Anthropology Of Communes Research Paper

1. ‘Alternative’ Communities

The great bulk of research on communes may be found in the disciplines of history, sociology, and psychology. Anthropological studies are relatively few in number, and only one, small book treats communes as a general topic (Hostetler 1974b). Considering that communes have much in common with the sort of small-scale community that anthropologists have preferred to investigate, it is curious that these scholars have not shown more interest in them. Like village communities, communes lend themselves to the kind of intensive fieldwork diagnostic of ethnography, and are especially accessible to the anthropological aspiration to research communities in the whole.

Perhaps one reason for the relative lack of anthropological attention is the consideration that in the social science literature, communalism has been largely associated with Western social settings. Where-as anthropology has focused on ‘other cultures,’ most (but not all) communes are not other in the relevant sense. They characteristically present themselves as essentially alternative to the societal orders in which they arise. However, in the present connection, significantly, the otherness entailed by such alterity can be misleading. For, as inverse and, in part or whole, utopian reactions to the dominant social order, such communities share with the latter rootedness in the same body of social thought. In the West this body of thought revolves around the question of the relation-ship between society and the individual, especially when that relationship is apprehended as a dualism. Seeing the dominant social order as primarily individualistic, communal societies propose to resolve the dualism to the contrary, by creating social and cultural conditions that ensure the valuational primacy of the collective over the individual. Typically, the realization of the primacy is keyed to institutional mechanisms that move the individual to grasp his or her self-identity primarily in terms of the collective.

2. Anthropological And Ethnographic Studies

The most substantial ethnographic studies of communes pertain to four different communal social settings: North American Anabaptist settlements, the Israeli kibbutz, Japanese communes, and the Soviet kolkhoz. Typically these studies take their cue from the presumptively alternative social nature of their subject, and accordingly tend to feature the way in which collectivism affects ‘normal’ institutions and practices, and the capacity of the community to withstand the opposing pressures of the surrounding social order.

2.1 The Hutterian Brethren

Hostetler’s work on the Hutterites is exemplarily anthropological, in its ethnographic comprehensive-ness and depth of cultural knowledge. He studied this people over a period of several years, and his publi-cations (see especially Hostetler (1974a) and Hostetler and Huntington (1996)) provide rich descriptions of the 500-year history of the Hutterites, their worldview and critical system of Christian belief and practice, the colonies’ economic, political, and domestic organization, and the difficulties experienced ‘today’ by this people in sustaining their unique communal way of life. But the principal focus of his research is socialization. Given the long-term survival of this social order under presumptively adverse external societal and cultural conditions, Hostetler supposed as the key to this evident success the inculcation of cultural values. Accordingly, he set out to examine the Hutterite child-rearing system. He finds that the system of socialization is remarkably effective for reasons of its ideological certitude, utter consistency, and under-standing attitude toward modest forms of individual deviancy.

The system is predicated on the Christian belief in the absolute authority of God and the presumption of the primacy of communal order as the key to ensure the submission of the will of the individual self to the will of God. Human nature is seen as dualistically divided between carnality and spirituality. The former quality is understood as in need of firm submission to the latter, a condition meant to be realized by means of communal existence. All the institutional practices of the Hutterites, including of course the education and training of children, are designed to function strictly on behalf of this spiritual principle of hierarchical authority. In result, Hostetler concludes, the Hutterite’s sense of individual self is only weakly distinguished from his social identity and is predisposed to self-denial and obedience to authority. In view of this analysis, Hostetler (in line with Hutterite opinion, and perhaps tautologically) is inclined to explain defection as a product of aberrant circumstances in which individuality emerges as an unruly force. These circumstances are, he suggests, associated with undesirable competition among family lines and the failure of these families truly to subject their autonomy to the social whole.

In his substantial monograph on the Hutterites, John Bennett (1967), like Hostetler, is interested in how this order of communal life perdures and maintains its traditional integrity, given the contrary nature of the surrounding social environment. But instead of socialization, Bennett focuses on the agricultural economy of the colonies and the impact of technological development. In line with the general tenor of Hostetler’s account, he argues that for reasons of their sure sense of identity, extremely efficient management, well-formed social order, and rational approach to economic matters, these communities are exceptionally adaptable. More particularly, because they are very open to technological change but not to consumeristic influence, they are enabled to thrive without corrupting their traditional way of life.

