is old enough to have more than one generation. Bennett (1975) argued that an adequate assessment of the success of a community requires three generations of communally born and educated members. Unlike U.S. communes, most of which came to an end before they produced even one such generation, the oldest kibbutzim have produced four. There is little about contemporary intentional communities that encourages future generations to stay. In fact, it is difficult to get a first generation to

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remain. There are no firm data on how long people stay at a modern intentional community, but the figure of four years comes up often in conversations with community leaders. Mark Holloway (1966, p. 17), writing about early American utopian communities, opines that boredom may be a reason that people leave communes. “The more ideal the picture, the greater the opportunity for boredom. Devoid of humour and those human peccadilloes that make life worth living, Utopia is a correct, systematized, priggish place, usually completely static—a secular heaven in fact.” Indeed, intentional communities almost always seek the impossible. In the past, as with the Oneida members, the Shakers, and the Harmonists, there was only a vague sense of not being able to achieve perfection on earth, or at least a more perfect life that could lead to heavenly perfection. Even 20th-century countercultural communities, such as New Buffalo, thought utopia was possible. But as any parent knows, children do not always share their parents’ dreams. The Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect like the Amish, Brethren, and Mennonites, originated in Central Europe in the 16th century, and many emigrated to Russia and later North America. They are arguably the most communal of the Anabaptist groups. Today, most Hutterite communities are located in the United States and Canada. Like Old Order Amish, Hutterites approach education as the responsibility of the community rather than the outside world. This is a highly structured enculturative process. Kindergarten begins at age 3, and at age 15 the young person enters the world of adult responsibilities (Huntington, 1997, p. 338). Immersive education, such as the Hutterites practice, is one method of assuring the continuity of a community through generations. Once schooled within the community, the transition to the larger society and especially higher education is fraught with difficulties. Modern communities, such as Earthaven, also have attempted forms of community schooling. Children at Findhorn attend a nearby Steiner School, a type of school practicing an alternative style of education. Cohousing communities often use local school systems. The reality is that most communitarian parents understand their children may leave the community and will need the life skills to enter hypermodern life; therefore, outside schools are often the only option. They recognize that utopia is a fleeting thing and that their children may have to adapt and readapt to more than one lifestyle. Another factor in communal life that affects subsequent generations is expectations. The baby boomers were perhaps the last American generation to be raised with the idea of limitless possibilities. As they grew to adulthood in

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the 1970s and 1980s, they discovered the practicalities of daily life; as a result, their children, the so-called Generation X, seemed to lack some of the ebullient optimism for contrarian lifestyles attributed to their parents’ generation. Therefore, there is less of an incentive to stay on living in community.

Middle-Class White People One of the least mentioned but obvious issues in intentional communities is the lack of people of color or those on the lower economic scales. Miller (1999, pp. 170 – 171), among others, notes that this was also the case in the 1960s and 1970s. However, there is more economic and ethnic diversity in urban communities and Christian-based progressive communities (Christian, 2007). On the other hand, as mentioned in chapter 3, most intentional communities tend to be rural or semirural, and the lure of the pastoral is more of a European American than, say, an African American trope. The commune is a utopian dream of Gardner’s (1978) “children of prosperity.” Despite the lack of diversity, it has been my experience that members of contemporary intentional communities in North America and Western Europe tend to be politically liberal and less ethnocentric than the rest of society, but they are nonetheless ethnically fairly homogenous—that is, white, middle class, and well educated. And, if anything, the trend in the 2000s is toward those with higher incomes, especially in cohousing situations. This observation has not escaped the notice of leaders in communities that have experimented with cohousing, such as Findhorn, the EcoVillage at Ithaca, and other communities whose leaders are concerned over the possibility of communities of socioeconomic elites. A pointed example of the difficulty in attracting minorities to intentional communities is Koinonia Farm. As mentioned in chapter 6, one of the commune’s ideological pillars was interracialism. Despite that, Koinonia failed to attract black families in any significant number. There a good reason for this. According to K’Meyer (1997, p. 58), black families living nearby were for the most part lower income, and Koinonia was a commune started by folks who eschewed materialism. Under the circumstances, it was difficult for blacks who earned a wage, even a low wage, to give that up and move to a community in which communal sharing was the rule, which would amount to “voluntary poverty.” Miller (1999, p. 171) essentially makes the same point concerning the lack of non-whites in the counterculture. “The counterculture were divesting themselves of materialism, of all the meaningless goods with which they had

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been brought up, whereas non-whites typically had been social have-nots, without all the meaningless goods, and were searching for a share of the material good life that they had never enjoyed.” On the other hand, many of today’s intentional communities, especially cohousing situations, have far more amenities than the early hippie communes. So another explanation for the lack of diversity might be found in the geography of race. Suburbs were the bane of the counterculture and the place many communitarians still seek to escape. Suburbs are predominately white and middle class. But according to the 2000 Census, American suburbs are becoming more ethnically diverse, although white non-Hispanics still represent about 73 percent of the suburban population (Frey, 2001). Western Europe as a whole also is becoming more ethnically diverse. Therefore, the white suburban scenario still may partly account for the dearth of minority groups in intentional communities, but there may be other reasons. Perhaps another reason is that minorities and working-class whites tend to stress priorities and interests distinct from the white middle-class that currently dominates intentional communities. For example, according to Taylor (2002, p. 41), environmental issues are perceived differently accordingly to class, race, and even gender. The white middle class tends to focus on issues such as pollution, wilderness and habitat protection, and, more recently, climate change. Minorities and the white working class, on the other hand, place a higher priority on environmental issues tied to occupational health and safety and jobs. With the growth of the ecovillage movement, these interpretations of environmentalism become increasingly important. The environment is only one domain in which class and race may affect priorities, ideologies, and interests. There are others related to governance and spiritually, for example. The bottom line is that to become more ethnically and economically diverse, intentional communities must diversify their interests and priorities.

