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Book synopsis

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.

Book details

Book category Books in German Sozialwissenschaften, Recht, Wirtschaft Ethnologie Volkskunde

• Full title: Becoming Utopia
• Author: Adam Kaul
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260
• EAN: 9781496247216
• ISBN: 1496247213
• ID: 49339901
• Publisher: Nebraska
• Weight: 666 g
• Date of publishing: 01. July 2026

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