MY YEAR POOPING IN A BUCKET: LIFESTYLE, CULTURAL, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE “NODE” AT DANCING RABBIT ECOVILLAGE _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by ZACH RUBIN Dr. Victoria Johnson, Dissertation Supervisor July, 2018 The undersigned, appointed by the Associate Vice Chancellor of the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, have examined the dissertation entitled: MY YEAR POOPING IN A BUCKET: LIFESTYLE, CULTURAL, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE “NODE” AT DANCING RABBIT ECOVILLAGE presented by Zach Rubin, a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Victoria Johnson ________________________ Professor Wayne Brekhus ________________________ Professor Rebecca Scott ________________________ Professor Mary Grigsby ________________________ Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go to Dr. Victoria Johnson, as without her efforts to review and critique this dissertation it would certainly not have been possible to produce a quality product. The rest of my committee deserves similar kudos for their efforts at holding my writing and analysis to the highest standard. I would especially like to thank Mary Grigsby for her emotional support throughout the process, and for reviewing early drafts of chapters, as that goes far above and beyond the typical demands for a committee member from outside the department. Many other people also deserve mention for their varied means of support, emotional, logistical, and otherwise. Thank you to Katelynn Towne for our many writing dates, without which the writing of this dissertation would have taken far longer. Thank you to Daniel Petrin for sharing an office with me and being a perfect mix of talkative when needed, and quiet when we both needed to get work done. Thank you to Don Willis for continued collaboration on projects related to the topic of intentional communities that helped me develop better critical analyses of the literature in this piece. Thank you to Kristen Kalz for going with me on my initial visit to Dancing Rabbit, and for continuing to check in with me as the project progress, asking poignant questions all the time. Thank you to Nathan Katz, for being a most excellent dungeon master and also for being a sounding board on dissertation related issues. ii And, of course, thank you to all the Rabbits. Without their kindness, their willingness to open their hearts and homes to me, and without their creative use of buckets, this dissertation would not have been possible. iii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................II LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. V ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................... VI CHAPTER 1 - DANCING RABBIT AND THE CASE FOR A SOCIAL MOVEMENT NODE.............1 CHAPTER 2 – WINTER: CULTURAL PRACTICES AND LIFESTYLE AT DANCING RABBIT ECOVILLAGE ...................................................................................................................... 44 CHAPTER 3 – SPRING: RECRUITMENT AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY PROCESSES ............... 83 CHAPTER 4 – SUMMER: PREFIGURING A BETTER WORLD THROUGH DANCING RABBIT’S ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS........................................................................................... 116 CHAPTER 5 – FALL: THE COLLECTIVE ACTION RESERVIOR AND HOW DANCING RABBIT TURNS LIFESTYLE INTO POLITICAL ACTION ..................................................................... 154 CHAPTER 6 – DANCES WITH RABBITS: HOW THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT NODE WORKS .. 186 APPENDIX A ..................................................................................................................... 215 APPENDIX B ..................................................................................................................... 223 ACRONYM GUIDE ............................................................................................................ 228 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................... 229 VITA ................................................................................................................................. 241 iv List of Figures Figure 1 - Movement branches that form the social movement "node" ......................... 28 Figure 2 - Weber's Orientations to Social Action and Types of Legitimate Domination 125 v Abstract What happens between the most visible aspects of social movements? When protestors put down their signs, petitioners hang up their clipboards, and movement organizations contract, there are several theories about what happens to the social and political currents that made them possible in the first place. Theories of social movements often rely on an understanding of political cycles, resource availability, or social strain. Often, movement actors are portrayed as “activated” for a given campaign, only to return to inactivity after it concludes. Beyond those observations lie permanent communities of activists whose forms of political engagement are not inherently ties to shifting winds of political opportunity and are deeply embedded in the everyday practices of lifestyle. This dissertation profiles one such group, Dancing Rabbit ecovillage, as a social movement “node,” containing hallmarks of cultural, lifestyle, and social movements. Members of a node, like the one portrayed in this work, follow a different path towards being activated that offers a different account of how political work is drawn from personal consciousness. The concept of the social movement node is developed as an alternative explanation for the persistence of activism, one which helps to develop and elaborate a long-developing understanding of personal and political spheres are overlapping and immutably connected rather than separate and opposed. I detail the village’s claim to the nature and future of society through an ethnographic explanation vi that moves through its own cycles based on a seasonal metaphor, rather than on the terms of national trends. vii Chapter 1 - Dancing Rabbit and the Case for a Social Movement Node Introduction Facing a friendly crowd of Rabbits1 in their village, I explained to them the results of the research I had done there the previous year: This place, these people, I explained to them, are part of a social movement. “But of course we are!” exclaimed Harlequin2 at the end of the presentation. “I would not be here if I didn’t think I could live the way I wanted and change the world in doing so. I could go be poor and farm anywhere, but I chose to do it here because I feel like I’m making a difference.” With her words, I also received a room full of nods and mumbles of agreement. Why would anyone doubt their village is part of a social movement? Too often, though, scholars of social movements would cast such an assertion aside and label the people of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (henceforth DR) too broadly as a subculture, or to narrowly as a commune looking to retreat from mainstream society. People there are politically engaged, albeit at the margins of society in many of their 1 “Rabbits” is the term my respondents use for themselves based on the community they live in, and a moniker I’ve decided to carry over into my writing about them as well. 2 Some of the names of individuals in this work are changed out of respect for privacy. Only respondents who gave explicit permission are described using their real names. 1 norms and geographically removed from the centers of power with their location in rural northeast Missouri. They irregularly participate in direct action confrontations against elected officials, corporations, or the like, and it’s not easy to discern who their antagonist is in a way that, say, the environmentalist movement could point to an evil Big Oil. Yet an increasing number of people have started to re-examine the role of groups like DR as though they are part of larger social movements (Roberts 1971, Schehr 1997, Ergas 2010). Villages like these have taken many forms throughout US history, perhaps most iconically as the Commune movement of the 1960s and 70s. But beyond their association in the popular mind lies a deep, rich history of communitarian projects spanning the ideological spectrum from left to right, religious to secular, isolationist to activist, and a host of other motivations. Some are forgotten to the obscurities of time, while others are famous in their effects and through their prolific writings. The sum of these, though, is a complex tapestry of social experiments called Intentional Communities (henceforth ICs). ICs tend to reflect the major social, economic, and political concerns of their day, laying claim to what the problems of contemporary society are and how they should be addressed. Whereas social movements have relied on direct action as a means of motivating social change, ICs have historically favored the option of creating an alternative lifestyle in which to practice their more perfected, ideal way of living –