Zablocki’s philosophically rich study of the Bruderhof (Zablocki 1971), another deeply religious Anabaptist community, less traditionalist than the Hutterites, also constitutes an important contribution to the anthropology of communes. Zablocki is a sociologist, but by virtue of his intensive fieldwork in a single settlement, and his attention to the quotidian course of social events, his study is patently ethno-graphical. He, too, was interested in the relative success of the Bruderhof. He addresses this issue in terms of ‘commitment,’ a notion pertaining to the fusion of self-interest with the needs of the community and given currency in Kanter’s Commitment and Community, a sociological study (contemporary with Zablocki’s) of communes in general (Kanter 1972).

In addressing the question of the manner in which the Bruderhof creates and sustains the commitment of its members, Zablocki takes, in addition to the standard functionalism of Hostetler’s and Bennett’s work, a strong psychodynamic turn. Unlike Hostetler, whose approach to the question of commitment typifies the ‘culture and personality’ school of interpretation, Zablocki draws on psychoanalysis in a way that bears directly on sociological dynamics, not personality. His main finding is that the Bruderhof is characterized by an institutional structure the critical function of which is to call on and employ the ordinarily repressed psychodynamic energy of collective behavior in order to sustain commitment. Hence, when the community suffers a social crisis that threatens commitment on the part of members (such crises are, he finds, inevitable), this structure of resolution—a joyful prayer meeting of the whole—is brought into play, revitalizing commitment. In effect, he depicts a community keyed to something like Rousseau’s ‘general will’ (a concept of ‘commitment’ if ever there was one), the difference being that in the Bruderhof this will is regarded as accessible (it is thought to pre-exist its concrete determination) only by means of the realization of a spiritual rather than rational or political unity. By arguing that this unity is brought about through collective behavior and affective effervescence, Zablocki charges Durkheim’s famous but vague sociological thesis about the tran-scendent force of society, with a determinate psycho-analytical dynamic.

Underlying Zablocki’s concern for commitment is a general concern about the relation between com-munity and freedom. This concern is of interest to him for reasons beyond the question of the Bruderhof, as he finds that American society in general suffers from a need for community. Hence, for him the examination of the Bruderhof carries lessons for the society at large, the most prominent of which is the importance of distinguishing a kind of freedom that is nonindividualistic.

2.2 The Israeli Kibbutz

Melford Spiro’s (1970) first book on the kibbutz continues to serve as an anthropological introduction to this secular communal society. It presents the community’s historical beginnings, ideological principles, and institutional practices. It was originally intended to serve as a preliminary chapter to the earlier book resulting from Spiro’s basic research project on the kibbutz, namely a study of socialization and personality development (Spiro 1965). Like Hostetler on the Hutterites, Spiro was intrigued by this communal enterprise’s goal of recreating man in society’s image, making him fit to live in social harmony (the kibbutz ideology’s hoped-for ‘New Man’). And like Hostetler, Spiro approached this problem as a question of the causal relationship between culture and personality, presuming that the personality of the founders’ children must take its shape from the social arrangements fashioned by the parents. In particular, seeing the goal of communalism as essentially incompatible with conflict and hostility, Spiro sought to determine the degree to which kibbutz socialization and its system of ‘collective education’ were successful in eliminating the ‘aggression drive’ in the children reared in this way. This is the research theme around which centers his psychologically expert study Children of the Kibbutz (the title is an expression of a kibbutz ideological shibboleth), the major product of his research on this community (Spiro 1965). As a result of his inquiry he finds what he already anticipated in the epilog of his first book on the kibbutz and is consistent with his penchant for basic psycho-analytical theory: that aggression, being a universal drive, can be curbed but not eliminated.

