More expensive than most homesteads

“Encyclopedia of Community” is a super-expensive four-volume encyclopaedia about intentional communities and related subjects. It's probably too expensive for most communities to buy! I bought the second volume from a British vendor, so this review is based on that volume only.

The main problem with this work is that “community” is a very broad subject, which could potentially cover almost anything (except, I suppose, selfish genes). However, if you are a causal reader, the catch-all character might actually make perusing the encyclopaedia more exciting. Thus, the second volume contains entries on Harlem, Greenwich Village, Las Vegas and – wait for it – loneliness. There are also articles on Tristan da Cunha (the world's most remotely located populated island), ghost towns, home schooling, gender roles on the web, youth gangs and the environmental justice movement. The entry on Islam claims that Muslim civilization is very pluralistic. Say no more!

As behoves an encyclopaedia of intentional communities, the most important entries give overviews of such communities in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia. There are also articles concentrating on a single movement, such as the Hutterites, Fourierism or Findhorn. The craziest people covered must be The Farm, a community of 1,500 hippies living in conservative Tennessee! When The Farm demanded that its inhabitants pay for their food and housing, the community shrank to just 200 people. These stalwarts are still around, selling their vegan cookbooks on the web. And yes, there have been a couple of drug busts on their premises…

The “objective”, scholarly slant of the encyclopaedia is occasionally a problem. The contributors play down the cultic element in community living, not mentioning the severe criticism directed against the Children of God. And while the scope of this work is immense, I did notice a few curious misses. The entry on Scandinavia contains a lot of boring information on Danish co-housing, but none on the Skogsnäs hippie collective or the Hassela drug treatment collective, the two most well-known intentional communities in Sweden.

That being said, I will nevertheless award “Encyclopaedia of Community, Vol 2” four stars out of five. You need to sell a lot of vegan cookbooks to afford the four-volume set, though.