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We all know that navigating unfamiliar sites is hard enough, but navigating our own was a really interesting task. Cody and I met up on Sunday night to look over our extremely bare-bones project website and get to work. We pulled from other students’ course websites to get some inspiration for “Pages” we could make to allow site visitors to easily access our project’s conclusions.
Cody and I settled on pages titled “About Us”, “Our Contract,” “Media,” “Differing Perspectives,” and “Our Conclusion,” while agreeing we may add more depending on the sort of data we collect along the way. I think it’s important for site visitors to know a little bit about our personal interests in the course, and it helps build a relationship even if it may be a virtual one. We think of this section as more colloquial and friendly. Our contract still needs editing but we can’t work on that until we’ve talked to the monks one-on-one. “Media” will include photographs and videos obtained from the visits to the abbey, as well as archived photos and videos. “Differing Perspectives” will allow us to further explore our conclusion but in a more personal sense where both Cody and I can write about our experience with the project and our differing interpretations of the collected data. Our conclusion will be a comprehensive collection of both Cody and my work and will be less separated than the aforementioned page.
Today we applied to be exempt from review by the Institutional Review Board and hopefully will hear back soon. I don’t think Cody and I knew what we were getting into; the process is tricky and it seems like they’re looking for very precise responses from us. In general, I hope that we are accepted as exempt because it’s a shorter wait process. As soon as we have the OK, we will begin interviewing the monks.
In this video, published by the Genesee Abbey on YouTube, the B-roll narrator speaks softly while soothing music scans over images of old barns or deer in a field of long grass. The narrator describes the serenity of nature and the fraternal love shared by the monks at the Abbey of the Genesee.
The video then begins to take a slight turn as the images start to show monks in the bread-making facility, operating heavy machinery in a warehouse-type environment. The words “reverent labor” used by the video’s narrator seem antithetical to our own perceptions about typical warehouse labor.
The video is extremely well-done, showing that there is an appreciation by the strict observers for technology and mechanization. I think my own misconceptions about monasteries will be proven wrong along the course of the semester; although the monks spend a lot of time in contemplative prayer and silence, it doesn’t mean they are totally disconnected from modern technology or living in the stone ages. I think it would be interesting to speak to them in the coming weeks about their relationship to the outside world, as we discussed in class last week. Do they see themselves as totally separate from the larger community? How does their bread making business differentiate them from other monasteries which seek seclusion from the larger community? Can’t wait to find out the answers to these questions, although I do expect them to vary from monk to monk.
While reading Kanter’s essay, “The Comforts of Commitment: Issues in Group Life,” I constantly found myself returning to the points she made about a strong and centralized “charismatic leader” as a crucial element in many successful communities (127). Although I understand that Kanter covers nineteenth-century communes, it’s valid to read her essay intertextually with the 1960s’ reemergence of communal living; the image of this enthusiastic leader seems relevant to the rise of cult groups. (Maybe in class we should briefly discuss what distinguishes an organized commune from an organized cult.) Of course there are no clear-cut boundaries between the two, but I can’t help but think of the “Manson Family” when I hear about charismatic figureheads. What isn’t addressed in the paper (and I realize this isn’t part of the essay’s topic) is the abuse of power and the implications of this on the group’s members. What most times begins as a peaceful and seemingly loving group can become monopolized by a single person very gradually and then very suddenly. As Kanter points out, however, the devotion to the centralized leader causes a member’s commitment to the group to grow. I propose that this fierce commitment based on the group’s leader can cause people to become manipulated.
This is why I find the abandonment of individuality so problematic; we are at our most vulnerable when we disown all that we’ve ever known (family, friends, morals) in order to become a part of something completely new. Hence why cult members often partake in activities that they would otherwise never be involved in, but do, for the sake of the greater community.
As for Sosis & Bressler’s piece (though much of the mathematic aspects go right over my head), to me, the results are not too shocking. People are incentivized to work hard their entire lives and do good and give to charity, not always because of sheer selflessness but because of the promise of reward in an afterlife. That might be kind of cynical, but I think that’s where the researchers’ data was guiding them. Secular communes aren’t motivated by the fear of disappointing a higher power because there isn’t one to worship, hence why secular communities lose membership or struggle with balancing a centralized leadership with democratic ideals. And I generally think this is OK — you don’t want to have to invent some higher power in order to maintain your group’s membership — there’s an artificiality about that. If people are not willing to be active members in the community, it’s simply not for them and they should be encouraged to either get more involved or go their own way.
Cody and I have finally decided on the community we will be researching throughout the course of the semester! I think I speak for the both of us when I say that this is a very exciting decision to have made, and that we can’t wait to get started on our tasks.