Organization vs. Ideas What makes communities work? Is it the structure of the community or the cultural factors behind it? The easy answer is that it is a combination of both. But it is clear that some communities emphasize one over the other and are successful. So, in which direction does the balance tilt in successful communities? First, a clarification of terms. By structure I mean the social structure of the community. This includes the organization and the hierarchies and rules

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that govern the community. By cultural factors I refer to the ideas, identities, traditions, and beliefs of the community—that is, the culture of the group. This dichotomous relationship between structure and culture is one of the central discussions in the social sciences, and it is of critical importance in the context of communal living. To an extent, it boils down to a which-comesfirst debate. The argument goes something like this: does the community begin with the design of a community or with the need to promote a set of principles, social theories, or spirituality practices? In the popular work Bowling Alone (2001), Robert D. Putnam argues that the sense of community has been lost over the past few decades, and, in a subsequent work, Better Together (Putnam & Feldstein, 2004), he and a colleague note that society is undergoing a revival through social networking. Indeed, as I stated in the previous chapter, social networking has a role to play in the building of community, or what Putnam calls “social capital.” These networks are structural in nature; they develop as social instruments to create communities bound by common interests, such as computer gaming or films, but not on the higher level of values and beliefs. They do not posses the requisite attributes to create the kind of permanence evident in an intentional community. If communities . . . are to be recreated, restoring social connectedness is necessary but not sufficient. The reasons communities need shared moral cultures may be obvious to sociologists, but they ought to know that this observation is a major bone of contention between communitarians and liberals in the political theory sense of the term. It suffices here to note that without shared values, communities are unable to withstand centrifugal forces . . . and that if one studies those entities that are commonly viewed as communities, they tend to have a core of such shared values (an empirical argument). For these reasons, the mainstays of community cannot be bowling leagues, bird watching societies, and chess clubs. While these may provide some measure, albeit rather thin, of social bonds, they are trivial as sources of new formations of shared moral values. (Etzioni, 2001, p. 224) If we accept the premise that a shared sense of morals or beliefs is an essential ingredient to the formation and social sustainability of communities, does that mean communities such as elder communities or cul-de-sac communes lack permanence? This remains to be seen. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the term community has no single interpretation. David

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Spangler, one of the spiritual leaders of Findhorn in the early 1970s, was asked by Communities, the principal intentional community network, to explain what community means. His answer ends cryptically but not without making an important point about the underlying reason for community cohesiveness: When this was a small gathering of people it was very easy for us to experience community here; everyone worked with everybody else, we knew everyone’s first name, we were together through the day and we had sanctuary all together. As the community grew, jobs became more specialized and people worked further afield, and being together became more difficult. Then the quality that makes community had to arise from something more than just physical proximity and daily encounter. . . . Community is not something that is created when people come together and live together, rather it is something that is preexistent and we can awaken to it. There is never a time when we are not in community, and our practice is to awaken to that experience of communion. (Questenberry, 1996)

Nostalgia, the Enemy of Progress? The search for community in this book has taken a variety of creative forms. All share a critique of the prevailing social order and of hypermodern life in general. All seek to reclaim an imagined past by restructuring—both literally and figuratively—contemporary life into something resembling an older form. Propelling this enterprise, to a certain extent, is nostalgia. Nostalgia is an odd emotion, although emotion is probably not the best term. It is a mental place, a kind of cognitive map of both a personal and a collective past. It makes one go where one would otherwise not. It turns a sense of loss into a form of pleasure. For most of us, nostalgia is a passive mental exercise, but for others it is the beginning of a template for action. Nostalgia in action is manifested in tradition, and traditions create nostalgia. This interlocking relationship between nostalgia and tradition is, for some, a hindrance to progress; for some, tradition is the enemy of progress. Contemporary communitarians are balanced between tradition and progress. This liminal state can be empowering or it can be enervating. “Progress,” once the most extreme manifestation of radical optimism and a promise of universally shared and lasting happiness, has moved

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all the way to the opposite, dystopian and fatalistic pole of anticipation. . . . Instead of great expectations and sweet dreams, “progress” evokes an insomnia full of nightmares of “being left behind,” of missing the train or falling out of the window of a fast accelerating vehicle. (Bauman, 2005, p. 68) As referenced in chapter 2, defining progress is a challenge because progress is a social construct. It is bound by time and Western ideas about society, science, and success. In the popular imagination it is often associated with scientific or technological advances. Social progress is usually tied to economic growth or the correction of social ills. But there are other ways to conceptualize progress. For some, progress may mean freedom from the material nature of humankind or the creation of community. In this sense, tradition is not the enemy of progress, but rather an uneasy associate, and nostalgia is the emotion that enables the partnership. Just as the nostalgia for family empowered early communities, so nostalgia both empowers and limits contemporary communities—the nostalgia for the rural, for the tribal, for community. To complicate matters, the word community is overused (I have an excuse because community is what this book is about) and threatens to become a cliché. Businesses use it to describe a workplace, and Internet users apply the term in various ways. There are untold numbers of virtual communities or e-communities. It is catch word for something everybody seems to think we have lost and need to get back. It has also become a synonym for family. Wuthnow (2002, p. 68) says the term has become ambiguous: Although it is much discussed by everyone from therapists to clergy, community is no longer easy to define in terms of neighborhoods, and the larger contexts in which people live, work, shop, and vote convey mixed signals about what it may mean to be part of a community. This problem is especially acute in the suburbs of metropolitan areas that are made up of scattered and overlapping political jurisdictions. The problem was expressed well by one suburban resident who complained, “There’s no central community and no feeling of ‘us’ and ‘we do things this way.’ I’m jealous of people who live in manageable-size towns. People here aren’t concerned about issues of the community because their loyalty is everywhere. They don’t feel at home in any one community.”