Spiro’s psychoanalytical naturalism receives even greater emphasis in his later study of women in the kibbutz (Spiro 1979), a topic presenting itself in the light of the ideological aim to establish equality between the sexes. Here he concludes, unequivocally, that gender–role differentiation is due to ‘precultural’ factors and therefore not subject to cultural elimination. In fact, the direction of Spiro’s explanatory exercises was signaled, even before the publication of his first volume on the kibbutz, in a provocative article (Spiro 1954), the thesis of which is that the kibbutz had managed by cultural design to do away with the family in favor of the undiluted integrity of the collective whole. A few years later, however, retracting this thesis and foreshadowing his naturalistic universalism, he concluded that the family does constitute a distinct feature of kibbutz social structure (Spiro 1960). The merits of his psychological orientation aside, Spiro’s work on the kibbutz is astutely and invaluably attentive right from the start to the stream of social problems that bear on the place of the individual and run steadily beneath the ideological and, even, empirically minded self-presentation of this communal society.

In Two Kinds of Rationality, Evens (1995) treats the question of liberalizing change in a kibbutz in relation to democratic procedure and generational conflict. His phenomenological emphasis on practice and tacit knowledge sharply distinguishes his approach in the present connection. It leads him to look beneath the ideology for, rather than biological or psychological causes, contradictory understandings that are so taken for granted they predispose their hosts, whose self-identity cannot be told apart from these understandings, to certain behaviors. He traces the understandings in question to Rousseau’s contractarian theory of the relationship between the individual and society, and then to the sense of man and generation given in the Hebrew myth of Genesis. Like other students of communal societies, Evens is moved to use his research as a basis on which to develop a theory of human conduct; in his case, one keyed to an ontology of ambiguity and a considered notion of ethics. In an earlier essay (Evens 1975), he examines a case of stigmatization in the kibbutz, in order to bring into relief the deepest meanings of the most basic social position in this society, that of ‘member’ or chaser kibbutz. He found that these meanings betray implicit, unreflected ideological expectations of failure in the face of perfectibilism, and foster defensive but disturbing social acts.

Allison Bowes’s (1989) Kibbutz Goshen not only serves as a sound ethnographic introduction to the kibbutz but also analyzes prominent social problems characterizing the community in which she did her research. Problems of hired labor, competition over work roles, the re-emergence of familism, the sexual division of labor, and conflict between the generations are all subjected to eclectic but useful and empirically substantive sociological analysis. More broadly, turning a remedial eye on the very idea of ideology, she contends that the definition of these apparently troubled social circumstances as problems indicative of failure derives in large part from a misguided tendency to see kibbutz ideology as a set of fixed and decisive principles rather than a pliable and adaptive system of values.

The problem of work roles is the focus of Israel Shepher’s (1983) ethnography of a kibbutz (see also Shepher 1980). He is concerned with the threat to the practice of equality posed by the development of permanent work roles, given increasing specialization in the kibbutz economy and the concomitant demand for expert workers. He argues that in so far as this trend is comprehensively applicable to every member, the creation of a structure of inequality based on work roles is precluded, since everyone is equally indispensable to his or her place in the labor sphere. In Women in the Kibbutz, Tiger and Joseph Shepher (1975) take up the question of sex–role differentiation. Their aim is to use the example of the kibbutz to arrive at universal truth in respect of the place of women in society. Like Spiro, they propose a naturalism, but their argument is sociobiological rather than psycho-analytical, keyed to the concept of ‘biogrammar’ or the genetic transmission of behavioral characteristics.