The meeting with Father Isaac went very well and there seems to be a wealth of information available to us about the monastery that needs to be collected, digitized, and made accessible to the community at large.
Although I felt bad about breaking the news to the co-op, I still would love to incorporate them into our final presentation to show patterns of intentional communities in the Geneseo area. They were very understanding of our desires for a more established community. They are just beginning, and I hope that when I return to Geneseo as an alumni, I will see a flourishing co-op still present.
Our contract still needs some work (ie. finishing up our “Milestones” section) but other than that, I feel really positive about the path we’ve decided to take.
I finally got to have an in-depth, one-on-one conversation with the archivist today after my class. Liz Argentieri pulled up a couple of documents about the Shakers, as I had informed her about our class text’s chapter on the community. She told me that, in a town ten minutes from my school, there existed our very own Shaker community, now the site of Groveland’s Correctional Facility. Funny how things turn out.
As we sat at a small desk in the room containing the Geneseo town archive, Argentieri explained to me the difference between the two rooms; the town archive in one room is more free to the public, where students and townspeople are able to browse after having the room unlocked by the librarian. The other archive, or what Argentieri was explaining as less of a legitimate archive, holds historical documents from SUNY Geneseo as a university. Here, documents like school newspapers or meeting minutes are kept and only in an extremely rare instance is anyone, besides the library’s staff, allowed to peruse its shelves. Those interested in particular documents should request them and a member of the staff will enter the room to remove the records for them. In general, she explains that neither of these rooms abide by the strict definition of an archive — if they did, she briefly explained the tedious process of removing records that have expired and are no longer necessary.
Argentieri also searched Geneseo’s online database with me, using particular keywords that might engage something within the archives. Using the search term “commun*,” we already found a lot of activity and I plan on looking into that further. Hey, if the Shakers set up a community close by, who’s to say that Geneseo doesn’t have a rich history of intentional communities? Who’s to say Livingston County’s intentional communities just haven’t been compiled into a book yet? This is why archival work is so interesting.
I left the library at 5pm today (I’m back again, making this my fourth stay here in the past 24 hours) with such an excitement about me. Recently, I’ve been going through old scrapbooks in my sorority house (founded in 1885), and although I’d love to see the old old records (I’m talking back in the day when we were founded as a literary society), I’m sure they’re long gone. The other day, I flipped through the pages of a 1988 binder where I found typewriter-printed pages full of meeting minutes, letters addressed to Governor Mario Cuomo (asking if he’d please be our commencement speaker — he rejected), and old court case files from when someone burglarized our home. Other than the thrill of looking through these blasts from the past, I feel a deep disappointment in myself, now Recording Secretary and Cabinet member in my sorority, that we don’t print things anymore. Actually, scratch that — that we don’t save things anymore. (Save trees). Funny enough, just today we were surprised to open the door to see two women in their late 50s, alumni. They told us they lived at the house in 1974! I remembered exactly where I had seen the scrapbook from that year and pulled it down from the shelf for them to look at. (Am I my own kind of archivist now?). Anyway, you can tell the meeting with the archivist went really well and I’m excited to be able to log our community’s documents in an orderly and accessible way.
Cody and I loved our dinner at the co-op. We enjoyed a delicious vegetarian taco meal and shared our “rose,” “thorn,” and “buds” of the day/week. The rose means you describe the best part of your day, the thorn the worst, and the bud is something you’re looking forward to. Many of us mentioned being done with schoolwork and enjoying the weekend as our “buds.” I felt like I was among a group of casual friends, and was invited to come hangout at the co-op anytime.
Later, on the walk home, Cody and I asked each other whether or not this was “the one,” the community we’d like to research. Cody mentioned wanting to check out the monastery down the road a bit before we decide which I agreed to. I think as far as accessibility and ability to archive data, the co-op seems like a great place to start this journey. In a way, I feel like I’m journeying with the co-op on their way toward hopeful success. Plus, one of their extremely impressive members has already transferred all of their documents onto Google Drive so that new members have a record of the group’s history and are given a working guideline of how to run the organization.
Here are some pictures of the outside of the co-op, and the amazing meal we enjoyed as a group:
While reading Reece’s chapters for this week, it seems like there is a subtle conversation on the concept of activism and our roles as active or inactive catalysts for holistic change in the world. At Twin Oaks, Valerie tells Reece that she thinks of people who want to change the world as members of either “two streams” of thought (Reece 195). She sees being an activist as an “against energy” and commune members as taking part in creating a new world, a new alternative system that resists the “mainstream” (Reece 195). Is this nihilism, or maybe a less morbid version of it? I realize that some members of Twin Oaks are activists but are the others then just floating by, focused so much on their own happiness that they overlook those oppressed in the “outside” world?
