COMMUNAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION
31ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE
HANCOCK SHAKER VILLAGE
PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 2, 2004

PROGRAM OF EVENTS
Abstracts and Presenter Biographies

PLENARY SESSION 

Stephen Paterwic
“Hancock Shaker Village: Not the ‘First’ of Mother’s Children, Not the ‘Least’ of Mother’s Children, But Almost the Last of Mother’s Children: Insights into Hancock Shaker History from First Gathering to Dissolution”

Stephen Paterwic has been studying the Shakers for 37 years and is a well-known speaker at Shaker conferences and forums.  He has published numerous articles on the Shakers in Communal Studies, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, the Shaker Messenger, Shaker's World, and the Shaker Quarterly.  He is past President of the Boston Area Shaker Study Group, serves as an overseer at Hancock Shaker Village, and is a corporator at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village and a member of their Friends of the Shakers board.  Mr. Paterwic is a teacher in the Springfield (MA) Public Schools and is the chair of the mathematics department at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology.  He makes his home in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Lawrence Yerdon
“Hancock from Dissolution to Historic Site Museum”

Lawrence Yerdon was the Executive Director of Hancock Shaker Village for eighteen years.  He is now the President of Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

PAPER PRESENTATIONS

 Lotus Allen
“Women’s Voices, Women’s Ways: A Project Proposal” (Session VIII.C)

The current working title of this project is “Women’s Voices, Women’s Ways: Intentional Community as Source and Support.”  The vision is to create a picture book profiling at least 24 women visionaries/pioneers/founders within contemporary intentional communities, with a companion 30-minute video.  In this presentation she will share some of the germinating questions which guide this project and will welcome the input of conference participants in this evolving project.

Lotus Allen is currently based at The Farm in Tennessee and has lived within collective households and intentional communities for much of her adult life, including being a former member of Sandhill Farm in Missouri.  She serve on  the Board for the Fellowship for Intentional Community, is an events organizer and program coordinator for Network for a New Culture and also works for Plenty, Int'l and Mid South Mediation Service.

Deborah Altus
“Travels for the ‘60s Communes Project” (Session VII.C)

As a participant on the “Personal Journeys” roundtable, Altus will discuss her travels for the 60s Communes Project.

Deborah Altus lives, loves and plays in Lawrence, Kansas, where her experiences in cooperative living led her to the CSA.  Deborah is particularly interested in contemporary intentional communities, with a focus on Walden Two communities and aging in community.  She is an Associate Professor at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.  Deborah is the CSA Vice-President and will be take office as President at the end of this conference.

Sam Arnold
“Church before Family” (Session II.B)

The presenter is a grandson of Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof communities which originated in Germany in 1920.  Today the Bruderhof includes a dozen communities in New York, Pennsylvania, Australia, New Zealand, England, and Germany.  Arnold was born in Paraguay, where the community migrated to during WW II.  Early in life he learned how his own family was sacrificed for the church, and the lasting effects this had.  When he came of age this caused him to leave the Bruderhof for good, but he was unprepared for life on the outside, making the transition a formidable challenge. The need for supportive and helpful parents is significant for any young adult, and even more so for an unworldly Bruderhof departee.  Today contact for many with close relatives inside the sect is prevented, even for funerals, and so the church continues to divide families. 

Sam Arnold was born in Paraguay and grew up in the Bruderhof communities until the age of fifteen.  He recently retired from teaching music and resides in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada.

Sandra Barty
“Synanon:  Tensions Between the Good of the Individual and the Good of the Community” (Session IV.B)

This paper will explore the contribution of this thematic approach to the study of the communal society Synanon.  The author lived in Synanon for 20 years and wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the community.  The dissertation provided the framework for her journey from communal living to the larger society.  Barty will draw on her personal experiences as well as her academic perspectives in her presentation.

Sandra Barty recently finished her Ph.D. in American Studies with concentrations in Communal Studies and Gender Studies. She lived and worked in Synanon for twenty years.

Brian Bixby
“Shaker Visitors, Shaker Tourists” (Session V.A)

Not everyone who travels to a communal society intends to join it.  For over two centuries, people traveled to Shaker villages.  What was originally a method for Shakers to recruit new members in the early 19th Century has become historical and spiritual tourism at the beginning of the 21^st Century.  This paper offers a historical account of those travelers and what they came to see.

Brian Bixby is a doctoral student in History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  He wonders how everyone can both be tourists and loathe tourists.

Michael Boover
“Still Sowing: The Long Journey of the Catholic Worker Movement in Worcester County, Massachusetts” (Session IV.C)

The Catholic Worker movement was born in the Depression and by the late 1930s had houses throughout the country, including a house in Worcester and a farm in Upton, Massachusetts. The Catholic Worker found fertile ground, adherents and many sympathizers in Worcester County. In this account, Boover traces the history and influence of the Catholic Worker in Worcester County, with particular emphasis on the Mustard Seed House of Hospitality.

Michael Boover, a Catholic Worker, mental health worker, and adjunct professor at Worcester State College, has written about peace and the history and influence of the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester County with particular emphasis on the Mustard Seed House of Hospitality where he lived and worked for a decade (1972-1982). He continues to serve as convener for “clarification of thought” and is the community’s archivist. With his wife, Diane, and their children, Michael lives and works in a new communal expression of faith life, Annunciation House, where prayer and study are shared with interested others.

Martha Bradley
“Sites of Representation:  Examining Community through the Lens of Spatial Communities” (Session VIII.A) 

A spatial community is one which is understood as distinct in part by both outsiders and insiders through its spatial practices, patterns, and particular built environment.   The spaces of such environments are apart from the world, have discrete and meaningful boundaries, and contribute to group identity and meaning.  Spatial communities created by religious movements bring theology into the mix revealing ideas about God and heaven in the lines drawn through space.  They build as well boundaries that clearly define who is inside the faith and who is not.  In this way a spatial world view is concretized and represented in ideas about space, life practices, and spatial patterns. For a spatial community, identity and history of the group is represented, remembered, perpetuated, and social relationships is structured through space.  This presentation presents a model for the study of communal groups through the lens of spatial communities, and to use this lens to consider how space contributes to the way we remember such communities.   

The sites of representation in spatial communities are both geographical places and geographical, political, religious, cultural and theoretical viewpoints.  Her object in this presentation is to propose a series of morphological features of such sites of representation and that might help us better understand communal organizations.  Such features might include:  1) clusters or patterns of structures, systems, or streets; 2) the nature of the connections between the pieces; 3) the ways spatial concepts are embedded in the theology; 4) the ways those theological concepts are represented in physical forms; 5) the ways such concepts are represented in life practices; 6) the ways existing architectural types are transformed for new uses; 7) new architectural types developed in response to specific theological needs. 

Dr. Martha Sonntag Bradley is a historian who specializes in the history of Utah, gender and community. Her publications include: Kidnapped from that Land: The Government Raids on the Polygamous Community of Short Creek; A History of Beaver County; A History of Kane County, and The Four Zinas: Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier for which she won the Best Book Award from the Utah Historical Society and the Best Biographical Book Award from the Mormon History Association. Her forthcoming volume, A Guide to Utah Architecture will be published by Gibbs Smith Publishers. Her most recent book is The Right Fight? The Mormon Church’s Campaign Against the Equal Rights Amendment. She is an associate professor in the college of architecture and planning at the University of Utah.

Susan Love Brown
“Josiah Warren:  The Wandering Anarchist” (Session VI.C) 

Josiah Warren became the father of American individualist anarchism as a result of his reaction to his experiences in the Community of Equality at New Harmony, Indiana.  He was to become the founder of at least three intentional communities, all anarchistic in nature, but he never stayed in any community for very long.  This paper attempts to evaluate the effect of his peripatetic nature on the communities he founded, only one of which (Modern Times) lasted any length of time, and on his own life which took many turns from the creation of time stores to the invention of printing presses.   

Susan Love Brown is associate professor in the department of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University.  She is a political and psychological anthropologist with an interest in the origin of ideology and intentional communities, especially Ananda Village and anarchist communities.  She is the editor of Intentional Community:  An Anthropological Perspective (SUNY Press, 2002).

Walter Brumm
“Shared Lives, Divergent Realities: The Shaker-Harmonist Bond” (Session III.C)

This paper will focus on early Shaker-Harmonist contacts and communications from a social interactionist perspective.

Walter Brumm is recently retired from teaching Sociology at the California University of Pennsylvania.

