Intentional community

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An intentional community is a voluntary

monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives
.

Members of the Anabaptist Christian Bruderhof Communities live, eat, work and worship communally.
Young musicians living in a shared community in Amsterdam
Traditional ashram
Ecovillage "Velyka Rodyna" in Troshcha (Ukrainian: Троща).

History

hippies.[9][10][11]

Synonyms and definitions

Additional terms referring to an intentional community can be alternative lifestyle, intentional society, cooperative community, withdrawn community, enacted community, socialist colony, communistic society, collective settlement, communal society, commune, mutualistic community, communitarian experiment, experimental community, utopian experiment, practical utopia, and utopian society.[12]

Authorship Year Definition
B. Shenker 1986 "An intentional community is a relatively small group of people who have created a whole way of life for the attainment of a certain set of goals."[1]
D. E. Pitzer 1989 Intentional communities are "small, voluntary social units partly isolated from the general society in which members share an economic union and lifestyle in an attempt to implement, at least in part, their ideal ideological, religious, political, social, economic, and educational systems".[2]
G. Kozeny 1996 "An 'intentional community' is a group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values. The people may live together on a piece of rural land, in a suburban home, or in an urban neighborhood, and they may share a single residence or live in a cluster of dwellings."[13]
W. J. Metcalf 2004 An intentional community is "[f]ive or more people, drawn from more than one family or kinship group, who have voluntarily come together for the purpose of ameliorating perceived social problems and inadequacies. They seek to live beyond the bounds of mainstream society by adopting a consciously devised and usually well thought-out social and cultural alternative. In the pursuit of their goals, they share significant aspects of their lives together. Participants are characterized by a "we-consciousness," seeing themselves as a continuing group, separate from and in many ways better than the society from which they emerged."[3]

Variety

The purposes of intentional communities vary and may be political, spiritual, economic, or environmental.[14] In addition to spiritual communities, secular communities also exist.[15] One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals.[16] Egalitarian values can be combined with other values.[17] Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way:[18]

Membership

Members of Christian intentional communities want to emulate the practices of the earliest believers. Using the

Rutba House would fall into this category. Despite strict membership criteria, these communities are open to visitors and not reclusive to the extent of some other intentional communities.[21]

A survey in the 1995 edition of the "

Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, 10 percent had both rural and urban sites, and 8 percent did not specify.[22]

Governance

The most common form of governance in intentional communities is democratic (64 percent), with decisions made by some form of consensus decision-making or voting. A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities, 11 percent are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure, and 16 percent do not specify.[22]

Core principles

The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have been expressed in various forms over the years. The term "communitarian" was invented by the Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby, subsequently a Unitarian minister.[23]

At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger category of utopias.[24] He listed three main characteristics:

  • First, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order.
  • Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organized as being too industrialized (or factory sized) and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions.
  • Third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.[25]

Twenty-five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, Shared Lives, defined communes as having the following core principles: the importance of the group as opposed to the nuclear family unit, a "common purse", a collective household, group decision-making in general and intimate affairs.[26] Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of "primary group" (generally with fewer than 20 people, although there are examples of much larger communes). Commune members have emotional bonds to the whole group rather than to any sub-group, and the commune is experienced with emotions that go beyond just social collectivity.[27]

By region

See also: List of intentional communities

With the simple definition of a commune as an intentional community with 100% income sharing, the online directory of the

anthroposophic philosophy, including Camphill villages that provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems or other special needs.[30]

Many cultures naturally practice communal or tribal living, and would not designate their way of life as a planned "commune" per se, though their living situation may have many characteristics of a commune.

Australia

In

Mount Toolebewong
, 65 km east of Melbourne, Victoria at an altitude of 600–800 m, this community has been entirely off the electricity grid since its inception in 1974. Founding members still resident include Peter and Sandra Cock.

Germany

Bruderhof

The first wave of

Bruderhof in the United States of America and Kibbutzim
in Israel. In the 1960s, there was a resurgence of communities calling themselves communes, starting with the Kommune 1 in Berlin, without knowledge of or influence by previous movements.[34] A large number of contemporary intentional communities define themselves as communes, and there is a network of political communes called "Kommuja"[35] with about 40 member groups (May 2023).

In the German commune book, Das KommuneBuch, communes are defined by Elisabeth Voß as communities which:[36]

  • Live and work together
  • Have a communal economy, i.e., common finances and common property (land, buildings, means of production)
  • Have communal decision making – usually consensus decision making
  • Try to reduce hierarchy and hierarchical structures
  • Have communalization of housework, childcare and other communal tasks
  • Have equality between women and men
  • Have low ecological footprints through sharing and saving resources

Israel

The communal dining hall in Kibbutz Merom Golan, ca. 1968–1972

Hashomer Hatsair.[38]

