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eBook details

• Title: Strange Places: Estrangement, Utopianism, And Intentional Communities (Essay)
• Author : Utopian Studies
• Release Date : January 22, 2007
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 240 KB

Description

Introduction In this article, I examine the paradoxical role of estrangement in utopianism by drawing on the experiences of intentional communities. (1) Scholars of fictional utopias, following (or contesting) Darko Suvin, have firmly established that estrangement is fundamental to utopianism. It permits critical distance and facilitates paradigm shifts; it provokes a key utopian function: fresh perceptions of the limits of the possible. (2) My research indicates that estrangement performs similar functions inside intentional communities by facilitating critical distance and group coherence. As such, it seems that estrangement has a profoundly positive relationship with utopianism. Distanced, remote, and strange, utopias variously interrogate the now from an imaginary good-place, and estrangement permits this interrogation. However, estranged relationships are complex and difficult, and a discussion of estrangement also requires contemplation of the ways that we regard and treat the Other: the strange and unknown outsider. This aspect of estrangement takes us into dark places, and people who try to realise utopian dreams in intentional communities often find the various effects of estrangement impossible to endure. Drawing on theoretical debates and first-hand fieldwork, I will suggest that estrangement lies at the heart of utopian experiments. It is necessary and yet variously unendurable.

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