Becoming Utopia

History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest

Margaret E. Farrar, Adam Kaul (Autoren)

Buch | Hardcover

260 Seiten

2026
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-4351-5 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Juli 2026)
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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.

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.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Arriving: Utopia on the Prairie
Chapter 2: Discovering: Bishop Hill as American Identity Story
Chapter 3: Forgetting: Bishop Hill as Imperialist Amnesia
Chapter 4: Remembering: Commemoration, Preservation, and Heritage
Chapter 5: Creating: Fluid Swedish Heritages in the 21st Century
Chapter 6: Sustaining: Clean Energy Economies and Social Change
Chapter 7: Departing: Utopia Revisited and Revised
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.7.2026
Reihe/Serie	Anthropology of Contemporary North America
Zusatzinfo	21 photographs, 7 illustrations, 5 maps, index
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
	Technik ► Architektur
ISBN-10	1-4962-4351-X / 149624351X
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-4351-5 / 9781496243515
Zustand	Neuware