Departments

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communes

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    4/18/2022

    The Lost Utopian Communes of the Midwest

    by Evan Malmgren

    "Inland America is pocked with the unmarked graves of communitarian utopias—primitive socialist and communist experiments—that tried to rebuild the world on what was assumed to be virgin soil."

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    11/28/2021

    Utopia’s Settler Colonialism Problem

    by Jessica Namakkal

    The commune movements of the 1960s counterculture were organized around a number of pernicious assumptions about indigenous people and the prerogatives of whites to settle and reorganize land. 

  • SOURCE: The Tennessean
    7-21-13

    The Farm, home to free spirits for 42 years, is at a crossroads

    Aged with years of cannabis and communal living, Stephen Gaskin’s body is worn and his words unhurried. At 78, he walks with slow intention. But the spirit of this tie-dye-clad hippie philosopher — iconic founder of The Farm — remains vibrant.Ask him about the beginning, and his blue eyes come ablaze.More than four decades ago, Gaskin led a caravan of nonconformists across the country, taking his band of beatnik brethren deep into the Tennessee woods. They traveled from San Francisco and settled on a 1,750-acre spread of land in Summertown in 1971 to form their own society — a spiritual commune called The Farm....