Roben Campbell
"’Slowly Hastening to the Grave’:  Death and Illness at Harvard--the Picture” (Session VI.B) 

 "Slowly hastening to the grave ..." is a quote from a letter written in 1851 by a sister in the Harvard Shaker ministry who became alarmed by the high number of deaths among the sisterhood in the village.  Her presentation seeks to verify the number of deaths by consumption, compare the death rates with the town of Harvard, and determine whether consumption played a role in the decline of the village. 

As a weaver Campbell’s interest in the Shakers began with the sisters' textile work, the woven cloth, toweling, and carpets.  In 1998 she started working as an interpreter at Fruitlands Museums.  Since then she has completed several studies: one of the Shaker style of carpet weaving, and the other of the population of the Harvard Shaker Village with her husband, David Fay, and Mike Volmar.  She also was co-curator for the exhibit at Fruitlands The Brethren and Sisters: A Community Portrait which goes through the end of October of 2004.

Wendy Chmielewski
"Community on the Road from Coast to Coast:  The Great Peace March for Nuclear Disarmament" (Session II.A) 

In 1986 a group of approximately 600 people from diverse backgrounds marched from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over an eight-month period.  The group, known as the Great Peace March for Nuclear Disarmament, believed that "nuclear weapons are politically, socially, economically and morally unjustifiable."  To spread that message and encourage citizen action for the abolition of nuclear weapons, the marchers traveled through large and small towns across the U.S. talking with people, in groups, schools, churches, anywhere they could, about the need for the American people to speak out on the issue.

Moving 600 people across the country on foot was a tremendous challenge.  The GPM created a traveling, temporary, intentional community, with its own governing board, officers, judicial system, media, and other group social structures.  The community was based on consensus, progressive community values, and beliefs in social justice.  The Great Peace March was only one of several temporary intentional communities established for political, grassroots, activism in the last quarter of the twentieth century.  These groups were intended, from their inception, to be transitory, rather than as permanent communities.  However, even in these temporary communities, similar to more permanent ones, the internal social structures established were based on shared values, often as alternative to mainstream society.  This paper will explore the philosophical and political background of the Great Peace March, the community structures established by the participants, the unique aspects of a traveling community, and finally the historical context for such intentional societies.

Wendy E. Chmielewski is the George Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. She has written and published on the history of women in intentional communities and in the U.S. peace movement.  She is currently researching gender and food at the Oneida Community.

Karen Christensen
“The Meaning of Community: A Roundtable Discussion” (Session VIII.B)

Christensen was the lead editor of the recently published Encyclopedia of Community. She will discuss what has been learned about community from the Encyclopedia project and what questions and issues are in particular need of further research. 

Karen Christensen is a publisher and writer on community and environmental issues. She served as the Lead Editor for the Encyclopedia of Community (Sage 2003).

David J. Connell
“The State of Community Theory:  Implications for Communal Studies” (Session VII.B) 

The state of community theory is not good.  Community is deemed too elusive to define and too complex to understand.  Consequently, ambiguity prevails over theory.  This paper discusses three implications of this problem for communal studies.  (1) Community is taken as a given object of social order situated between individuals and society, thus constraining how communal relations can be understood.  (2) Community theory is founded upon surface descriptions of human settlements and interactions.  (3) Theory, definitions, and approaches used for community studies are interdependent, i.e., regardless of the approach used, the method of study and object of study refer to each other in circular arguments. 

David J. Connell is interested in the philosophy, theory, and practice of community.  His doctoral dissertation was on the meaning of community   David is also interested in the relationship between community and agriculture.  His background is in economics, business, and community development.  As of January 2005, David will be Assistant Professor, School of Environmental Planning, University of Northern British Columbia.  Website:  www.djconnell.ca.

Jane F. Crosthwaite
"Intrepid Missionaries and Wet Chickens:  Shaker Travels to the West" (Session II.C) 

Isolating six accounts of Shaker travel to the West between 1805 and 1889, we can trace fascinating changes in both Shaker and American life.  Detailed journals, particularly of early Shaker visitors to the West, tell of the developing modes of conveyance and describe the advances in carriage, canal, steamboat, and rail travel over the course of the

Nineteenth Century.  From the first difficult winter travel on foot to the later, easier travel by train, the Eastern visitors recorded changes in transportation, technology, and urban development.  The accounts begin with the missionary ventures of the Second Great Awakening and end with efforts to close and consolidate some of the Western societies.   

While the travelers set out with many different purposes over time and tell us about changing conditions in the West, one remarkable trip was taken during the Civil War and another records the unexpected death of Rufus Bishop at Whitewater, Ohio.  Along the way, the reader gains surprising insights into individual Shaker personalities, insights that are not so readily available in the home journals which record a more repetitive daily life. 

Shaker travelers journeyed with their eyes wide open, with their personal quirks, and with a continuing Shaker dedication. 

Jane Crosthwaite is Professor of Religion at Mount Holyoke College.  She received her Bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University and her Ph.D. from Duke. She is one of the founding members of the Women's Studies Program, and teaches courses in women in American religious history and courses in ethics.  Her research is primarily directed toward a study of the drawings produced by the Shaker sisters during the mid-nineteenth century period known as the Era of Manifestations.

Anthony Denzer
“Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Post-War Los Angeles” (Session VIII.A) 

In 1946, when the resettlement of veterans triggered a housing crisis in Los Angeles, architect Gregory Ain began working with 280 families to develop a cooperative housing tract called Community Homes. In contrast to ‘villages’ of Quonset huts being erected in public parks, this project was to be the first fully developed social and aesthetic solution to the city's postwar emergency.  The cooperative was among the largest of its kind, and its members selected themselves out of critical resistance to the suburban housing industry. The 280 families were primarily drawn from Hollywood: animators, musicians, writers, and designers.  Most of them were union members and many were socialists or communists. Ain himself had been active in the Communist Party in the 1930s and early 40s.  Politics and race in fact proved to be the project's fatal flaw. Using archival sources and interviews to reconstruct the history of Community Homes, this paper will give new analytic emphasis to the resistant use of politics, architecture and landscape design to project specific forms of community and social identity in the postwar period. It will also describe and analyze the role of the FHA and other institutional forces in enforcing policies of homogeneity and exclusion. 

Anthony Denzer is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at UCLA.  He is an Associate Designer at Tolkin & Associates in Pasadena, and also teaches courses in architecture and environmental arts at Woodbury University and UCLA Extension Interior Design Program.

Mario DePillis
“The Meaning of Community” (roundtable discussion) (Session VIII.B) 

As a member of this roundtable, Dr. DePillis will share his thoughts on the meaning of community. 

Mario DePillis is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and former editor of Communal Societies.

Donald F. Durnbaugh
“The Intertwined Spiritual and Geographic Journeys of the Hutterian Brethren and the Bruderhof” (Session III.C) 

The Bruderhof is a high-intensity twentieth-century communal movement, currently active in ten colonies in the US, UK, and Australia with ca. 2,600 members.  Founded in 1920, it based its life on the oldest communitarian movement still in existence, the much-larger Hutterian Brethren, itself founded in 1528.  The Hutterites now number ca. 42,000
members in more than 400 colonies, predominantly in Canada and the western USA.  In 1931 the older movement accepted the Bruderhof into its fold, but the intertwined history since that date has been marked by tension, division, reconciliation, and further estrangement.  This presentation will sketch the combined histories of the two movements, briefly relating their mergings and partings and suggesting the basic
reasons for both their alignments and their divisions.

Donald F. Durnbaugh is professor-emeritus of church history, Bethany Theological Seminary, who currently serves in retirement as archivist and curator of the special collections of Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA.

Hermann Ehmer
“Spiritual and Formal Gardens in Communal Societies” (Session VIII.A)

Ever since Adam and Eve’s paradise the garden has been an important image: the secluded garden as the opposite to the outside world, the epitome of orderliness in contrast to the chaos of the world. The garden is therefore a favorite theme in medieval, Renaissance and later in impressionist art.   The garden is a powerful metaphor also, not only in devotional literature.  The communal society tends to be such a secluded garden, a separate body in or outside the world. The garden theme therefore must be important for these societies.  The aim of this paper is to show this in two examples: Zoar/Ohio and Old Economy/Pennsylvania.  The concept of the garden traveled with the people of Zoar and Economy across the ocean from Europe. They knew the formal gardens of their princes, but gave them a spiritual meaning in rebuilding them in the New World. Yet the prototype for these communal gardens was not only the parks of the Old World royalty. The Zoar garden for instance finds a striking parallel in a painting of the 17th century in a church in the country where the Zoarites came from. Although they probably did not know the original, an 18th century engraving of it was published together with an interpretation of its mystical significance. So the garden which existed only in a European painter’s imagination was set up in America. 

Hermann Ehmer is the Director of the Landeskirchliches Archive in Stuttgart, Germany.