I guess what I’m getting at is that no matter how utopian or idealistic or romantic an idea is that excites me, when the idea is actualized, I usually set the dial back to realistic mode. Throughout this post I surround the word outside in quotation marks because although Twin Oaks and communities like it have set up their own micro-societies, we are all still citizens of the same country. Not to mention, most of their members have had experience living in this mainstream society, maybe aside from the children who were born here. Unless perhaps on a different planetary body all together, I’m suggesting that we still have a natural obligation to our fellow humans who live in a society separate from our own. Thinking more globally, I may share almost nothing ostensibly in common with a woman in the Middle East; we might have completely different understandings of the way the world works, different economic systems, different political backgrounds. And yet, we share a human bond, so innately protective and compassionate that it makes ignoring one another’s struggles an actively passive move.
As someone who was raised with the notion that we have an obligation to speak for those whose voices are silenced, it irks me to think that other people see Twin Oaks as a justified escape from all of this country’s problems, that activism is simply negative energy when it attempts to lift all people out of unjust situations. I understand that even those in this “outside” world can, and often do, choose to ignore the problems around them. But as members of an intentional community, who to create a world of peace and fairness, I’d expect more. It also makes me consider the luxury of having the choice to abandon civilization and all personal possessions in order to live on a commune (as was prevalent in 1960s drop cities). Are less fortunate people able to make that decision for themselves and their families?
I appreciated Reece’s chapter on Thoreau, which just touches lightly on Thoreau’s political beliefs (especially on slavery, industrialism’s damage to the environment). Reece writes, “Years later, the leader of Concord’s Underground Railroad remember that Thoreau…had done more to help fugitive slaves than anyone else in the town” (Reece 276). Even though he understood that change comes from within before it can be activated throughout the larger community, he was able to accomplish both without sacrificing his internal journey. After all, it was apparently a woman who led him out of the woods and not his stance on American imperialism and slave labor.
I hope this wasn’t too critical a blog post but I feel really passionately about what I’ve read in the chapters and what I’ve written in the post and wanted to make sure I jotted down some ideas before I keep reading Utopia Drive.
While reading Reece’s chapter on Twin Oaks, I can’t help but think that the only way we as people can develop important connections with one another while attempting to produce or contribute in some way to the community, is through small groups run like Twin Oaks. And I think Reece is suggesting that, too. The problem with Acorn is that it relies on the community’s consensus on decision-making rather than relying on those who serve as planner-managers. There isn’t enough accountability for those who’d like to sit around all day smoking cigarettes and not performing the 42 hours of work per week. I really like that Twin Oaks helps subsidize other small groups like it in order to encourage this micro-society based on egalitarian values. However I understand the problem Reece runs into when he tries to imagine the “perfected” society. Once Twin Oaks starts mandating that its sister community, Acorn, adopt the same governing ideals that they possess, there is a totalitarian force creeping up on the group. The best thing we can do as community members is communicate our grievances with one another and try to be considerate and active members for each other and for ourselves. Those guys smoking in Acorn may or may not realize that their laziness damages the community as a whole. If they are asked to work on these issues by council members or else they will be asked to leave, it might make them realize that they are not cut out for dedicated communal living of this sort. Let them start their own community and realize that in order to live sustainably based on egalitarian principles, work must shared by each member of the community.
Something I find very important in Reece’s observations of Acorn is his description of the aesthetics of the community. He describes the “feel of 1960s ‘drop cities’ ” and the dingy “sag” feeling he experiences (Reece 176). There is a general sense of lack of upkeep here. Even simple issues that could be improved in order to make the community look more attractive are ignored. If we look at these communities in the same way that Acorn sees itself (externally capitalist), then membership demand would likely be greater if the desires to live in a happy, clean, and fair community were aspects that they could easily recognize on a visit to the commune. Then the greater demand causes more communities of shared values begin to spring up around them and more people are able to engage in this type of living concept. – Dana
With a busy week behind me, I decided to go check out the archives over the weekend. Unfortunately, the archivist does not work on the weekends and I could not be granted access to them unless she was in her office. On Monday, I decided to wake up early and try again. The student at the front desk of Milne Library asked her supervisor if he could bring me to the archives but he informed me that only Liz Argentieri could do that. The Special Collections Librarian, as her business card reads, asked me to distinguish which archive I was interested in (Geneseo college or Geneseo town archive). She unlocked the sliding doors behind the “fishbowl,” as Geneseo students call it, into a sunlit room with 4 rows of shelving full of documents (books, magazine, and documents in boxes).
