Paper short abstract:

I explore how members of an American land-based intentional community embrace a romanticized ideal of "the land" as a stable place and time that could return after capitalist modernity fails, arguing that practical uses of and disputes about the soil destabilized settler imaginaries from within.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a rural, land-based intentional community in the U.S., this paper analyzes how "the land" in back-to-the-landism serves as a tacit reference to an America of another time. I argue that an idealized notion of the land fosters belonging in a community that simultaneously critiques American political economy and values, as it models itself aesthetically on the image of Jeffersonian agrarian Americana. By advocating a "return" to the land through homesteading, proponents invoked a purified, nascent nation of the past, prior to industrial capitalism. In doing so, they idealized the small scale, rudimentary technology, and rugged bravery iconic of the heyday of American settler colonialism. At the same time, the notion of "return" was often imagined in the context of an apocalyptic collapse, thus positioning the community less as an intervention into contemporary American life than as a place outside of time that could re-animate some version of a vibrant evolutionary past only after the future destruction of the modern nation. Such abstract imaginaries of "the land," however, proved irrelevant to the day-to-day practices of working the soil, which generated very different ideas about the community's purpose and future. Elaborating "the soiled imagination," I thus argue further that the agrarian ideal is both a site of aspiration and contestation, as disputes about exactly how the soil should be cultivated could tentatively unsettle the purity of settler common sense about temporality, place, and property that so often accompanied invocations of "the land."