Susan Eisenhandler
“Traveling Up the Road Into the Past: How Field Trips Animate Communal Studies” (Session V.C)

This paper discusses and analyzes the value and role of field trips in undergraduate courses that focus on communities.  Specifically, observations and comments made by students are used to illustrate some ways in which field trips animate communal studies.  In addition to deepening an appreciation for Shaker folkways and beliefs, students take away a palpable sense of the nature of commitment woven into the communal life of this group, and, by extension, to other communal groups past and present.  Contributions made by communal groups to culture and society are experienced in ways that are compelling and long-lasting despite the limited glimpse a day provides.  Firsthand contact with the material culture that has been preserved in Hancock also breathes life into larger social scientific connections established by scholars, such as the link between communal beliefs and the design and use of space in a community.  This daylong journey stimulates independent trips to other locales and encourages further reading and intellectual work by students who would not ordinarily think about communal groups and their place in American social life.  

Susan A. Eisenhandler, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Dept. of Sociology at UCONN. In 1997 she created a course called, Communities, for the undergraduate curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  A substantive unit highlights intentional communities and features a field trip to Hancock Shaker Village.  Professor Eisenhandler's published scholarship focuses on issues of identity and aging.

Donald Emerich
“Shaker Architecture: A New Vision” (Session VIII.A)

This talk concerns the discipline of organizing and presenting a structure for future study of the surviving 250 Shaker buildings in seven states, with emphasis on documentation, as perhaps even more important than preservation and restoration. 

A. Donald Emerich began his study of the Shakers in 1960, soon concentrating on their architecture. In 1968, he organized and presided at the first national conference on Shaker studies at Hancock Shaker Village. Subsequently he was guest curator and catalog author/editor for exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, and the New York State Museum, and consultant for shows/catalogs for the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Albany Institute of History and Art. He is a past national board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, and is now under contract to Dover Publications, Inc., for a book (tentatively scheduled for 2005) titled Shaker Architecture: An Introduction—Measured Drawings and Photographs form the Historic American Buildings Survey at the Library of Congress.

Randy Ericson
“Digitizing The Manifesto” (Session V.C) 

This talk will focus on progress Hamilton College is making in digitizing the Shaker Manifesto (and all its preceding and succeeding titles), from 1869-1899.  Ericson will show what the display of the images will be like as well as initial navigational tools.  He will set the context for this project by providing a brief description of the Communal Societies Collection at Hamilton.

Randall Ericson was appointed the Couper Librarian (a.k.a. College Librarian) at Hamilton College in 2000.  From 1988-2000, he was an Associate University Librarian for Technical and Automated Services at Syracuse University.  He was Library Director of Technical Services at Hamilton College (1982-1988) and Intern and Serials Cataloger at Library of Congress (1979-1982).  His involvement with communal societies began in 2000 when he took over leadership of the Hamilton College Library and its communal societies collection.  

David Fay
“Slowly Hastening to the Grave:” Death and Illness at Harvard--the Numbers” (Session VI.B) 

In 1851, Harvard Ministry Elder sister Sally Loomis writes on an unusual number of deaths of young Shaker sisters since 1813.  Twenty-four sisters died from the Church family alone, according to Loomis, seventeen under the age of thirty and another seven between thirty and forty-three.  This paper asks whether Loomis’ observation is correct: were there an unusual number of deaths?  An attempt will be made to explain any statistically significant differences in death rates between young female Harvard Shakers and the comparable death rates of young male Shakers, young female Harvard residents, Harvard Shakers of other ages, and young female Shakers of earlier and later periods. Consideration will be given to epidemics of the time, differences in access to good health care between Shakers and Harvard town residents, and differences in access to health care between male and female Shakers. 

David Fay has worked with his wife, Roben Campbell, and Mike Volmar, Curator at Fruitlands, to complete a statistical database of Harvard Shakers.

Kathleen Fernandez
“Unwanted Publicity: Zoar in the Wake of Nordhoff’s Communistic Societies”      (Session IV.B) 

The Separatist community of Zoar received many and varied communications from readers of Nordhoff’s book, even though the author was rather condescending in his treatment of the community.  This paper will examine the reactions of the Separatists to this “unwanted publicity.” 

In addition to presenting the above paper, Kathleen Fernandez will also participate in the roundtable discussion “The Meaning of Community.” 

Kathleen M. Fernandez, a native of Dayton, Ohio, was Site Manager of Zoar Village State Memorial and Fort Laurens State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society from 1988, retiring in 2004.  She was Curator of Interpretation of the two sites (and at Schoenbrunn Village at various times) since 1975, and has worked for the Ohio Historical Society since before graduating from Otterbein College in 1971.  She is active with the Ohio & Erie Canal Corridor and the Communal Studies Association and edits the newsletters for both organizations.  She is also a surveyor for the Museum Assessment Program.  She has recently published a book, A Singular People:  Images of Zoar, Kent State University Press, 2003.  She is currently a free lance museum consultant and Interim Executive Secretary of the Communal Studies Association.  She is married and lives in Canton, Ohio.

Robert Fogarty
"A Blue Guide to Utopian Communities: Charles Nordhoff's Communistic Societies of America" (Session V.A) 

An examination of Charles Nordhoff’s work. 

Robert S. Fogarty is the editor of the Antioch Review and the author of several books on communal societies including All Things New: Communal and Utopian Movements,1865-1914 (Chicago) and most recently Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller's Intimate Memoir (Indiana). He is just completing a study of Anglo-American faith healing,1870-1930.

Lawrence Foster
“Reconsidering the ‘Twin Relics of Barbarism’:  A Comparison of the Historiography of American Slavery and Mormon Polygamy” (Session VII.B)  

The complex transitions that are associated with the introduction of alternative systems of communal, family, and sexual life have received much attention.  This presentation will move a step beyond such analyses of specific groups and social systems to focus on the complex historiographical transitions that may also happen during and after a major transition in social structure occurs.  In particular, he proposes to look at the changing historical perspectives on two of the most controversial social practices in 19th century America--slavery and polygamy.  Foster believes that such a comparative analysis also may suggest fruitful perspectives for understanding the changing historical understanding of other communal groups and practices, as well. 

This paper will compare and contrast three phases in the historiography of American slavery and Mormon polygamy, reflecting on why such similar patterns of analysis have developed in the studies of both social systems.  Foster shall suggest how some of the pathbreaking recent studies of slavery raise new comparative questions for polygamy studies.  Conversely, he shall discuss how the finest recent polygamy scholarship opens up new questions and approaches that can fruitfully be applied to future studies of slavery.   Out of such comparisons, Foster hopes to open up new ways of understanding how both social systems challenged and were challenged by the larger American culture of which they were such a controversial part. 

Lawrence Foster is a Professor of American History at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, Georgia). He is the author of Religion and Sexuality (Oxford 1981), Women, Family and Utopia (Syracuse 1991), and Free Love in Utopia (2001), which deal with the 19th-century Shaker, Oneida, and Mormon communities.  He is also a past president of the Communal Studies Association and the Mormon History Association (though he is not a Mormon).

Christian Goodwillie
“Dear Elder Brother: Ernest F. McGregor’s 1904 Correspondence with the Shakers” (Session III.A.) 

Goodwillie will present the unpublished correspondence of Yale graduate student Ernest F. McGregor with Shaker leaders from the communities active in 1904.  These letters offer an important insight into the state of Shaker communities, both spiritually and physically, at the beginning of the twentieth century.  In particular a stark contrast is shown between the faltering western villages and the vibrant spirituality still evident in the east. 

Christian Goodwillie is the Curator of Collections at Hancock Shaker Village and the compiler/editor of Shaker Songs: A Celebration of Peace, Harmony and Simplicity (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2002).  He holds a BA in History from Indiana University where he also studied at The Early Music Institute. He earned a Master’s Degree in Historic Preservation from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Margaret M.  Gower
“Historical Influences of the ‘Biographic Memoir of Calvin Green’” (Session III.A) 

The personal history of Calvin Green is interrelated at every stage with the history of the Shaker Society, making his “Biographic Memoir” a rich mine of materials on the development of Shakerism in the United States.  The “Biographic Memoir,” however, is not important merely for its special perspective or for the new possibilities for historical insight that it offers.  Shaker scholars have always read and referred to the “Biographic Memoir” and have incorporated its narrative into their accounts of Shakerism.   

Comprehensive histories of Shakerism introduce their readers to Green.  He is noted as an elder, a missionary, a theologian, a biographer, and a life-long Believer.  More importantly, his record of Shaker theology and chronology is accepted by scholars as definitive in most aspects. 

