One dilemma that faced intentional communities of the 19th century was balancing the communards' desire for their own, secluded place and their drive to educate the rest of society by example. Dancing Rabbit, an experimental intentional community, is taking a decidedly 21st century approach to that problem: though their location in rural Missouri allows them to remain extremely luminal, the Rabbits have embarked on a program of visits and dissemination of information through various media that exposes their message to greater society.
The residents I spoke to think that their system of outreach via the internet and television as well as physical visits is working well for their community, but they have had to make certain compromises to get the publicity they feel they need. Though this will certainly be a challenge for them in the coming years, the way they've controlled their portrayal in the media thus far indicates to me that they'll be able to balance their radicalism with their need to get the mainstream culture to accept their ideas.
[...] All the Rabbits are celebrating, the settlement looks spotless and friendly, and one of the founding members, Tony, says that the only thing he'd change about the place years after its founding, is that he'd like to “expand the outreach part of things, telling the world and sharing our ideas [Dancing Rabbit Website, 2007].” This is probably something of an exaggeration: the Dancing Rabbits I met were quick to admit that communal living is sometimes frustrating, always hard work, and not usually utopic. [...]
[...] They teach music to local children, write a weekly column for the town paper, hold dances, have yoga and meditation groups, play Ultimate Frisbee, host work parties, and are constantly occupied by chores like construction and gardening: until their population expanded, Dancing Rabbit grew 90% of the food it consumed. The Rabbits have been extremely innovative in their building: though the settlement has few if any TVs, a new kitchen building is being constructed to include “chicken a glass panel built into an adjacent chicken coop, through which members can watch their animals while they eat [Thomas 2007.] Different subsets of the community eat together, but they gather the whole community for two weekly potlucks, one with only Dancing Rabbit members and one that includes Sandhill Farm. [...]
[...] This, I believe, will be the biggest challenge for Dancing Rabbit in the coming years. The community will not only have to merely stick together, no small feat in itself, but they will have to do so in a way that is palatable to the mainstream. They will have to look good enough to make people who drive Hummers want to adopt their way of life while still, well, crapping in buckets. They will have to look good enough that, when the more conservative media gets wind of the intentional movement and comes to cover them, they will have only positive things to report. [...]
[...] Being on a reality show did fit in with their goal of outreach: Vito and Johari, at least, resolved to live more greenly once they got back to New York, and the effect it had on viewers may have been significant Days gave Dancing Rabbit a change to participate in the trendy, mainstream medium of a reality show, exposing their ecological ideas to people who might never have sought to learn about environmentalism on their own. Dancing Rabbit has, of course, been lucky up to this point in that only liberal media have really tried to report on the community. [...]
[...] In fact, Dancing Rabbit devoted a page of its website to defending the consumption-obsessed visitors, Vito and Johari. They claimed that the show's editors tried to “heighten the drama” and make Vito and Johari look more obnoxious than they had actually been [Dancing Rabbit Website, 2007]. This obfuscation extended to downright lies and misinformation. The main conflict of the episode was that Vito, a large, 35-year-old club producer, wasn't allowed to eat meat or any other animal products when he came to the community. [...]
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