When experts in communal studies gather later this week to share their academic research, they likely won’t be using the word “commune” to describe their subject matter. It’s a word that conjures up too many false images, they say, from religious cults contemplating suicide to barefoot hippies engaging in free love.
Instead, expect to find the experts talking about “intentional communities.”
“The word ‘commune’ has taken on a negative meaning,” said retired anthropologist Donald Janzen. “I’m afraid after the 1960s, it began to have a rather negative connotation.”
It’s one of the reasons why a diverse group of scholars — from historians to musicologists — created the Communal Studies Association 28 years ago.
They were concerned that the tainted concept of commune would overshadow the rich history of communal living and the lessons that could be learned from it. Among its founders is Donald Pitzer, director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana.
Janzen is executive secretary of the organization and one of the organizers of its annual conference, held in New Harmony, Ind., this week.
Among the speakers will be two members of the Kashi Ashram, an interfaith communal society based in Sebastian,
Fla. The members, Krishnapriya and Radhe Chan, also will speak at a public forum today at 7 p.m. at the USI.
The ashram was created 25 years ago by a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, who told followers that her vision of an idyllic communal society was formed by her conversations with Jesus, and influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism. The ashram offers a ministry to people with terminal illnesses, including AIDS.
It’s one of the estimated 2,000 communal societies, both historic and contemporary, that Janzen has been documenting for the last 10 years.
They include the 200-year-old Shaker communities, one of which still exists, to the Atlanta-based Open Door Community, created 20 years ago as a Christian ministry to serve the homeless.
Their origins differ and their reasons for existence range from religious fervor to environmental stewardship, but Janzen said they share a common goal. That is, to create a community, outside society’s norm, based on common beliefs and cooperative living.
Janzen’s interest in communal living was fed by his own academic research of Pleasant Hill, a Shaker village established in the early 1800s in central Kentucky.
The Shakers were a religious community in New England, formed during the “Great Awakening,” a period of religious revival at the turn of the century. Men and women lived in the community, but remained celibate, and believed the biblical Judgment Day would come in their lifetime. To build the community, they took in converts and orphans.
The Shakers founded 20 different communities, including some in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Several lasted until the early 1900s, and the last to survive is in Sabbathlake, Maine.
Many did well for awhile, Janzen believes, because they weren’t dependent on a single leader, and learned how to create successful farming communities and stay committed to their core religious beliefs.
But the Civil War and later the industrialization of the late 18th century took their toll on the Shaker communities, Janzen said.
While many communal societies were built upon religious themes, others envisioned a more secular utopian society.
Both are part of the history of New Harmony, the setting for the conference. In 1814, 800 people who belonged to George Rapp’s Harmonie Society moved from Harmonie, Pa., to land along the Wabash River, which they dubbed New Harmony. They moved there to await what they believed would be the kingdom of God on Earth. By 1824, they erected 180 buildings, cultivated 2,000 of their 30,000 acres and sold their products in 22 states and 10 foreign countries.
Ten years after first arriving, they decided to depart, and moved back to Pennsylvania. The Harmonists sold their land to Robert Owen, a social reformer from Scotland. Owen set about to create a “New Moral World” in which humans could find perfection through education and social science. Owen’s community lasted only two years.
New Harmony is now a historical site, parts of its communal past preserved for both academic study and simple enjoyment by tourists