Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: developmental communalism to a wide range of intentional community movements in the United States, see Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). COMMUNAL SOCIETIES 26recently, Pitzer has predicted that the twenty-first century will be "a time when progressive ideas, ideals, and innovations" developed in the small intentional communities of the twentieth century will "become integrated into the general society." 2 Camphill today is a living laboratory for Pitzer's theory because, although the movement is still spreading to new places, many participants fear that it is abandoning its most distinctive cooperative features.Notable among these features are the practices of income-sharing-in which people work without salaries and rely on the community for their economic needs-and life-sharing-in which people of diverse abilities occupy households in which meals, recreation, religious services, and seasonal festivals are all shared.Camphill has never been fully communal, in the sense of all assets being held in common, so these practices of income-and life-sharing will serve as the baseline for this consideration of Camphill's current developmental processes.Camphill founder Karl König was referring primarily to income-and life-sharing when he declared that "the establishment of a true community" was one of the three "Camphill essentials," along with "regard for the spiritual nature" of persons with disabilities and commitment to "inner development" on the part of their teachers and companions.König's declaration notwithstanding, these practices are by no means considered "essential" by every Camphill community today.Yet König also used organic, developmental metaphors to describe Camphill: the three essentials were not fixed rules but "fruits and flowers" that would need to "unfold and grow" in order for Camphill to "develop and . . .keep its pledge to the handicapped child."And though the current changes in Camphill may be in some respects a development away from communalism, in other respects they reveal a new unfolding of the founding value of "true community."3 The account of Camphill's developmental processes in this essay is based on seventeen years of participant observation, site visits, and formal interviews with Camphillers.My research on Camphill began
Source: Communal Societies
Author: Daniel McKanan
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2949899746