Ireland

In 1831 John Vandeleur (a landlord) established a commune on his Ralahine Estate at Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare. Vandeleur asked Edward Thomas Craig, an English socialist, to formulate rules and regulations for the commune. It was set up with a population of 22 adult single men, 7 married women and their 7 husbands, 5 single women, 4 orphan boys and 5 children under the age of 9 years. No money was employed, only credit notes which could be used in the commune shop. All occupants were committed to a life with no alcohol, tobacco, snuff or gambling. All were required to work for 12 hours a day during the summer and from dawn to dusk in winter. The social experiment prospered for a time and 29 new members joined. However, in 1833 the experiment collapsed due to the gambling debts of John Vandeleur. The members of the commune met for the last time on 23 November 1833 and placed on record a declaration of "the contentment, peace and happiness they had experienced for two years under the arrangements introduced by Mr. Vandeleur and Mr. Craig and which through no fault of the Association was now at an end".[39]

Russia

In

monastic communities have again become more common, populous and, to a lesser degree, more influential in Russian society. Various patterns of Russian behavior — toloka (толока), pomochi (помочи), artel
(артель) — are also based on communal ("мирские") traditions.

In the years immediately following the

revolutions of 1917 Tolstoyan communities proliferated in Russia, but later they were eventually wiped out or stripped of their independence as collectivisation and ideological purges got under way in the late 1920s.[42] Colonies, such as the Life and Labor Commune, relocated to Siberia to avoid being liquidated. Several Tolstoyan leaders, including Yakov Dragunovsky (1886-1937), were put on trial and then sent to the Gulag prison camps.[43]

South Africa

In 1991, Afrikaners in South Africa founded the controversial Afrikaner-only town of Orania, with the goal of creating a stronghold for the Afrikaner minority group, the Afrikaans language and the Afrikaner culture.[44] By 2022, the population was 2,500. The town was experiencing rapid growth and the population had climbed by 55% from 2018.[45] They favour a model of strict Afrikaner self-sufficiency and have their own currency, bank, local government and only employ Afrikaners.[46]

United Kingdom

The wind turbines at Findhorn make the Ecovillage a net exporter of electricity.

A 19th century advocate and practitioner of communal living was the utopian socialist John Goodwyn Barmby, who founded a Communist Church before becoming a Unitarian minister.[47]

The Simon Community in London is an example of social cooperation, made to ease homelessness within London. It provides food and religion and is staffed by homeless people and volunteers.[48]
Mildly nomadic, they run street "cafés" which distribute food to their known members and to the general public.

The

Bruderhof[49] has three locations in the UK.[50] In Glandwr, near Crymych, Pembrokeshire, a co-op called Lammas Ecovillage focuses on planning and sustainable development. Granted planning permission by the Welsh Government in 2009, it has since created 9 holdings and is a central communal hub for its community.[51] In Scotland, the Findhorn Foundation founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean in 1962[52] is prominent for its educational centre and experimental architectural community project based at The Park, in Moray, Scotland, near the village of Findhorn.[53]

The Findhorn Ecovillage community at The Park, Findhorn, a village in Moray, Scotland, and at Cluny Hill in Forres, now houses more than 400 people.[54]

Historic agricultural examples include the Diggers settlement on St George's Hill, Surrey during the English Civil War and the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Co-operative Colony near Newcastle upon Tyne during the 1890s.[55][56]

United States

There is a long history of

back-to-the-land" ventures of the 1960s and 1970s.[57] One commune that played a large role in the hippie movement was Kaliflower, a utopian living cooperative that existed in San Francisco between 1967 and 1973 built on values of free love and anti-capitalism
.

Fellowship for Intentional Community
(FIC) is one of the main sources for listings of and more information about communes in the United States.

Although many American communes are short-lived, some have been in operation for over 50 years. The Bruderhof was established in the US in 1954,[19] Twin Oaks in 1967[59] and Koinonia Farm in 1942.[60] Twin Oaks is a rare example of a non-religious commune surviving for longer than 30 years.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The word commune is originally a French word appearing in the 12th century from Medieval Latin communia, meaning a large gathering of people sharing a common life; from Latin communis, things held in common.[8]