I told her I was taking a class on intentional communities and that I would like to find any documentation about the Genesee Valley Cooperative. I did mention, however, that the organization is fairly new (only four years old to be exact). Argentieri told me my first step should be to search on the Livingston County News website and see what my options look like. From there, she also mentioned just a general search for the group. Argentieri was very helpful, but she told me she did not have much time to talk because a new intern would be arriving soon. I thanked her, and she let me walk around the archive by myself to peruse.
What strikes me as an important observation about this experience is the idea that there is a keeper of the archives. The documents are respected and cared for very well — they document the social, economic, and political history of this little town. If documents go missing, there are inevitable gaps formed in this history. When seen fit, there are displays created using documents and artifacts relating to a particular, focused topic. For instance, Geneseo or Big Tree, has a deep Native American history. Although there seemed to be many books in the archive dealing with this aspect of Geneseo, I stumbled across a blog of a Geneseo Native American studies professor who writes, “It happens all the time. We are curious. We ask questions and, sometimes, despite our best efforts, we cannot find an answer.” Sometimes, more information needs to become available. I hope that all of our projects, not just my own, open doors for other people who want, simply, to know more.
One of the first shelves I looked at was filled with books about the Shakers. Actually, quite a lot of books about one form of intentional community, and I’m especially curious why (I had never heard of a Shaker community in the Geneseo area). A quick Google search led me to a website called “The Freethought Trail” which details a short-lived Shaker community between Rochester and Syracuse called the Sodus Bay Phalanx. I’m not sure of the distance requirement for archives (what’s allowed in there and what belongs to other counties/municipalities) but either way, it was reassuring to see a familiar name.
Although I have not been able to find more documentation for the co-op, I plan on using their Facebook group as a source for more information. I will also be eating there on Wednesday night so I can ask them directly. Before I give up on the archive, I will be making an appointment with Argentieri and trying to focus the project as much as possible. Perhaps Geneseo has a history of cooperative living that I don’t even know about, or maybe legal documents that discuss the concept and the town’s reactions. Either way, there’s much more in that archive than meets the eye and I’m excited to find out where it leads me. – Dana
On Tuesday afternoon, Cody and I met and spoke to a member of a fairly new local housing co-operative created around the principles of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers (1844). I heard about the small group through friends, and it turns out I know at least a couple of the people who currently reside there through various classes and mutual friends. Cody and I asked about their goals for this year, their hopes for the co-op after they have left Geneseo, and more specific questions about leadership roles/positions within the small group. The student was very excited to be able to tell us all about the work they try to do, and tries to wake up every morning with the mindset “what can I do for the co-op today?” He said that being in the co-op was very transformative for him: it has taught him to work towards becoming not only a better member, but also a more understanding person to all people every day.
He was especially interested by our Into the Woods class’s content and final project; he is really eager to collect all of the documents that the co-op has accumulated in the past four years and put them together into a cohesive history available to the public. He also hopes having more information out there will encourage younger students to join, or, if they’re anything like me (an embarrassed senior), at least hear about the co-op for the first time.
Something really important that he touched on during our interview was the reason why this particular co-op sprang up. He said that when it really came down to it, students were tired of eating campus food and wanted an environment where friends could come together every night and enjoy real, home-cooked meals as a group, almost like a family. And once this inspired the co-op, and they realized that a communal living space was necessary, the members also realized how important it is to be a knowledgeable tenant in college towns. Their next objective is to collect a group dedicated to educating students about their rights as renters to ensure that landlords do not take advantage of our ignorance as young adults without much understanding of real estate contracts. He also wants to screen documentaries, bring speakers, and hold events that connect the co-op to the local community as well as the larger community.
In the past, the co-op has struggled with issues among its members. Although this was briefly touched on (he admits that he now knows that the co-op is only as committed as its members are), I think there are valid and relatable problems being slightly avoided. If some members join but are in the mindset that they will do the least possible, not much active work is being done for the community. If the co-op functions this way, is it really a co-op or, as Erik Reece would say, “eight liberal vegans living in a group house” (8)? What this particular member was saying was that in past years, the co-op has only had enough time to focus on centering and stabilizing itself without the financial or organizational means to reach out to the community yet. He has high hopes that with the strong group of members living there this year, they will be able to do more outreach than in years past.
Overall, the informal interview went extremely well. Cody and I were enthusiastically invited to a delicious dinner next Wednesday and are very excited! Oh, and it helps that as a vegetarian, all meals are meatless… – Dana