Gower’s paper will focus on the influence of the “Biographic Memoir of Calvin Green” in modern understandings of Shakerism.  She will outline scholarly dependence upon both the “Memoir” itself and on Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message by White and Taylor, which recycled passages from the “Biographic Memoir” and initiated the “Biographic Memoir” as authoritative history.  In the course of her paper, Gower will suggest that the “Biographic Memoir” both offers new material for analysis and is the source of many established views of nineteenth-century Shakerism.  

Margaret Gower is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School.  A summa cum laude alumna of Mount Holyoke College in 2004, she was introduced to communal studies through coursework on the Shakers with Professor Jane Crosthwaite.  Gower is the recipient of the Clio-Melpomene Award established by Peter Viereck for excellence in history or poetry, and a Phi Beta Kappa prize for original research.

Mary Ann Haagen
“In Search of a Go Ahead Pure Gospel Love: The Elkins Family and the Enfield, N.H. Shakers” (Session VII.A)

This paper examines the forces of faith and economic necessity that engaged one family in a sixty year relationship with Shakerism.  It will focus particularly on James Hervey Elkins’ spiritual jouney from believer to apostate to still-seeking friend of the Enfield Shaker Society. 

Mary Ann Haagen is a visiting scholar in the Department of Music at Dartmouth College. She is the founder and director of the Enfield Shaker Singers.  Her research on the Elkins Family was supported by a Faith Andrews Fellowship from Winterthur.

Roger Hall
"Ode to Contentment: Travels of a Shaker Missionary and Tunesmith" (Session II.C)

Elder Issachar Bates (1758-1837) was one of the foremost early Shaker missionaries and tunesmiths.  This presentation will trace his travels by word and song from New Lebanon, New York to Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana between 1805 and 1835, including his initial trip with two other Shaker missionaries who were the first to travel west.

Several of his Shaker tunes will be heard along with quotes from A Sketch of the Life and Experience of Issachar Bates Sen., completed just one year before his death.  In 1835, he composed one of the first Shaker hymns in three part harmony, "Ode to Contentment." The hymn text was written by Elder Richard Pelham of North Union, Ohio.  The sixth stanza ends with lines that seem to visualize the fervor of Elder Issachar:    

 "Oh! I'll tread this lovely vale, And its living breath inhale,    Catch the odours on the gale, Richly spread around."

He was described as "a powerful minister in both preaching and singing" and remembered for both his dedicated missionary work and his memorable music so "richly spread around."

Roger Hall is a musicologist and singer who has been a consultant for six Shaker recordings, an editor of several music collections, and author of many articles on Shaker music.  He is author of A Guide to Shaker Music and Joseph Brackett's 'SIMPLE GIFTS' and also has a website: American Shaker Music - http://hometown.aol.com/musbuff/page4.htm

Peter Hoehnle
“Communal Sojourners: The Search of Frederick Evans, Sojourner Truth, David Lamson and Others for a Communal Home” (Session II.C) 

The proposed study will examine the experiences of approximately a half dozen nineteenth century individuals who each lived in a succession of communal societies in an attempt to find a personal utopia.  The study will analyze the experiences of each individual, look for common threads in their respective experiences, and will then offer conclusions about the communitarian impulse that motivated these seekers.

The individuals at the heart of this study, at one time or another, belonged to groups as diverse as the Shakers, Brook Farm, the Society of Separatists at Zoar, the Hopewell Community, the Northampton Association, the Snow Hill Cloister, Bishop Hill, the Icarians, the Kingdom of Matthias, the Ebenezer Society and the Harmony Society, as well as a diverse number of smaller groups.  Three of the individuals to be profiled were foreign born, and one was a freed slave.  Among this group are such well-known figures as Frederick Evans, David Lamson and Sojourner Truth, as well as lesser known figures as Alcander Longley, August Jacobi and Carl Keelmann.  As a whole, they were a literate group of individuals who left behind vivid accounts of their experiences that the study will mine in order to explain the impulse that would drive individuals to live in as many as seven different societies in an attempt to find a personal “heaven on earth.” 

Peter Hoehnle received his BA in History from Cornell College (1996) and his MA (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) in History and AgriculturalHistory and Rural Studies from Iowa State University.  He has published several articles on communal topics, principally focusing on the Amana Society.  His current research explores interaction between nineteenth-century communal groups.

Nancy  Hutton and Christian Goodwillie
“Hancock’s Holy Hill: A Walking Tour” (Session IV.A)

In this two-part presentation, Goodwillie and Hutton will describe the activities that occurred on Mount Sinai during the Era of Manifestations leading up to and including the Shakers’ first community visit to their Holy Hill. 

The group will listen to history as they walk across the field and up to the site of Hancock’s North Family.  At this point of the walk (a ½ mile thus far), the hike to the site of Mount Sinai becomes much more vigorous and challenging.  Those who wish to continue the next mile-plus with Goodwillie will continue to climb up to Mount Sinai, while those who prefer to have had a more modest taste of the Shakers’ experience will return with Hutton to the 1910 Barn.  

The presentation with Hutton’s group will last a little more than an hour, while Goodwillie’s presentation and hike will last about two and a half hours (distance: over 4 miles).  If you choose to go to Mount Sinai, you need to have good hiking shoes, some water, and be prepared for portions of the hike to be challenging—the path has suffered from erosion and far from an easy stroll!  However, if you choose to ascend to Mount Sinai, you will be rewarded with an understanding of the Shakers’ commitment and the extent of their many labors.  Whether you join the presenters for part or all of the journey, they hope to deepen your appreciation for this spiritually-vibrant period of Shaker history.  An entirely indoor presentation will be offered in the event of inclement weather.

Nancy Hutton is applying to Ph.D. programs while finishing her M.T.S. at
Harvard Divinity School.   Her emphasis is on women's roles and participation in American religious history.

Christian Goodwillie is Curator of Collections at Hancock Shaker Village and compiler/editor of Shaker Songs: A Celebration of Peace, Harmony and Simplicity (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2002).

Barnabas D. Johnson 
"’Healthy Gossip’ and Democratic Governance” (Session II.B) 

The Bruderhof has a "no gossip" rule that insulates leaders from organized membership criticism of – and hence resistance to -- leadership abuses. This rule, called the First Law in Sannerz, originated in 1925 following a major crisis during which members "talked behind the back" of Eberhard Arnold, the founder, thereby presenting him with almost insurmountable opposition.  Whether the subsequently-adopted First Law was intended to insulate Arnold from further organized criticism (as some assert), or merely had that effect (as most ex-members agree), the First Law has during the past four decades been interpreted and applied in ways that have made it impossible for ordinary members to effectively challenge Eberhard's son, Heini Arnold, and (for the past 22 years), the current leader, Christoph, Heini's son.  This paper will examine that "no gossip" rule within the context of a larger inquiry into freedom of association and expression, democratic governance, and the cybernetics of society. [This paper will be read by Ruth Lambach]

Theodore Kallman
“The Pilgrimage of Ralph Albertson” (Session VI.C) 

Albertson’s life journey was a pilgrimage in pursuit of “happiness,” both individual and social.  This presentation traces Albertson’s life from his training at Oberlin Theological Seminary, to his association with several communal experiments and cooperative movements in North Carolina, Maine, Georgia, and Massachusetts.  Albertson was a founder and leader of the Christian Commonwealth, a Christian socialist community established outside of Columbus, Georgia in 1896. It survived until 1901. This paper will focus on Albertson’s aborted communal attempt in North Carolina, the brief success of his Christian Commonwealth, and his activities on “the Farm.” 

Ted Kallman received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.  He is currently a history professor at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA where he teaches US, World, and African-American history.

Bruce Kaplan
“Strife-filled Travels:  The Kibbutz HaMeuhad Split of 1951” (Session IV.B) 

The tight social network of communal societies, although supportive and invigorating, sometimes proves to be toxic.  What happens when there is a radical change in ideology among certain members of the society or a perceived threat from within the society?  How do members function in a hyper-politicized atmosphere where your hated ideological opponent may be your child’s caregiver?  In 1951, Israel’s largest kibbutz movement, Kibbutz HaMeuhad, was torn asunder by internecine ideological strife.  This resulted in an actual split both within the movement itself and within its communal settlements.  Political discourse turned extremely acrimonious and relations among communitarians soured. Things reached the point where the kibbutz movement was forced to act.  A decision was reached in which nearly half of the movement’s members and kibbutzim left Kibbutz HaMeuhad for a rival kibbutz movement, Ihud HaKvutzot VeHaKibbutzim.  Members of both sides were forced to leave their homes and journey to new kibbutzim, where their side was in the majority, to restart their lives.  Families and friends often chose ideological purity over kinship and friendship.   