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In her thought-provoking book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym (2001, p. xiii) defines nostalgia as a “longing for home that no longer exists or never existed” by explicating the roots of the word. She adds that nostalgia “is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. This romance with a fantasy also defines the search for utopia. It is the perfect home, the home of one’s dreams.” But since we know intuitively that utopia is more a goal than an achievable end, the road to it becomes a series of compromises. The first compromise is the realization that longing for a place that no longer exists is a double-edged sword—the past cannot be recreated precisely as imagined and, therefore, can either serve as a source of dejection or inspiration. In other words, mining the past can be profitable if it leads to an achievable future. As Boym (2001, p. 10) further explains, “Nostalgia, as a historical emotion, is a longing for that shrinking ‘space of experience’ that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations. Nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress.” Looked at another way, nostalgia may sustain tradition but also enable progress. If recreating the past that gave rise to nostalgia were not possible, which it usually is not, then perhaps utilizing elements that remind us of that past and projecting them into the future may suffice. This is a kind of alternative progress. Ecovillages are an example of this alternative progress. They look backward and forward. They attempt to recreate the communalism of the preindustrial village while establishing a pattern of living adapted to what some see as a grim environmental future. Ecovillagers like Earle Barnhart and Hilde Maingay were members of a research institute experimenting in alternative forms of ecological systems before they helped start Cape Cod’s Alchemy Farm. The environmentally inventive architectures of Ontario’s Whole Village and Massachusetts’s Sirius Community are cutting edge. At Arizona’s Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri used 20th-century materials and concepts to recreate the feel of a medieval Italian village. Findhorn’s forward-looking experiments in ecosewage systems are models of innovation. If community life is reconstituted on a template taken solely from the past, then that life is bound by the past. The longing for home is the essence of the intentional community. But nostalgia for what was thought to be a better, simpler life is static; acting upon the wistful longing for the past is progress of a different, but no less powerful, kind.

Notes Preface 1. The Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) lists more than 2,300 intentional communities on its Web site—directory.ic.org/iclist/geo.php—with more than 1,600 in the United States as of March 16, 2010. However, the list is open-ended and many of the communities may be just forming or conceptual. The Fellowship’s magazine, Communities, generally focuses on mainstream communities as defined in this chapter.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Beyond the Threshold 1. The use of the tern San is arbitrary in reference to the groups of huntergatherers in the Kalahari region. The term Bushmen is considered derogatory. Some authors use the term !Kung San, or just !Kung. Others may use the specific name of a San group. 2. The more realistic documentary N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, by filmmaker John Marshall, shows a somewhat less idyllic version of San life from a tribal woman’s perspective. It was released in 1980, the same year as The Gods Must Be Crazy. 3. Not all communities of the past attempted to escape industrialization. Robert Owen, the founder of the second commune at New Harmony, Indiana, was an industrialist with strong notions of social reform in the context of communalism (Pritzer, 1997, p. 90). 4. The Slow Cities movement (Honoré, 2004, pp. 85–118) evolved from the Slow Foods movement (Petrini, 2003). Both have the common aim of slowing the pace of modern life by making city centers less frenetic and more oriented toward pedestrians and by discouraging the growth of fast food establishments. 5. Moody, an abolitionist, said when asked about enlisting for the Union army during the Civil War, “There has never been a time in my life when I felt that I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow-being. In this respect I am a Quaker” (Moody, 1900, p. 82).

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Chapter 2 Elders of Utopia 1. Male continence involved non-ejaculation either during or after coitus. Noyes believed that the normal sex act was inherently wasteful but did serve a social communicative function. Therefore, regular sex, absent the need to produce children, required male self-control (Pitzer, 1997, p. 258). 2. This practice was called stirpiculture, and it meant only certain people were permitted to become parents. The prospective parents were chosen by committee (Schaefer & Zellner, 2008, pp. 76–77). 3. Young men were often initiated into sex by older women. Young girls also were initiated, sometimes by Noyes, who at one point was accused of pedophilia and had to move to Canada, where the Oneida Community had a factory (Friesen & Friesen, 2004, p. 181). 4. Peter Caddy died in 1994 in an automobile accident in Germany. 5. From the organization’s Web site, www.findhorn.org/index.php, accessed January 15, 2010.

Chapter 3 Last Days of the Counterculture 1. Worldpress.org is the online version of World Press Review, published in New York. The print version was dropped in 2004. 2. The community maintains a Web site, www.christiania.org, and publishes a guide for tourists. 3. From The Farm Web site at www.thefarm.org/general/farmfaq.html. Accessed April 30, 2008. 4. This information was compiled from the Plenty Web site, www.plenty.org/ history.htm, and from the film Visions of Utopia, Part II, 2009, produced by Geoph Kozeny and the Fellowship for Intentional Community.

Chapter 4 Ritual as Nostalgia 1. Mission statements tend to get revised from time to time. These mission and vision statements were approved by Earthaven’s council in 2009 and are available at the community’s Web site: www.earthaven.org/mission_goals.php. 2. It should be noted that many of the Puritan communities established in New England in the 17th century could be broadly defined as intentional communities. It was from the uniquely independent nature of the Puritan church that the town meeting form grew. Puritan churches functioned without an episcopal governing body; therefore, Puritan towns were governed entirely separate from other towns. 3. This is similar to what Turner (1969, pp. 168–169) calls calendrical rites, although it is used here in a broader context.

