Nineteenth-century presses delighted in reporting on the “spectacle” of the Amana Society, playing up the contrast between this pious communistic community of German immigrants and its “ambitious” individualistic American counterparts. These accounts employed a rhetoric of containment, a form of rhetorical imagining that contains the threat of a non-normative community. Three characteristics of this rhetoric are evident in the Amana descriptions: (1) a particular gaze that views the community as a picture; (2) a degree of praise that is simultaneously undermined by a nostalgic attitude toward the community; and (3) an assertion that the benefits of this lifestyle require an unthinkable sacrifice incompatible with the imagining audience's nature or values. Containment rhetoric neutralizes the threat of the imagined group—often by circulating its tropes and images to more public, powerful venues—and implicitly defines the group as peripheral to the larger public.

Containment Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Imagining Amana, Inscribing America

People are motivated not only by a quest for satisfaction but also by trying to live up to their sense of what is moral. This sense cannot be reduced to a form of satisfaction, among other reasons because it often engenders pain and sacrifice rather than pleasure. Analysis is enriched when we realize people are moral wrestlers who are pulled by both kinds of motivations. Such a recognition is also useful for public policy. The concept of well-being is a step forward but one must take into account that people can find meaning and purpose in bad behavior from gang-like activities to serving in ISIS.

Happiness Is the Wrong Metric

The aim of the article is to compare, using surveys, interviews and participant observation, long-term development strategies in two rural communities, one in Iowa (Amana Colonies) and the other in southern Italy (Val Comino). The Amana Colonies have chosen a market model whereas the Val Comino uses a model supported with funds from the European Community. Both strategies prioritise local ability to co-ordinate actions across geographical and institutional scales. The findings suggest that the efficiency of the two strategies is wearing out and their long-term sustainability is in question. In the case of southern Italy, this is because powerful members in local institutions operate on conventions of clientelism and corporativism; in the Amanas it is because shareholders who live in the community are interested in preserving the identity of the territory whereas those who do not are interested in the corporation's dividends.

Market and State‐supported Sustainability: A Tale of Two Rural Communities in Iowa and Italy

People are motivated not only by a quest for satisfaction but also by an ambition to live up to their sense of what is moral. This sense cannot be reduced to a form of satisfaction or pleasure maximization because, among other reasons, it often engenders pain and sacrifice. Further more, studies repeatedly show that income beyond a certain level does not make people happier, while “higher” sources, like spirituality, community involvement, intellectual activity, and family bonding, pay dividends with respect to individual happiness. Analysis and public policy are enriched when we realize that people take moral commitments seriously and will sometimes eschew their own pleasure to pursue them. This conception of well-being, which crucially incorporates moral affirmation, is a step forward in a deep-rooted dialogue in the social sciences and philosophy about human motivation, behavior, ethics, and how one goes about living “the good life.”

In the rich and complex history of American Christianity, utopias in one form or another have played a constant part. From the early puritan settlements onwards, North America has played a distinctive role in the Christian imagination — as a place of refuge, as a place for experimentation, as the founding-spot for new sects, churches, and denominations. Among the experimenters have been many groups of Christians in America who have, over more than two centuries, gathered themselves into communal organizations — what participants and commentators now call ‘intentional communities’. Their numbers have been almost impossible to measure accurately; one authoritative listing counts about six hundred communal groups with over fifteen hundred separate settlements in the USA before 1965, and there will have been thousands more communes formed since then. Membership figures are even harder to pin down, but it is certain that the numbers of people who have at one time or another lived in an American intentional community runs into the hundreds of thousands.

Heavens on Earth: Christian Utopias in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10425&context=annals-of-iowa

Peter Hoehnle

Papers

Community in Transition: Amana's Great Change, 1931-1933

Machine in the Garden: the Woolen Textile Industry of the Amana Society, 1785-1942