Several kibbutzim, in which neither ideological faction held a clear majority, split in half, not only in terms of population, but also in terms of land and property.  These new kibbutzim separated by barbed wire and a narrow strip of land, both claimed to be the authentic ideological heir to the original settlement, evidenced by the retention of the original kibbutz name (differing only by a movement designation Meuhad or Ihud).  The animosity and shunning between the two sides of the ideological battle, especially those living on the “split” settlements, continued for many years.  Kaplan’s paper will traverse the historical developments that led up to this ideological crisis in the Kibbutz HaMeuhad movement.  It will also explore the journey taken by the communitarian movement to handle the situation.  The physical complexion of the resultant kibbutz movements as well as the necessary travels undertaken by kibbutz members away from their families, friends, and birthplaces to rectify the crisis will be investigated.   

Bruce Kaplan is an urban planner based in Cambridge, MA.  He holds a BAfrom Oberlin College and a Master’s in Urban Planning degree from Texas A&M University.  Fascinated at a young age by the nearby North American Phalanx site, he eventually spent time living on several kibbutzim.  He has just begun graduate work at Boston University in intellectual history.

Megan M. Kennedy
“’This place is not meant for recreation. It is meant for inspiration.’:  The Institutional Legacy of Clara Endicott Sears (Session III.B)

Clara Endicott Sears--amateur historian, curator, and poet--wrote in 1918 that “very soon the rush of modern life will have swept away the potent characteristics of our old New England villages - already they are changing from the old into the new.”  This presentation examines the work and contributions of Sears in her development of Fruitlands, where she created an eclectic and diverse museum as experimental as the groups she sought to honor.  Her works also tells the history of the effects of urbanization and a desire for the renewal of pastoral life; the continual process of cultural Americanization; and the growth of local, small-scale museums, regional travelogues, and novels. 

As Sears formed the museums, she also created something of a sacred landscape, imposing pastures, brooks, and orchards onto a distinctly New England geography.

Through her dedication, Sears is noteworthy, if not significant and important; although she can lay no claim to overarching national significance or importance, her numerous historical tracts, her development of Fruitlands, and her dedication to public preservation make her a valuable member in the greater study of communal groups. 

Megan Kennedy is a graduate student in history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Alex Kimmelman
“Chasing the Cure: Health-seeker Communities of the American Southwest” (Session II.A) 

In 1904, the International Conference on Tuberculosis concluded that the only viable therapy for the disease was travel.  In the absence of drug therapy, people were advised to travel to a suitable climate, altitude and environmental conditions for the treatment of their conditions.  Most of these factors could be readily found in the American West.  Hence, we have a formalization of the phenomenon in American history of the “Healthseeker” or “Chasing the Cure,” the migratory movement of invalids seeking a place which afforded the maximum level of comfort. 

By 1904 this migratory movement was already half-a-century old, with another 50 years of tuberculars moving for health yet to come.  Even with the advent of new pharmaceuticals, the movement shifted to seasonal relocations by people with asthma, chronic bronchitis, arthritis and rheumatism.  The yearly movement of the snowbirds to the sunbelt of the American Southwest today is a continuation of the healthseeker tradition. A more permanent form of healthseeker community also exists along the border, that of cancer victims and those suffering other types of diseases for which they receive treatment in Mexico that is banned in the U.S.   

The healthseeker communities of the American Southwest are today important economic and social components of cities stretching from Los Angeles and San Diego, to Denver, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Cruces, El Paso and San Antonio.  Two new aspects have added to the movement -- the high cost of healthcare and strains of drug resistant disease -- which have led people to fall back on folk remedies and the efficacy of good climate.  There appears to be no end to the search for better health. 

Alex J. Kimmelman is the owner and operator of Arizona History Associates, a history consulting firm, and is an Associate Faculty Member of the History Department and Acting Director of the Community and Oral History Center of Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.

Sharon Duane Koomler
“The Faithful Walk: A Shaker’s Missionary Journey” (Session VII.A)

On Tuesday, January 1, 1805 at 3:15 a.m., three missionaries left their Shaker home in New Lebanon, New York on foot.  Their faithful walk would take John Meacham, Issachar Bates, and Benjamin Seth Youngs to the "west," to open the Shaker gospel in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. A detailed manuscript journal of the trip was kept by Benjamin Youngs. 

Benjamin Youngs joined the Shakers in 1794 and quickly rose to a position of responsibility. He took on an important role as a missionary, spreading the Shaker faith. Accompanied by Issachar Bates, Youngs frequently journeyed throughout New York and New England, preaching on Shakerism. On each trip, Youngs kept detailed accounts of the experience. He also wrote letters back to New Lebanon’s Ministry, particularly during the 1805 journey, reporting on the successes and challenges of the missionary efforts.

After settling at South Union, Kentucky, Youngs corresponded with the Ministry at New Lebanon about many subjects. A particular letter, written in 1813, recounts his emotional departure from New Lebanon in 1805. It is through Youngs’ letters and careful accounts of his missionary journeys that it is possible to capture the significance of his own spiritual journey while he was such an integral player in the expansion of the Shakers’ spiritual journey in America. 

This presentation will look at Benjamin Youngs’ writings and his physical and spiritual journey as a Shaker. 

Sharon Koomler is curator at the Shaker Museum and Library (Old Chatham, New York). 

Geoph Kozeny
“Visions of Utopia: Documenting Communities in Film” (Session VIII.A)

As part of the panel on Personal Journeys, Geoph Kozeny will describe his work on creating the award-winning documentary Visions of Utopia. 

Geoph Kozeny has lived in various kinds of communities since the early ‘70s, and for the past 16 years has been on the road visiting over 360 intentional communities—asking about their visions and realities, and documenting their visions and their daily lives through articles, photos, and video.  He is actively involved with the Fellowship for Intentional Community, helped create the first two editions of Communities Directory, and is a regular columnist for Communities magazine.  Volume #1 of his “Visions of Utopia” video documentary has received rave reviews, and Volume #2 is now in the final editing phase. 

Kerry Linden
“Salvation from the Dress Spirit: The Oneida Community Reform Dress” (Session III.B) 

 In 1848, shortly after creating a new home in the burned-over district of Central New York, the Oneida Community adopted a distinctive new reform dress for its female members.  The outfit was modeled after “the dress of children -- frock and pantalettes” and was touted as being practical, comfortable and healthy.  

The outfit distinguished Oneida women from the outside world and symbolized their allegiance to the communal life and Perfectionist doctrine. Oneida Community founder and leader, John Humphrey Noyes, proposed the outfit as an antidote to the physical limitations, exaggeration of gender distinctions, and female vanity, know by Oneidans as the “dress sprit”, which he believed were caused by the crinolines and corsets that characterized “worldly” feminine dress. 

The speaker will draw on first-person documents and the scholarship of Gayle Veronica Fischer to analyze the success of the Oneida reform dress in meeting these stated goals, and to examine whether the outfit reflected a measure of gender equality for Oneida women.  The presentation will look at women’s activities and influence in the governance of the Oneida Community, their place in Oneida’s sophisticated industrial economy, and their participation in the Community’s practices of complex marriage, selective breeding, and communal child rearing.  Discussion will also cover the perception of Oneida women and their clothing by the outside world and how this unique outfit fits into the spectrum of 19th-century dress reforms which were motivated by health and political concerns. 

Kerry Linden is the Curator of Interpretation and Collections at the Oneida Community Mansion House.

Joshua Lockyer
“Intentional Community as Cultural Critique?  The Cases of BCI (USA) and Mitraniketan (India)” (Session VI.A) 

Susan Love Brown’s recent conceptualization of intentional communities as the embodiment of cultural critique offers a unique way for anthropologists to present critical perspectives on modern epistemologies and political economies while maintaining a more objective stance as social scientists engaged in empirical research.  This paper will review the controversy surrounding cultural critique in anthropology before discussing application of Brown’s ideas regarding intentional communities as cultural critique to the subjects of Lockyer’s dissertation research.  This research, currently in progress, will examine and compare the content and distribution of cultural critique among members of two long-lived and historically connected intentional communities: Celo Community in North Carolina (founded 1936) and Mitraniketan community in Kerala, South India (founded 1956). 

Joshua Lockyer is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Georgia.