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4. The Anthropology Department at my college, Southern Connecticut State University, sponsored a field school near a Maasai village in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of Tanzania in the early 2000s. During that time, faculty and students observed circumcision rituals as guests. Male circumcisions were a public event. Female circumcisions, or genital mutilations, were performed out of public sight. The rituals usually take place in June. 5. Roughly half the Earthaven folk are baby boomers. 6. There may be several reasons for returning to the Amish community. Mazie (2005, p. 752) speculates that the insular world of Amish communities restricts the options of young people on Rumspringa. For example, Amish youth may be free to experience the outside world but lack the broad-based support, including financial support, to remain in that world beyond Rumspringa. Amish children are not schooled beyond eighth grade, or age 13; therefore, they may be educationally handicapped when seeking jobs in the outside world. 7. This material is from the “exploration process” section on the EVI community’s Web site. The exploration process URL is: http://ecovillageithaca.org/evi/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=69

Chapter 5 Dream a Little Dream 1. Soleri’s biographical sketch is available at the Arcosanti Web site, www. arcosanti.org/project/background/soleri/main.html, in the community’s literature, and on Soleri’s Facebook page. 2. The novel Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975, had some influence. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture and the green movement in the 1970s and thereafter. 3. From a talk at Findhorn’s The Park, July 23, 2009. 4. From a public interview on August 14, 2009. 5. Community members are also shareholders in a community supported agriculture (CSA) system. 6. “Y2K-09,” Sirius Attunement Spring 2009 Newsletter, www.siriuscommunity. org/Att/att-5-09.html.

Chapter 6 Communities in Motion 1. Figures relating to the International Red Cross are from the organization’s Web site, www.ifrc.org/voluntee/index.asp 2. Additionally, Habitat and similar organizations provide platforms for consensus among religious groups by highlighting common concerns (Wuthnow & Hodgkinson, 1990, p. 292).

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3. Habitat’s future homeowners are required to work on site, depending on their circumstances, for a certain number of hours. 4. Habitat accepts volunteers from both groups and individuals. Volunteers work under the supervision of a building supervisor, a professional who is employed by the local affiliate. 5. Jordan is also known in evangelical religious circles for his admittedly “risky” and somewhat irreverent “Cotton Patch” translations of books of the New Testament. 6. From Habitat’s website, www.habitat.org. 7. The Koinonia community consists of people with various levels of involvement including long- and short-term members and guests and visitors who stay for various periods of time (K’Meyer, 1997, p. 193). 8. This version of HFHI’s founding can be found on the organization’s Web site at www.habitat.org/how/historytext.aspx. After 2005, the Fullers formed a new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing, using Koinonia Farm as the center’s launching pad. The choice of Koinonia was significant in that it brought the Fullers’s “hammering movement” home to its communal roots. 9. It should be noted that HFHI still acknowledges its debt to the Fullers on its Web site and in its literature. Likewise, former President Carter, who remains active in HFHI, led religious devotions at the Fuller Center in late 2007, according to the center’s Web site at www.fullercenter.org/site/PageServer?pagename=CarterDevotio nsPR. Accessed December 20, 2007. 10. Jimmy Carter work projects have been held at various locations every year for about a week since 1984. 11. From the Habitat Web site at www.habitat.org/newsroom/2007archive/ 09_04_2007_Eurobuild.aspx. 12. From the colony’s Web site, www.macdowellcolony.org/about-FAQ.html#. 13. From the Killingworth Community Gardens Web site, www.kwgardens.org/. 14. From the restaurant’s Web site, www.farm255.com/mission.html. 15. The Kwakwaka’wakw were the subject of considerable research by Franz Boas, considered the father of American anthropology, and were the subject of a film by photographer Edward Curtis, In the Land of the War Canoes, released in 1914. The silent film was based on a Kwakwaka’wakw myth and used Kwakwaka’wakw actors. Its depiction of Indian rituals and life were startling for the time. 16. From www.progressivedinnerparty.org.

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Index AARP The Magazine, 135 Adams, Patch, 44 African Americans, 40, 143, 173 Alchemy Farm, 130 –32 American Indian Movement (AIM), 97, 169 Amish communities: education and, 172; farming and, 10; ideology behind, 5, 8, 14, 20, 38, 78; midwives and, 71; Rumspringa in, 100 –101; tradition vs. modernism in, 101 Anabaptist communities, 2, 5, 14, 28, 32, 74, 172 Anti-materialism, 142 Arcosanti community: architecture of, 17, 109 –11, 178; future of, 113 –15; inspiration from, 127; New Urbanism and, 111 –13; overview, 107 –9 Arts and crafts, 10, 69, 115, 149 –54 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 12 Attunement, 46, 49, 51, 105, 133 Auroville, India community, 12, 114 Australian Aboriginal rituals, 16 Authority issues, 28, 31, 56, 62–64, 87, 167, 169 –70 Avatar (film), 122

Baby boom generation, 2, 22, 116, 135, 172 Bailey, F. G., 167, 171 Baptism ritual, 99 –101 Barnhart, Earle, 130 –31 Better Together (Putnam), 175 Biskek, Kyrgyzstan, 165 – 66 Black Bear Ranch community, 80 Blogging networks, 162– 63 “Boatload of Knowledge” assembly, 30 Bohemians, 56, 171 Bokaer, Joan, 127 Bolinas, California, 75 Book Publishing Company, 69 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 175 Boym, Svetlana, 178 Brampton, Canada, 128 –29 Brook Farm experiment, 27, 37–38, 43 Brown, Susan Love, 21 Buddhism, 5, 15, 16, 91, 103, 118 Building materials, 17, 69, 80, 85, 112, 153 Bushmen (!Kung San), 3 Byrdcliffe colony, 151–53, 154 Caddy, Peter and Eileen, 13, 45 – 46, 53, 138 Callenbach, Ernest, 75 Cape Cod Ark House, 130 –31

