Becoming Utopia
Product details
- ISBN 9781496243515
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2026
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