Richard Lynch
“Teaching The Dispossessed: Science Fiction, Historical Imagination, and Critical Evaluation” (Session V.C)

This presentation will explore the ways in which we can use literature to help us teach about historical utopian communities.  Leguin’s novel The Dispossessed can give us a powerful literary window into both the utopian imagination and life in historical communal societies.  It is the story of Shevek, who was raised as a member of a utopia founded on a harsh but survivable moon of Anarres, a world marked by capitalism and Cold War politics.  The conditions and practices of the utopian colonists in the novel parallel many of those from nineteenth-century communities.  It is thus able to bring certain aspects of historical communal life into vivid and crisp focus, making them more accessible for contemporary reader’s understanding.  The novel also serves to create a space for critical evaluation of the utopian practices and values as readers reflect upon and respond to the opposed ways of life the novel portrays. It thus provides a context within which we can evaluate and assess a number of different social theories and practices, including those of historical communitarians.  Finally, by bringing these practices and values into sharp relief, the novel creates opportunities for readers and students to articulate and critically evaluate their own values.  At the end of the day, fostering this kind of self-discovery and self-evaluation on the part of our students may be some of the most important work we can do in teaching about utopian and communal visions. 

Richard A. Lynch first became interested in communal societies when he lived and worked in student housing cooperatives in Austin, TX.  He has taught philosophy at Boston College (MA) and Wabash College (IN), and is completing a Ph.D. on the ethics of Michel Foucault.

Enid Mastrianni
“Prestonia Mann Martin and the ‘Summer Brook Farm’” (Session II.A)

Prestonia Mann Martin, now forgotten, was well known during her life which spanned 1861-1945.  Her parents, Dr. John Preston Mann and Ann Rebecca Furman Mann were important abolitionists in New York State.  They were also free-thinking Unitarians who raised her, an only child, to be very well educated and idealistic.  There is some evidence that her parents were in a minor way, affiliated with the Brook Farm experiment in Massachusetts in the 1840s. 

Around 1895, after her parents died, she established an utopian community, based on the ideas of Brook Farm, which she called Summer Brook Farm on the side of Hurricane Mountain in the Adirondack Mountains of NY.  Until about 1936, she invited numbers of people to spend the summer there, living in "fraternal cooperation."  Many literary and political luminaries left accounts of their summers there including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair and Henry Demerest Lloyd.

Prestonia Mann Martin was interested in communal living arrangements for most of her long life.  She knew at least one Shaker eldress well, (and purchased a lot of their furniture and a cloak) she cites an early devotion to Looking Backward, by Bellamy, she was a Fabian Socialist and she left clippings about the Mormons in her scrapbooks.  Her influential piece of utopian theory was her 1932 book, Prohibiting Poverty, whereby she lays out a scheme where all of 18-26 year old Americans would produce and deliver all of the goods and services needed by all of the rest of the Americans.  This book was very popular and was taken up by Eleanor Roosevelt who gave copies of it away and frequently spoke publicly and privately about it.  There is some evidence that this book was a basis for the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Enid Mastrianni has been researching Martin for years. She published an article about her in the July/August 2000 issue of Adirondack Life magazine.

Daniel McKanan
 “Journeys along the Communal Network” (Session III.C)

Drawing primarily on interviews with community members, this presentation will offer a typology of journeys within the Catholic Worker and Camphill networks of intentional communities.  Individuals move from community to community within each network for a variety of reasons.  Movement founders travel both to inspire fledgling communities and to allow new leadership to emerge at the “mother house.”  Community seekers sometimes travel to the other side of the world to encounter a model of community that they then bring back to their native society.  Children raised in community often discover that spending time at other communities in the same network allows them to differentiate from their parents without losing their parents’ communal values.  The communal network even provides a cheap vacation opportunity, allowing individuals to experience new cultures and new climates within a familiar communal framework.  All of these journeys create bonds of friendship not only among individuals, but between the communities themselves.  Such friendships are essential to the vitality and sustainable of any communal movement.  

Dan McKanan is associate professor of theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in central Minnesota.  He is the author of Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (Oxford, 2002), and is currently working on a book on Camphill, Catholic Worker, and Associationist communities.

M. Stephen Miller
"The Uses of Shaker Ephemera in the Study of Shaker Economic Life" (Session III.A)

There are two basic approaches to studying the various Shaker community industries which formed the economic foundation for their communal experiment.  There is the manuscript record and there are the products themselves, along with
the material needed to bring them to the marketplace and sell them.  This latter category is collectively known as ephemera:  printed matter intended for one-time or short-term use.

Timothy Miller
“Notes and Speculations on the Origins of Mormon Communitarianism” (Session VII.B)

Many scholars have noted that Mormonism is a product of the cultural milieu from which it emerged--for example, that Joseph Smith's digging up of the Nephite records, written on golden plates, came at a time and place in which there was much fascination with buried treasure and with finding gold magically.  As it happens, a similar cultural milieu may help to explain the origins of Mormon communitarianism.  Shakers and the devotees of Jemima Wilkinson, the Public Universal Friend, were active near Smith's home during the time at which his ideas were taking shape.  Less familiar but equally active were communal groups led by Jacob Cochran, Isaac Bullard, and a man remembered only as "Dorril," among others.  This paper examines several communal groups that may have contributed to Joseph Smith's formulation of the concept of the United Order, or Mormon communalism.

Timothy Miller is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of three books on the history of American intentional communities.  

Stephen Butler Murray
"With and Against the Church of Scotland:  The Counter-Cultural Spirituality of the Iona Community" (Session VI.A)

The Iona Community in Scotland is something that has evolved considerably over the last sixty-six years.  Iona is one of the oldest religious communities in Scotland, a small island off the western coast, supposedly the site from which St. Columba and his disciples from Ireland launched their evangelization of Scotland, “winning” Scotland to Christianity.  It is the burial ground of many of Scotland’s kings, including MacBeth, as well as varied Viking lords and jarls whose ships landed again and again on Iona, also understanding it as a holy place.  Over the centuries, due to raids, the elements, and disuse the ancient abbey at Iona fell into disrepair.  The island and its cherished, ruined abbey, continued to be a place for pilgrimage. 

In 1938, one of the Church of Scotland’s most celebrated young ministers, George MacLeod, gave up his pulpit at Govan, “the People’s Cathedral” in Glasgow, and embarked on a radical experiment to rebuild the Iona Abbey.  Bringing together unemployed craftsmen and ministers-in-training as laborers together, MacLeod and his “Iona Community” rebuilt the Iona Abbey with a vision to answering the needs of the times.  MacLeod and the Iona Community came to be both controversial and celebrated, and their stands both with and against the Church of Scotland are remarkable.  In this paper, Murray seeks to discuss this uneasy relationship between the Iona Community and the Church of Scotland, especially in how the Iona Community has served as a vital source for the training of clergy for work in economically deprived areas, in the development of innovative liturgical forms which wed old Celtic worship formats with traditional Presbyterian services, and in its strong social witness, particularly with regard to disarmament, world hunger, and its plea for purposeful ecumenical action on social and political issues. 

The Reverend Dr. Stephen Butler Murray is College Chaplain, Director of the Intercultural Center, and Lecturer in Religion and Environmental Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

David Ostrom
“Who Be You?” (Session II.B)

This presentation will consider how organizational demand for total suppression of the individual affected the family.  Ostrom compares the Bruderhof to other non-religious organizations such as the U.S. military. 

Dave Ostrom is 62 years old, married and has three children.  He is a retired Biomedical Engineer. He went to the Bruderhof (Woodcrest) with his parents in 1955 and was ejected April 1960. He earned a B.Sc. from the University of San Francisco.

Lyn Rainard
"The Journey to Destiny:  Cyrus Teed and the Search for Home" (Session VI.C)

Identifying Cyrus Teed and the Koreshan journey is nothing short of problematic.  Which of the many journeys ought be the object of our attention?  The search for adherents, the journey in search for a world cosmogony and spiritual relevance were codified only after the passing of the Master in 1908.  For the purpose of this presentation several of the Koreshan journeys will be referenced while the focal point will be the search for the New Jerusalem--a search that may never have reached a conclusion.

Lyn Rainard is a member of the Board of Directors of the Communal Studies Association and teaches history at Tidewater Community College, Virginia.

Christopher Raschka
“Simple Gifts: A Children’s Book” (Session VIII.C) 

Raschka will describe with slides the editorial and design process in creating his picture book, Simple Gifts, which is based upon the Shaker Hymn.  He will try to elucidate how, in this case, 19th century Shaker ideas have been packaged in a late 20th century children's picture book, to be sold at Borders and Barnes and Nobles. 

Chris Raschka has written and illustrated more than 30 books for children, including Yo! Yes?, a Caldecott Honor Book, and Mysterious Thelonious, a NYTimes Best Illustrated Book.  He lives in New York City with his wife and son, and travels to Pennsylvania to visit his father, Don Durnbaugh.