194

Index

Capitalism, 2, 61, 66 – 67, 70, 170 –71 Carson, Gail, 126 Carter, Jimmy and Rosalyn, 142, 144, 145, 146 – 48 Catholic Church, 137–38, 140 Cayce, Edgar, 116 –17 Celebration rituals, 71, 77, 103 – 4, 117 Celibacy: of Harmony Society, 28, 29, 35 –36; of Shakers, 15, 31, 35 –38, 114 Celtic Christian community, 15 Charles, Prince, 113 Cheers (TV show), 9 Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, 97, 146 – 48 Christian, Diana Leafe, 6, 15, 81, 90, 135 –36 Christiania. See Freetown Christiania Christianity: Christian mysticism, 50; family and, 41; at The Farm, 15 –16, 34, 72 –73; at Koinonia Farm, 142; progressive communities and, 173; racial issues and, 143; sectarian differences and, 145, 147, 165; spirituality and, 5, 15, 16 Circumcision rites, 97–100 Climate change issues, 64, 124, 174 Close, Lindsay, 131 Cohousing communities: economy of, 13; ecovillages as, 22, 41, 107, 127 –28, 129, 131, 167; foundation of, 43; future trends in, 6, 160, 171 –74; for seniors, 135 –36 Commercialism, 2, 9, 67, 139, 141 Communalism/communitarians. See also Cohousing communities; Ecovillage movement/ lifestyle; Freetown Christiania; Intentional communities; New Harmony; specific communities: authority and, 28, 31, 56, 62–64,

87, 167, 169 –70; counterculture and, 2, 115; cul-de-sac commune, 22, 134 –36, 159 – 60, 175; defined, 176; globalization and, 8; hypermodernity in, 42 – 43; ideal of, 154 –55; identity and, 8 –9; individualism vs., 167– 69; leaders of, 13; liminality and, 18 –19, 36, 86, 87, 100; nostalgia issues in, 176–78; nudity issues in, 14, 53, 101, 135; online, 161– 63; organizational structure of, 174 –76; potlatching, 157–58; separation and, 7; social structure vs., 100; spirituality and, 32, 114; volunteerism and, 138 –39, 142 Communities (magazine), 10 –11, 89, 158 –59, 176 Community gardens: at Alchemy Farm, 131; as community movement, 21, 138, 155 –56, 160; composting in, 126; at Earthhaven, 83 – 84, 85; at The Farm, 69; at Findhorn Gardens, 45 – 47; at Koinonia Farm, 142; organic, 44, 47, 132; permaculture in, 53; as sacred, 17; shared resources in, 43; at Sirius Community, 132; work duty in, 51 Composting, 126, 132 Consensus governance, 13, 60, 88 –93, 124, 129, 132, 134, 170 Consumerism, 9, 117, 123, 170 Cos Cob Art Colony, 151, 154 Cosanti Foundation, 108 –9 Counterculture movement. See also The Farm; Freetown Christiania: communalism and, 2, 115; diversity in, 173 –74; hippies and, 2; middle class and, 5 – 6; mysticism and, 115 –16; of

Index

1960s –1970s, 10; Shaker communities as, 2, 8; urban, 78; Vietnam War and, 5, 14, 72, 169 –70 Crombie, Ogilvie (“Roc”), 46 Cul-de-sac commune, 22, 134 –36, 159 – 60, 175 Cyberspace, 161– 63 Da Silva Arjuna, 89, 91 Dana, Charles A., 37 Dark Green Religion, 120 –22 Davidson, Bruce, 132, 133 Davidson, Gordon, 132 Dawson, Jonathan, 9, 54, 123, 124 –25 Dawson, Lorne, 13 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 77 “Deep ecology,” 119 –20 Der Spiegel (magazine), 63 Devil’s Playground (documentary), 100 Directed meditation, 50 Diversity issues, 5, 16, 89, 102, 124, 127, 146, 173 –74 DiZerega, Gus, 120 Doctors without Borders, 138 Dolling, Brenda, 130 Douglas, Mary, 94 Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Turner), 86 Driver, Tom, 95 Drop City community (Colorado), 12–13, 79 –80, 81 Drucker, Peter, 12 Drug use, 2, 14, 58, 61, 65 – 66, 68, 72, 81, 133 Duany, Andrés, 112–13 Durkheim, Émile, 76 Durrett, Charles, 134, 135 Earthaven Ecovillage: community in, 84 – 86, 100; council meetings

195

in, 88, 90 – 93, 170; education in, 172; initiation into, 92 –93; isolation of, 83 – 84, 103; religious preferences of, 88 – 89, 103 – 4; rituals in, 89 –91, 96, 98 –99, 105; tradition vs. modernism in, 97, 101 Eco-Experience Week (Findhorn), 48 –54, 104 –5 Economy, Pennsylvania, 29 Economy/economic issues: capitalism, 2, 61, 66 – 67, 70, 170 –71; commercialism, 2, 9, 67, 139, 141; communal, 13 –14, 34; consumerism, 9, 117, 123, 170; entrepreneurial communitarians, 170 –71; at The Farm, 74; in kibbutz living, 4; sociocultural environment of, 7 Ecotopia Emerging (Callenbach), 75 EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI), 6, 103, 115, 123, 125 –28, 173 Ecovillage movement/lifestyle. See also The Farm; Findhorn Garden community; specific ecovillages: cohousing in, 22, 41, 107, 127–28, 129, 131, 167; conflicts in, 89; diversity in, 127; evolution of, 22, 122 –25; nostalgia and, 178; organic gardening and, 47; popularity of, 124 –25; privacy issues in, 126; structure of, 8, 17, 54 Ecovillage Training Center ( The Farm), 68, 69 Education: at Earthhaven, 84; at The Farm, 1, 70, 114; at Findhorn Gardens, 46, 47– 48, 119; of the Hutterites, 172; immersive education, 172; in intentional communities, 22, 171; in kibbutz living, 4; Owenists and, 15, 30, 32, 37

