Creating Community at the Farm: A Contested Concept

This ethnography explores the competing concepts of community that are deployed within the context of a communal farm. Residents of the Farm articulate oppositional concepts of community that are based on familial and instrumental relationships. The concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are utilized to better understand the manner in which these discourses manifest themselves in the lived experiences of Farm residents. The contradictory nature of these conceptualizations suggests that the concept of community cannot be treated as a monolithic reality within scholarly inquiry.