Rebeca Rivera
“Sustainable Consumption in the U. S.: the Practice of Conscious Consumption within Urban Environmentally Oriented Intentional Communities” (Session VI.A)

Consumption practices in the United States in particular and Northern countries in general contribute in large part to global environmental degradation and social inequality. Campaigns to change consumption levels have aimed at making small changes in individual behavior on the fringes of the problem and have been met with limited success.  Instead, researchers on sustainable consumption, drawing from the work in
anthropology, posit that solutions to overconsumption must occur at the social not at the individual level.  Previous research in anthropology concludes that consumption is a social process whereby individuals consume to meet social goals and expectations. Environmentally oriented intentional communities (EOICs) are a growing phenomenon and serve as valuable locations in which to study sustainable consumption as a social practice.  The city of Seattle has 37 such communities. This paper is an analysis of 3 case studies of EOICs in Seattle, Washington that have been able to minimize their levels of consumption by creating social practices, infrastructure, and institutional structures that facilitate sustainable consumption.  This paper suggests that the process of sustainable consumption within EOICs is facilitated by environmentally and socially oriented values and worldview that inform social norms, cultural capital, and systems of provision. 

Rebeca Rivera is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology and Urban Ecology at the University of Washington.

Nancy L. Roberts
“Oneida Community Journalism, 1848-1881” (Session V.A)

This paper will focus on a single, extremely turbulent period in the Community’s founding years (1848 to about 1855).  Utilizing Community periodicals, Roberts will document in depth and analyze the Community’s journalistic portrayal of their early, tumultuous beginning period in New York State.  This was a time when, driven from their original site in Putney, Vermont (owing to neighbors’ discomfort with their marriage and sexual practices), they sought to re-group in western New York State.  They faced once again the delicate process of gaining local toleration and also of helping to make new members comfortable with the Community’s radical social lifestyle.  Contrary to some older, voyeuristic accounts, contemporary scholars have established that the “free love” practiced at Oneida did not in truth attract numerous converts, but rather repelled many who had practiced traditional monogamy most of their adult lives.  How the Community represented itself in its public journalism during this first great period of tensions and uncertainty promises to shed light on the historic uses of journalism to change public opinion.  Roberts will focus especially on the Oneidans’ overall communication strategies and on their use of language to publicly characterize their unorthodox practices.  

Nancy Roberts is a Professor of Communications at the State University of New York, Albany.  She is the author of several books and essays on the press in America, American Catholicism, American Peace writers and Dorothy Day.  

Lyman Tower Sargent and Lucy Sargisson
“Riverside Community (New Zealand):  Sixty Years Old and Still Going Strong” (Session IV.C)

This presentation will describe the New Zealand Riverside Community, which is 65 years old and survived the move from religious to secular thirty years ago. The presentation will discuss how they managed this transition, losing only one member in the process.  This presentation is drawn from a new book on New Zealand communities by Sargent and Sargisson. 

Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the Editor of Utopian Studies.  In addition to presenting the above paper, Lyman Tower Sargent will also participate in the roundtable discussion “The Meaning of Community.” 

Lucy Sargisson, School of Politics, Nottingham University, is unable to attend the conference.

Lawrence and Rose Schein
“Interpersonal Issues and Conflict Resolution in a Secular Commune” (Session IV.B)

This paper probes the sometimes unglamorous nuts and bolts problems of communal living that pit the group against the individual and individuals against each other. Successful resolution requires considerable discipline and patience to deal with emotionally exhausting interactions.  The presentation is divided into five sections: communal context—the 26 year experiment at Grasmere, New York; the content of problems and frustrations; management of tensions; successes and failures in resolution; and lessons learned in the art of living together.  The conflict solving process that was the commune’s greatest achievement was not ultimately sufficient for survival.  And here lies a cautionary tale for comparable ventures. 

Lawrence Schein received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He retired several years ago as a senior research fellow at The Conference Board, an international business and economics research organization.  He was a participant in the Grasmere commune for 26 years. 

Rose Schein, MSW, ACSW, received her graduate degree from Temple University.  She is a retired special education social worker with prior professional experience in immigrant resettlement, juvenile probation, family counseling and services for the aging. She is also a veteran of the Grasmere commune.

Denise Seachrist
“A Printer, a Recluse, a Scholar:  Three Individual Journeys to Community” (Session VIII.C)

Seachrist’s introduction to religious communal societies occurred when, at the age of six, she accompanied her maternal grandfather, Lester Rapp, to the restored village of George Rapp's third and final settlement of Old Economy located in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.  Twenty-five years later while pursuing her doctorate in Musicology-Ethnomusicology at Kent State University, Seachrist enrolled in a course which focused on American religious groups.  Her advisor introduced her to a microfilm copy of a music manuscript from the communal society of Snow Hill in Franklin County, Pennsylvania.  Transcribing the manuscript into modern notation and analyzing the music of this offshoot of the more well-known Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, transformed her life. 

Before Seachrist could conduct the fieldwork to research Snow Hill, she first was required to travel to meet two men who had preserved the spiritual and physical aspects of Snow Hill for years.  Eventually, her research led to a dissertation; however, her personal journey to becoming the researcher she is today would not have been possible had the printer, Crist King, and the recluse, George Wingert, not been willing to travel along the path with her.  This paper chronicles how three individual journeys led to one common place and one common goal of ensuring Snow Hill would have a past, a present, and a future. 

Denise Seachrist is the Interim Assistant Dean at Kent State University, Trumball Campus.  She is the author of The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh (Kent State University Press, 2003) as well as several articles and essays on Halim El-Dabh, Conrad Beisel, and Snow Hill.

Michael Taylor
“Changing Pilots in Mid-Journey:  Economy, Zoar, and Amana” (Session IV.B)

By the late 19^th century the communitarian ventures at Economy, Zoar and Amana were radically reexamining their organizational structures.  All were American transplants of German pietist groups in the early to mid-19^th century.  All had “charismatic” leaders when they arrived in the United States who successfully instituted communal structures. This paper will look at how each community dealt with the passing of that leader in light of past experience with that leader, leadership candidates and its understanding of the group’s special place in history. 

Dr. Michael Taylor, McCoy Professor of Management and Leadership at Marietta College, did his early work on Shaker ethical thought and is now looking at leadership changes among historic communitarian societies.

Kathryn Tomasek
“Travels, Journeys and the Press: Women and Fourierism in the Antebellum United States” (Session III.B)

This paper focuses on the conceptual journeys made by Fourierist women after the movement reached a turning point in 1845 and began to call on women for support.  The Harbinger, the organ of the movement, published several calls to women in 1845 and 1846, and in 1847, women began to speak for themselves within the pages of the journal.  Fourierist women also developed several networks of correspondence outside the movement's press.  Through these networks, they expressed their exasperation with Fourierist men and their determination that they must act on their own to achieve their goals.  

Kathryn Tomasek teaches in History and Women's Studies at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.  She is currently working on a manuscript about women and Fourierism, as well as an article on class in Louisa May Alcott's novel Work.

Harold L. Twiss
“The Friendly Association for Mutual Interests” (Session V.A)

This paper discusses the brief life in 1826 of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.  It argues the Association was founded in response to visits of two travelers to the Philadelphia area in 1825--the Marquis de'Lafayette, carrying the mantle of Enlightenment optimism, and Robert Owen, bringing a vision of a more humane industrialism.  Their visits inspired a group of men in Philadelphia to seek to put into practice their ideals in the mill village of Valley Forge.  The paper attempts to show how these men attempted to implement their vision and why they failed.  One particularly valuable source was the ledger used by the cotton factory that was the focal point of the community.  Other sources include correspondence, newspaper accounts and pamphlets, property deeds, tax records, and census lists along with related secondary works.

Harold L. Twiss has recently published (Spring 2003) "The Rise and Decline of a Mill Village, Valley Forge, 1820-1880" in The Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.  He has served as Managing Editor of Judson Press and done editorial work for Westminster/John Knox Press and other denominational publishers.

Heather Van Wormer
“Journeys Through Space and Time: Community at the City of David” (Session IV.C) 

The investigation of journeys in this paper is twofold.  First, at the height of membership at the City of David and the House of David, the colonies sent out numerous preachers to spread the word, bands to spread the music and baseball teams to spread the fame. During their travels, theses members kept in close touch with home through letters and other correspondence.  These interactions give us an important glimpse of not only the travelers’ experiences, but also of the definitions of home for colony members. Second, to the present day, the origins and travels of individual members are marked and remembered in various ways.  Many different flowers, shrubs, and trees were brought with members when they were “called home”—many with signs naming the species of plant, the geographic origin, and the associated colony member clearly marked.  Others are not visibly marked, but are commonly known and remembered by colony members.