196

Index

Egalitarianism: at Earthhaven, 84; at Findhorn Gardens, 49; in government, 4, 49, 170; of humans, 3; ideal of, 6, 12 –14, 39, 94, 146, 149; at New Harmony, 30; of Owenists, 31 Elgin, Duane, 125 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37 England, Martin and Mabel, 142 Eno, Brian, 118 Entrepreneurial communitarians, 170 –71 Environment/environmental concerns: “deep ecology,” 119 – 20; human character and, 30; perception of, 174; spirituality and, 22 Ethnic hippie, 75 –76 European communities, 131–32 Facebook (online social networking), 161– 62, 163 Family ties/values, 40 – 42 Farlee, Jerry, 97, 147 The Farm: The Changeover at, 73 –74; Christianity and, 15 –16, 34, 72 –73; education at, 1, 70, 114; founding of, 1–2, 12–13, 22, 55, 67– 68, 72, 78, 79; funeral rites at, 71; future of, 114; leadership at, 170; overview, 68 –71, 82; permaculture at, 6, 7, 14, 69; senior community at, 134; size of, 12; vegetarianism at, 69 Federation of Damanhur, 15, 49 Fellowship for Intentional Community, 12 Fies, Bob, 80 – 81 Findhorn Garden community: capitalism and, 14, 61, 69 –71; children’s education in, 172; community in, 176; diversity

and, 13, 173; Eco-Experience Week at, 48 –54; education at, 46, 47– 48, 119; egalitarianism at, 49; as floating community, 15, 47– 48; founding of, 44–45; future of, 114; longevity of, 38, 75; New Age beliefs and, 89, 115 –16; overview, 45 – 47; permaculture at, 53, 178; rituals at, 104 –5; spirituality of, 22; Tolle, Eckhart and, 119 Finding Community (Christian), 15 Floating spirituality, 5, 15, 87–90, 106, 132 Fournier, Charles, 37–38 Freetown Christiania (Copenhagen, Denmark): antiauthority in, 167; autonomy of, 18, 56 –57, 66; drug use in, 61, 65 – 66; founding of, 55, 60 – 64, 68; future of, 7, 66 – 67; government of, 13–14, 60 – 61; inner city life in, 57– 60; police presence in, 58 –59, 62– 63; residential living in, 59 – 60; size of, 12; tourism and, 57–58, 65 Fuller, Millard and Linda, 144 – 47, 145 – 46 Funeral rites, 71, 95, 158 The Future of Nostalgia (Boym), 178 Gaia theory, 17, 122 Gans, Herbert J., 11, 77 Gardens. See Community gardens Gardner, Hugh, 32, 78, 80, 173 Gaskin, Ina May, 71–72 Gaskin, Stephen, 13, 15 –16, 71–73, 75, 134, 170 Gavron, Daniel, 4 Generation X, 173 Ghost Dance ritual, 96 –97, 147 Gibsone, Craig, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53

Index

Giddens, Anthony, 7 Giverny, France, 153 – 54 Global Ecovillage Network, 47, 54 The Global Walk for a Livable World, 127 Globalization, 8, 9, 125, 156 The Gods Must Be Crazy, 3 Goodall, Jane, 44 Governance. See also Egalitarianism: consensus form of, 13, 60, 88 – 93, 124, 129, 132, 134, 170; of Freetown Christiania, 13 –14, 60 – 61; as necessary, 12–13; organizational structure and, 174 –76; socialism and, 2, 31; two-tiered system, 132 Greenhaven community, 129 –30, 131 Griswold, Florence, 153, 154 Guilford Arts Center, 149 –51, 153, 154 Habitat for Humanity: as an antidote, 148 – 49; beginnings of, 144 – 45; overview, 137– 43; religion and, 165; on reservations, 146 – 48; work as ritual, 145 – 46 Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI), 137–39, 140 – 41, 146, 165 – 66 Harmonists (Harmony Society): conformity of, 31, 169; founding principles of, 85; goals of, 172; overview, 26 –29; pacifism of, 14; permaculture of, 43, 85, 111; spirituality of, 32 Hassam, Childe, 153 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 37 Heider, Karl, 154 –55 Hinduism, 16, 118, 121 Hippie culture. See also Freetown Christiania: Black Bear Ranch community and, 80; in Bolinas, California, 75; communes and,

197

2, 21–22, 79; Drop City community and, 12 –13, 79 – 80, 81; freedom and, 167; New Buffalo community and, 22, 79 – 81 Hollander, Mari, 48, 52, 172 Holloway, Mark, 172 Holzapfel, Cynthia, 74 Honoré, Carl, 10, 157 Horn, Paul, 118 Human Settlements Programme, 47 Hurley, Claire, 150 –51 Hutterite communities, 5, 14, 38, 172 Hypermodernity (“hypermodern times”): balancing, 170–71; challenges to, 159, 166; of ecovillages, 124 –25; overview, 6 –9, 10; progress and, 42 – 43; rituals and, 97, 101 Identity erosion, 8 – 9 Ideological underpinning, 5 Imani cooperative farm, 85 Immersive education, 172 In Praise of Slowness (Honoré), 10 Independent Online (news site), 62 – 63 Individualism vs. communalism, 167– 69 Industrial Revolution, 7, 9, 29 Industrialization, 76 –77, 152 Intentional communities. See also Amish communities; Arcosanti community; Cohousing communities; Communalism/ communitarians; Shaker communities; specific communities: communalism of, 4 – 6; diversity in, 5, 16, 89, 102, 124, 127, 146, 173 –74; egalitarianism/ reciprocity and, 12 –14; future of, 171–73; human-scale living, 11–12; ideological underpinning and, 5; living small/slow and,

198

Index

9 –10; narrative arc of, 21–23; pacifism/nonviolence in, 14; religion in, 5, 88 – 89; revitalization movements and, 19 –21; sacred spaces and, 16 –17; spirituality in, 15 –16, 22, 32, 114; threshold people in, 17–19 International Red Cross, 138 Iona Community, 15 Islam, 5 Isolationism, 75, 83 – 84, 103 Israeli kibbutz movement, 4 –5, 34, 38, 41, 171 Jacobs, Jane, 77 Jefferson, Thomas, 40, 77 Jesienski, Brian, 131 Johnson, Phillip, 25 Jordan, Clarence and Florence, 13, 142– 43, 144 Judeo-Christian sentiments, 15 Jyllands-Posten (newspaper), 64 Kalahari people, 3 Kibbutz living. See Israeli kibbutz movement Kincade, Kat, 73, 79, 101–2 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 143, 148 Klein, Nick, 80 Koinonia Farm, 138, 142 – 44, 173 Kooker, Naomi R., 133 Kopecky, Arthur, 75 Krishna Consciousness community, 15 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 143 Kunstler, James Howard, 112 L’Abri community, 15 Le Corbusier, Charles, 111, 113 Leary, Timothy, 79 LeBlanc, Dave, 160 Lee, Ann (Mother Ann), 5, 35 –36, 105