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-0-203-83263-9
    . Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  2. ^ a b Pitzer, D. E. (1989). "Developmental communalism: An alternative approach to communal studies". Utopian Thought and Communal Experience: 68–76.
  3. ^
    ISBN 9781844090327
    .
  4. ^ Butcher, A. A. (2002). Communal Economics (PDF). Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  5. S2CID 225187879
    . Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  6. ISBN 978-90-04-23625-7. Retrieved 20 September 2021 – via Google Books
    .
  7. ^
    JSTOR 26240431
    . Retrieved 30 August 2021.
  8. ^ Communes of France
  9. S2CID 226716773
    . Retrieved 21 September 2021.
  10. ISBN 978-90-04-23625-7. Retrieved 21 September 2021 – via Google Books
    .
  11. ^ Mahanty, Shannon (7 September 2021). "Could you handle life in a commune?". Evening Standard. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
  12. JSTOR 20719246
    . Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  13. ^ Kozeny, Geoph (1996). "Intentional Communities: Lifestyles Based on Ideals" (PDF). Community Catalyst Project, Fellowship for Intentional Community Online. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  14. ^ Strongin, Fay (2010). Imagining the Intentional Community Counterpublic (PDF) (Dissertation ed.). DSpace. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  15. ^ Caplan, Mariana. "Spiritual Communities: There's More to Them Than Meets the Third Eye". Fellowship for Intentional Community. Archived from the original on July 2, 2017. Retrieved March 16, 2022.
  16. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 2019-07-31.
  17. ^ "Feminism, Empowerment, and Justice | Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage". Archived from the original on 2021-04-10. Retrieved 2019-07-31.
  18. ISBN 0-226-97749-8
    .
  19. ^ a b "Bruderhof – Fellowship for Intentional Community". Fellowship for Intentional Community. Retrieved 2017-11-11.
  20. ISBN 0-9602714-4-9
    .
  21. ^ "Learning from the Bruderhof: An Intentional Christian Community". ChristLife. Retrieved 2017-10-27.
  22. ^
    ISBN 0-9718264-2-0
    .
  23. ISBN 9780786404551
    .
  24. ^ Roberts 1971.
  25. ^ Roberts 1971.
  26. ^ Metcalf 1996.
  27. ^ Metcalf 1996.
  28. ^ "Welcome to the Intentional Communities Directory". directory.ic.org. Archived from the original on 8 September 2011. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
  29. Fellowship for Intentional Community. 28 January 2019. Archived from the original
    on 8 September 2011. Retrieved 28 January 2019. We use commune only when referring to communities that share their income and resources completely, or nearly so
  30. ^ "At Camphill Kimberton, crafting a different way to live". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original on 2013-10-31.
  31. ^ "Moora Moora Co-operative Community". arachnoid.net.au. Retrieved 28 October 2021.
  32. ^ Conti 1984, p. 66-149.
  33. ^ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 132.
  34. ^ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 158.
  35. ^ "Kommuja-Netzwerk". kommuja.de (in German). Retrieved 28 September 2010.
  36. ^ Voß 1996, p. 17–26.
  37. ^ Horrox, James. "A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement", pp. 87–109
  38. ^ Horrox, James (October 2007). "Rebuilding Israel's Utopia". Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture.
  39. ^ Industrial Co-operation, the Story of a Peaceful Revolution: Being the Account of the History, Theory, and Practice of the Co-operative Movement in Great Britain and Ireland: Prepared for the Co-operative Education Association, Catherine Webb, Co-operative union, limited, 1907, p. 64
  40. ^ Энгельгардт, Александр, Письма из деревни, М., 1987
  41. ^ Морозов, Юрий, Пути России. М., 1992, т. 2, гл. 13
  42. ^ Charlotte Alston (2010). "Tolstoy's Guiding Light". History Today.
  43. ISBN 0815626010
    , (p.245, 249-250).
  44. ^ "Orania and the third reinvention of the Afrikaner - Carel Boshoff - DOCUMENTS". Politicsweb. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
  45. ^ "Archive.ph". The Times. Archived from the original on 2022-06-15. Retrieved 2022-10-10.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  46. ^ "'An indictment of South Africa': Whites-only town Orania is booming". The Guardian. 24 October 2019.
  47. ISBN 0-313-29465-8
    .
  48. ^ "The Simon Community". The Simon Community. 2014-03-21. Retrieved 2014-03-21. We are a community of homeless people and volunteers living and working together in a spirit of love, acceptance, tolerance and understanding. We aim to reach out to support and campaign for people who are experiencing homelessness, and particularly those for whom no other provision exists
  49. ^ "South East England | Diggers and Dreamers". www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk. Archived from the original on 2020-06-15. Retrieved 2019-04-30.
  50. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 2019-08-15.
  51. ^ "Lammas". Lammas. 2014-03-21. Retrieved 2014-03-21. The Lammas project has been created to pioneer an alternative model for living on the land. It empowers people to explore what it is to live a low-impact lifestyle. It demonstrates that alternatives are possible here and now.
  52. ^ "Findhorn Foundation – Findhorn Foundation History". Findhorn Foundation. 2014-03-21. Archived from the original on 2014-03-21. Retrieved 2014-03-21. The Findhorn Community was begun in 1962 by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean.
  53. ^ Local relations between the Findhorn Foundation and the village of Findhorn have occasionally foundered over inconsiderate use of the word "Findhorn" to mean either the former or the Ecovillage. See, for example, Walker (1994), Talk:Findhorn Foundation and also Findhorn (disambiguation).
  54. ISBN 978-1-84277-333-8
    .
  55. ^ "St George's Hill – Surrey Diggers Trail". www.diggerstrail.org.uk. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  56. ^ Henderson, Tony (2015-12-16). "How Clousden Hill communist agricultural colony in Newcastle sought to change the world". ChronicleLive. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  57. ISBN 978-0-674-14576-4
    . Retrieved March 14, 2014.
  58. ^ Jacobs, Andrew (2006-06-11). "Extreme Makeover, Commune Edition". The New York Times. p. 1. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  59. ^ "Twin Oaks Intentional Community". www.twinoaks.org. Retrieved 2017-11-11.
  60. ^ "Brief History". Koinonia Farm. Retrieved 2017-11-11.

Sources

Further reading

External links

New International Encyclopedia article "Communistic Societies
".
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