This paper explores these journeys and markings of travels, both in the past and present colony. It suggests that they are not merely markers of historical and geographical origins, but also promote and reinforce community among colony members. 

Heather Van Wormer recently finished her Ph.D. in anthropology at Michigan State University.  In the fall of 2004 she will join the Department of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University as a visiting assistant professor.  Her research interests focus on the ways that material culture both reflects and reinforces ideology in intentional communities.

Michael Volmar
“Apostasy in Harvard and Shirley Shaker Communities” (Session VI.B) 

Apostate literature provides an important window into the formation and history of one of the largest and most successful communal movements of the nineteenth century.  In this presentation Volmar will review the major published accounts that attack Shakers and their faith.  He puts forward the notion that apostasy in Harvard from 1781 to `9`8 can be divided into several periods, during which the motivations and types of people leaving the community differed.  Just as time period matters, the demographic research has revealed patterns for people leaving the Shakers.  Lastly, based on documentary research he will discuss some specific people who left the villages. 

Michael Volmar, Ph.D., is the Curator of Fruitlands Museums.

Glendyne Wergland
“Traveling Out of the Flesh:  Inward and Outward Means of Controlling Lust” (Session VII.A)

In this talk, Wegland will examine Shakers’ means of regulating sexual behavior in their ongoing effort to conquer lust.  These celibates’ quest for spiritual perfection required them to travel out of the flesh.  Their methods, illustrated by selections from Isaac Newton Youngs’ journal, may be categorized as two types:  inward means and outward means.  Mother Ann used psychosocial methods that combined both means to create peer pressure, guilt and shame to enforce celibacy.  The Elders promoted other inward means, including prayer (which will keep thee from sinning), strict self-discipline and control of wayward thoughts. 

Outward means included a full schedule of work, strenuous worship, and recreation, all under peer surveillance.  Those were the most obvious outward means, noticed even by the world’s people.  Dietary reform may also have served to subdue animal spirits.

None of those means worked for Isaac Newton Youngs when he was a young man considering outward means in his struggle to subdue his wayward flesh.  But popular nineteenth-century prescriptive works in the Mount Lebanon Shakers’ library mentioned, in addition to the inward and outward means already described, several physical deterrents to prevent men’s “seminal losses,” some of which could have been used by Shaker brethren.  And last but not least, the world’s people suspected that the Shakers used castration to reduce sexual activity.  Isaac Newton Youngs’ journal includes an enciphered account of an operation to remove Jonathan Wood’s testicles.  Such evidence raises questions that deserve close examination. 

Glendyne Wergland earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  She has published several articles on Shaker history, milliners, and women’s history.

Joseph White
“Rebecca Harding Davis and ‘The Harmonists’” (Session V.B) 

In a prefatory note, Aaron Williams D.D. informs the reader that the Introduction to his book, The Harmony Society, (Pittsburgh, l866) was written in reply to a "slanderous article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'The Harmonists.'"  He did not provide any further corroborating details.  Nor has anyone else who has written about the Harmonists had anything to say about it.  Rebecca Harding Davis was the author of the article, which appeared in April, l966.  Whether the article was indeed slanderous is open to question. That it was highly critical of the Harmonists is not.  Exactly what she found not to like about the Harmonists is one dimension of the paper.  

Who was Rebecca Harding Davis and why should posterity pay any attention to her views?  Davis was the author of Life in the Iron-Mills (l86l), a grimly realistic and sympathetic novelistic account of life and working conditions in the iron mills of Wheeling in the l850s.  The book is said to have created a literary sensation when it first appeared and, having been rediscovered in the l970s, has found a place in the established canon of American literature.  It is because Davis was unquestionably an accomplished writer, intellectual and social critic that her harsh views of the Harmonists call for further exploration.  Why, in light of her trenchant criticism of l9th century industrialization, was she so critical of the Harmony Society, representing as it did, a palpable alternative to "business as usual?"  This is a second--and most important--dimension that the paper examines. 

Joseph White teaches modern British history and comparative labor and social history at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is currently working on a history of Harmony.

Communal Studies Association Board of Directors 

Charles LeWarne, CSA President, is the author of Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915, and additional articles on communal groups, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.  He is also the author of two books, including a textbook in its third edition, and articles on Washington State.

Deborah Altus, CSA Vice-President, lives, loves and plays in Lawrence, Kansas, where her experiences in cooperative living led her to the CSA.  Deborah is particularly interested in contemporary intentional communities, with a focus on Walden Two communities and aging in community.  She is an Associate Professor at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.

Gina Walker, CSA Treasurer and Web Editor, is the Archivist at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana.  Living near New Harmony, Indiana and visiting grandparents and family who live in the same Hoosier County as Padanaram Settlement, peaked her interests in intentional communities at an early age.  These two communities remain favorites as she maintains the Communal Studies Collection at USI.    

Kathleen M. Fernandez, CSA Interim Executive Secretary and Newsletter Editor, is a  native of Dayton, Ohio.  She was Site Manager of Zoar Village State Memorial and Fort Laurens State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society from 1988-2004 when she retired.  She was Curator of Interpretation of the two sites (and at Schoenbrunn Village at various times) since 1975, and has worked for the Ohio Historical Society since before graduating from Otterbein College in 1971.  She is active with the Ohio & Erie Canal Corridor and the Communal Studies Association and edits the newsletters for both organizations.  She is also a surveyor for the Museum Assessment Program.  She has recently published a book, A Singular People:  Images of Zoar (Kent State University Press, 2003).  She is currently a free lance museum consultant, is married and lives in Canton, Ohio.

Rod Janzen, editor of the CSA journal Communal Societies, is Acting Dean of Fresno Pacific Graduate School and Professor of Social Science Education at Fresno Pacific University in California. 

Susan Love Brown is associate professor in the department of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University. She is a political and psychological anthropologist with an interest in the origin of ideology and intentional communities, especially Ananda Village and anarchist communities. She is the editor of Intentional Community: An Anthropological Perspective (SUNY Press, 2002).

Wendy E. Chmielewski is the George Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.  She has written and published on the history of women in intentional communities and in the U.S. peace movement.  She is currently researching gender and food at the Oneida Community.

Elizabeth DeWolfe, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine). She is the author of Shaking the Faith: Women, Family and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867 (Palgrave, 2002), which received the Communal Studies Association’s Outstanding Publication Award in 2003.  Her research interests include anti-Shakerism, print culture and nineteenth-century women’s history.  She lives in Maine with her husband, Scott DeWolfe, an antiquarian bookseller.  Dr. De Wolfe is the Book Review Editor for H-Communal-Societies.

Timothy Hodgdon received a Ph.D. in United States history from Arizona State University in 2002.  His research centers on the influence of gender on movements for social change in the post-World War II era.  In 2003, he received the Gutenberg Prize from the American Historical Association for his dissertation, “Manhood and the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-83,” which explores the contrasting forms of masculinity developed by anarchist and mystically inclined hippies, and their divergent responses to the emergence of radical feminism.  Hodgdon is moderator of the H-Net discussion list, H-Communal-Societies. Before joining the Duke University First-Year Writing Program, he was a visiting assistant professor of U.S. history at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Jayne Kamau is the Past President of the CSA Board.  An anthropologist, Dr. Kamau has written on New Harmony, among other topics.

Marlyn Klee is Professor Emerita in Political Science, Adelphi University.  Her interests include women and family in communal societies, with emphasis on the Oneida Community.  She has co-edited a collection (Syracuse University Press, 1993) with Wendy Chmielewski and Louis Kern on this subject.

Ruth Baer Lambach is an experienced communitarian who has written about her experiences growing up Mennonite/Hutterite/Bruderhof.  Her story, "Colony Girl" appears in Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States, Syracuse University Press, 1993. She has been a member of the CSA since 1989 when she attended her first conference and for the past several years has been the book review editor for the Communal Studies Journal. Ruth has worked with refugees and immigrants at Truman College, aka the Ellis Island of Chicago, since 1981. She has taught English as a Second Language and most recently has been the manager of 240 teachers in the Adult Education Program there.  She has a masters degree in Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago and in this capacity has given many presentations and written articles such as "Creating Community in the Classroom".  While Ruth does not live in any community nor belong to any church, she creates community wherever she works.

Michael Elph Morgan joined the Board in 2004.  He became acquainted with cooperative living in 1987 while at college and has been involved with the FIC and CSA since 1991. He worked as managing editor of the 2000 edition of Communities Directory.   Current projects involve living at Sunward Cohousing and helping build Great Oak Cohousing. 

Lyn Rainard is Professor of History at Tidewater Community College Chesapeake, Virginia.  His research interests include the Koreshan Unity and apostasy.