Lee, Richard B., 3 Lewis, Roland, 147 Liminality state, 18 –19, 36, 86, 87, 100 Linton, Ralph, 20 Lovelock, James, 122 Lutheran orthodoxy, 27 –28 Maasai circumcision rite, 97 – 98 MacDowell Colony, 154 MacLaine, Shirley, 116 –17 Maclean, Dorothy, 13, 45 – 46, 133 Maclure, William, 30, 31 Macro vs. micro authority, 169 –70 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 116 –17 Maingay, Hilde, 130 –31, 132, 178 Marriage issues, 33 –34, 40. See also Celibacy Marx, Karl, 76 Materialism, 2, 34, 141– 43, 170, 173 Mbuti singing ritual, 95 Mc-Laughlin, Corinne, 132 Meditation. See also Spirituality: attunement, 46, 49, 51, 105, 133; in council meetings, 91; directed, 50; group cohesion from, 132; music and, 119 Mellencamp, John, 77 Mennonite communities, 5, 14, 38, 172 Methany Pat, 118 Mexican communities, 16, 140 – 42 The Midwifery Center and Clinic (The Farm), 71 Miller, Timothy, 2, 22, 168, 173 Mind at Play (Gaskin), 15 Monet, Claude, 153 –54 Montaigne, Vicki, 69, 71, 73 –74 Moody, Dwight L., 14 Morality: of community, 7, 96, 125, 139, 175; ecovillages and, 125; of enclaves, 65; of the potlatch, 158; of society, 120, 133

Index

199

More, Thomas, 111 Mormons, 32, 33, 38, 74 Morris, William, 152 Mortensen, Viggo, 66 Mount Shasta, California, 115 Müller, Bernhard, 29 Multigenerational communities, 136 Music, 46, 51, 78, 118 –19, 159 Muslim rituals, 86 – 87 Mysticism, 46, 50, 52, 95, 98, 115 –16, 118 Myth of the Frontier, 38 – 40, 42 – 43

New Lanark community (Scotland), 30 New Urbanism, 111–13 New Vrindaban community, 15 New York Times (magazine), 68, 134, 161 Newhouse, Sewell, 34 Nimbin community, 61 Nostalgia issues, 176 –78 Noyes, John Humphrey, 33 –35 Nudity issues, 14, 53, 101, 135 Nuke Busters, 70

Nash, June, 149 National Geographic (magazine), 68 Native Americans, 40, 157–58 Nature spirits, 46 Navajo rituals, 16, 118 Neo-bohemians, 171 Neopaganism, 116, 117, 121 New Age movement (New Ageism): commercialization of, 139; counterculture and, 115 –16; defined, 22, 46 – 47, 115 –18; environmentalism and, 120 –22; hypermodernity vs., 10; music and, 118 –19; rituals and, 106 New Alchemy Institute, 131, 132 New Buffalo community, 6, 22, 75, 79 – 81, 172 A New Earth (Tolle), 119 New England Puritans, 17 New Harmony (Indiana) community: antislavery movement and, 37; architecture of, 111; celibacy and, 28, 29, 35 –36; cohousing and, 43; egalitarianism in, 30; founding of, 71–72; history of, 26 –32; longevity of, 2, 114; overview, 15, 25 –26; Owenists in, 29 –32; religion in, 25, 32; utopianism and, 38, 110

Obama, Michelle, 156 O’Brien, Helen, 48, 51 The Observer (newspaper), 65 Okiciyapi Tipi Habitat for Humanity, 146, 147 Old Lyme Colony, 151, 153 –54 Oneida Indian Nation, 32 –33 Oneida Society (Perfectionists): antislavery movement and, 37; founding principles of, 85; goals of, 27, 172; longevity of, 2; marriage and, 15, 40; overview, 32–35, 43; pacifism in, 14 Organic gardening, 44, 47, 132 Otter, River, 84 Owen, Robert, 29 –30, 33, 110, 114 Owenists, 15, 26 –27, 29 –32, 35, 37 Pacifism, 14, 39, 142 Paganism, 116, 117, 121 Pantheism, 121 Park, Robert, 65 Peace Corps, 138, 140, 141 The Peace Lines, 140 People (magazine), 68, 70 Perfectionists. See Oneida Society Permaculture: at The Farm, 6, 7, 14, 69; at Findhorn Garden, 53, 178; of Harmonists, 43, 85, 111

200

Index

Petrini, Carlo, 156 Pine Ridge Reservation (Lakota), 73, 97 Pipa, Kurt, 126 Pitzer, Donald, 3 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 112–13 Plenty USA, 73 Polygamy, 33–34, 64 Portmeirion village, 110 –11 Potlatching, 157–58 Poundbury (U.K.), 113 Progressive dinner parties, 158 –59 Prophetstown, Indiana, 28 Protestant religion, 137– 40 Puritan settlements, 17, 88 Putnam, Robert D., 175 Racial justice, 142– 43 Ranger, Henry Ward, 153 Rapp, George, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 71–72 Rappists community, 15, 26 Reciprocity, 12–14 Red Crescent Movement, 138 Reiki classes, 119 Reimer, Linda, 132, 133 Religion/religious issues. See also Christianity; Rituals; Spirituality: Catholic Church, 137–38, 140; cults and, 13; Dark Green Religion, 120 –22; in Earthaven Ecovillage, 88 – 89, 103 – 4; Habitat for Humanity and, 165; hypermodernity and, 10; in intentional communities, 5, 88 – 89; Lutheran orthodoxy, 27–28; in New Harmony community, 25, 32; Protestants, 137– 40; Satanism and, 121; in Shaker communities, 31; social forms of, 139 Renwick-Porter, Valerie, 10 –11 Revitalization movements, 19 –21