2.3 Japanese Communes

David Plath’s work on utopian communities is of special interest because it pertains to a non-Western social setting. In a brief discussion, representative of the usual analytical focus on the struggle of such communities to flourish in the midst of contrary social and cultural conditions, Plath (1966) examines the tactics used by four Japanese communal societies to adapt to the ambient milieu without compromising their reformatory goals. However, in his perceptive epilogue to Sensei and His People (Sugihara and Plath 1969), a first-person narrative of a Japanese commune authored by the wife of the commune’s charismatic founder and leader, Plath identifies suggestive differences between this and Western communal ventures. He observes that, having evolved spontaneously, Shinkyo (the name of the commune) cannot be regarded as an ‘intentional community,’ and he brings into relief the fundamental way in which this com-munity is continuous with, not simply reactionary to, the ambient society. The commune got its beginnings in reaction to the formalism of Tenrikyo, a nineteenth century Japanese religious movement related to Buddhism (Shinkyo’s founder had served at one time as a Tenri priest), as well as to the ‘bossism’ of the local village community. But its defining emphases—moral responsibility, self-sacrifice, mutual reliance, social equality, and spiritual bodily cleanliness—are manifestations of the traditional values of rural Japanese society. In view of the overtly complementary re-lationship between Shinkyo and the surrounding community, Plath’s exercise suggests that this commune, although radical by the actual standards of the state of things against which it reacted, practices a nonabsolutist communalism. As a result, by contrast to Western communitarian ventures, the identification with the social whole is not so much secured institutionally as left—not simply in the end but for all practical purposes—to the individual member’s quotidian discretion.

2.4 The Soviet Kolkhoz

Caroline Humphrey’s (1983) substantial social anthropological study of the Soviet collective farm or kolkhoz may be mentioned here but not really considered. For one thing, as a direct function of the state, the kolkhoz is neither alternative in the relevant sense nor self-generating. For another, although one can learn much about the social and politico-economic life of Soviet collectives from Humphrey’s study, it is more directly concerned with problems of social change deriving from the Soviet Union’s need to integrate into itself ethnic minorities (in this case, the Mongolian Buryat) than with collectivism itself. As a result, it is difficult to place Humphrey’s book directly in the literature on communes, and, apart from her extensive use of materials published by ethnographers and analysts native to the society in which she worked, she herself neither draws on nor mentions that literature.

3. Communes And The Significance Of Anthropological Research

Given the intensive nature of ethnographic fieldwork, it is not surprising that the anthropological study of communes tends to be distinguished by sharp attention to the discrepancies between communal practice and ideological design. In staying acutely mindful of this question, the anthropologist is dwelling on a theme at least implicit in the very operation of such com-munities. The ideological presumption of dualistic opposition between the individual and society defines the communal endeavor as dependent on self-sacrifice for its success, thus projecting the endeavor as a trial of transcendence in the face of material adversity. The adversity is typically apprehended as a matter of the pressures exerted by the external social environment. It is also associated, by communards and researchers alike, with a naturalistic presumption of one kind or another—especially self-interest and individualism. The research interests of socialization, adaptability, internal conflict, women’s and work roles, familism, crisis management, commitment, etc., revolve round the ideological picture of these communities as social experiments under hostile conditions, and amount implicitly to attempts at measuring the success or failure of the communitarian enterprise.

As informative as the anthropological focus on the gap between theory and practice is, though, it falls short of the unique advantage anthropology has to offer, for it tends to confine the anthropologist to the communal endeavor’s ideological social compass. That compass misleads, in part but significantly, by the presentation of itself as alternative or ‘other’: it is after all very much an integral function of the social universe against which its alternance is defined. In principle, however, even if working ‘at home,’ the anthropologist takes his or her direction from a more radical otherness, one that cannot be reduced to what is already known, at least not without disrupting or altering the latter. Thus, Plath’s work in Japan may well disclose a communalism that is not dualist in the received ( Western) sense of the term, and Evens’s on the kibbutz, digging deconstructively beneath the ideology to a nondualist mythic core, begins to rethink the very idea of the difference between theory and practice, away from its implicit perfectibilism and towards a relativism that serves to reform ‘ethics’ as the very name of human existence.

Given the radical way in which they tend to betray a dualism of the individual and society, communal orders constitute exceptionally fertile ground for anthropological study. Because they thus magnify a fact that ordinarily gets taken for granted, their study helps explain, as Durkheim asserted of exceptional (‘pathological’) social phenomena, the norm. By the same token (the conspicuous disclosure of individual– society dualism), since the relation between the individual and society is also a predicative question for social science inquiry, the study of these societies critically orients self-examination into anthropology’s own tacit foundations.

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