Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest - Hardcover

by Margaret E. Farrar (Author), Adam Kaul (Author)

Becoming Utopia centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it "Utopia on the Prairie," home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Margaret E. Farrar is a professor of political science at John Carroll University. She is the author of Building the Body Politic: Power and Urban Space in Washington, D.C. Adam Kaul is a professor of anthropology at Augustana College. He is the author of Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village.