Ripley, George, 37–38 The Rites of Passage (van Gennep), 18 –19 The Ritual Process (Turner), 19, 86 Rituals. See also Meditation: baptism, 99 –101; of celebration, 71, 77, 103 – 4, 117; circumcision rites, 97–100; community longevity and, 85 – 86; context in, 95 –96; cultural identity of, 96 –99; funeral rites, 71, 95, 158; hypermodernity and, 97, 101; liminality and, 87, 100; overview, 83 – 86, 93–94; power of, 93 –106; spirituality and, 87–90; stages of, 99 –101; tradition vs. modernism in, 101–2; work as, 145 –56 Rumspringa order, 100, 101 Ruskin, John, 152 Rydvall, Marianne, 61 Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, 35 Sacred Dance, 50 Sacred spaces, 16 –17 Sahlins, Marchall, 3 – 4 Saitoti, Teplit Ole, 98 The San people, 3 – 4 Satanism, 121 Sættedammen, Denmark, 128 Say, Thomas, 30 Seaside, Florida, 113 Selective breeding, 33 –34 Senior communities, 134 –36 Shaker communities: architecture of, 111; celibacy of, 15, 31, 35 – 38, 114; cohousing movement in, 43; conformity in, 169; as counterculture, 2, 8; founding principles of, 85; goals of, 9, 172; ideology of, 15, 40; longevity of, 36 –37, 114; in New Harmony, 28; overview, 35 –36, 38; pacifism

Index

of, 14; rituals of, 105 – 6; as rural, 74, 78; socio-religious nature of, 31 Shawnee People, 28, 54 Sibley, David, 18 Single-identity neighborhoods, 137–38 Sirius community, 44, 132–34, 170, 178 Skinner, B. F., 102 Slotkin, Richard, 38 –39 Slow City movement, 10, 111–12, 170, 178 Slow Food movement, 156 – 57 Smith, Samantha, 159 – 60, 171 Snyder, David, 137 Socialism/socialistic idealism, 2, 31 Sociocultural environment, 7, 31 Solar power, 8, 17, 69, 70, 81, 84, 107, 130 –32 Soleri, Paolo, 17, 108 –9, 111, 114, 178 Spangler, David, 46, 47, 116, 175 –76 Spanish-American War, 39 Speck, Jeff, 112 –13 Spirituality. See also Meditation; New Age movement; Religion/ religious issues; Rituals: communitarian acceptance of, 32, 84; environmental concerns and, 22; floating, 5, 15, 87– 90, 106, 132; in intentional communities, 15 –16, 22, 32, 114; as low key, 129; mysticism and, 46, 50, 52, 95, 98, 115 –16, 118; paganism, 116, 117, 121; ritual and, 87 – 90; Wiccanism, 5, 121 Stockholm Environmental Institute, 54 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 143 Sun Gaze Dance ritual, 97 Superiore, Torri, 17

201

Taylor, Bron, 120, 121, 174 Technology issues, 85, 89, 102, 161– 63 This Season’s People: A Book of Spiritual Teachings (Gaskin), 15 Thompson, Clive, 161 Threshold people, 17–19 Tillich, Paul, 25 Time (magazine), 63 – 64, 123 The Times (newspaper), 64, 161 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 169 Tolkien, J.R.R., 83 Tolle, Eckhart, 44, 119 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 76 Toronto, Canada, 128 –29 Torp, Malene, 57 Town meetings, 87– 88 Tribalism, 8 Turner, Fred, 162 Turner, Victor, 19, 36, 86, 87, 95, 99 –100, 147 Twin Oaks community, 11, 73, 79, 101– 2 Twitter (online social networking), 161– 62 United Kingdom (U.K.), 113 United Nations (UN), 46, 47 Urban counterculture, 78 Urban sprawl, 112 –13 Utopian communities. See also Arcosanti community; Ecovillage movement/lifestyle: American tradition of, 38 –39, 142; family values and, 41; goals of, 2, 22; New Urbanism in, 111–13; practicality and, 102; search for, 79 – 80, 84 Utrecht, Amsterdam, 155 –56 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies, 78 van Gennep, Arnold, 18–19, 99 Vegetarianism, 49, 51, 69, 73, 115

202

Index

Vietnam War counterculture, 5, 14, 72, 169–70 Volunteerism, 138–39, 142, 149 Wabash River communities, 26 –29 Walden Two (Skinner), 102 Walker, Liz, 103, 104, 123, 126 –27, 170 Walker, Lucy, 100 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 20, 21 Warburg, Emmerick, 60 Weber, Max, 77, 78 Whole Village, Canada, 129 –30, 131, 178

Wi-Fi issues, 85, 89 Wiccanism, 5, 121 Wind energy, 8, 132 Winfrey, Oprah, 119, 159 Wirth, Louis, 12 World of Warcraft (online game), 162 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 108, 111 Yaddo community, 154 Y2K crisis, 133 Yoga classes, 41, 62, 119, 159 Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh, 116 –17 Yount, David, 31 Yurts, 83, 101, 160, 166

About the Author JOSEPH C. MANZELLA is a professor of anthropology at Southern Connecticut State University, where he served as department chair 2002–2008. He has conducted fieldwork on intentional communities (ecovillages, suburban co-housing, communes, spiritual centers, volunteer associations, alternative communities and other projects where people strive together with a common vision) in the United States, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a newspaper editor, reporter, and photographer for 16 years, the last nine with The Hartford Courant. He is the author of The Struggle to Revitalize American Newspapers (2002). He earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut and his MA at Wesleyan University.