we drive south to check out this place called The Farm. checking the Tennessee indymedia last weekend, i came across the announcement for an exhibit ‘The Happiest Days of My Life’: Searching for Utopia in Tennessee about the history of utopian communities in Tennessee. most of these utopias are these social experiments of the 19th century (why have most utopian experiments ultimately failed, is one of the questions of the exhibit) but also then there’s The Farm, founded in 1971 and still existing today.
i checked out their website (here) before going to Nashville and had not been very impressed: a colony of californian hippies settling in tennessee to build a new land and community. but i was curious.
as we drive south the landscape changes. gently sloping (almost) hills and the sun comes out and gives them a golden glow. the Farm is in Summertown, which turns out to be very small. a gas station and small market at a split of the road might just be the center of this town, although by now i should know better than to calibrate north american social geography in terms of a center (as i know it). these towns boil down to a fabric of small roads with houses and farms (and churches) scattered around, almost at random. the gas station or market is a place where one can actually meet another person and ask the way.
without words the woman behind the counter reaches out for a small piece of paper with a drawing of how one gets to The Farm. i would like to know what’s on her mind; i strike a naive conversation about how we’re not from here, and don’t really know what the Farm is about. a man in the shop (they clearly know each other) hears us talking and comes out eager to join a conversation. when he figures out it’s about the Farm, he goes silent. for a moment the woman starts looking for words, then her hand waves her thoughts away. the man looks at me and says: “Just go there and you’ll see.”
we get lucky. the website asks people to announce their visit beforehand, but door of the office at the gate opens when we knock and Penny has some time for us. she tells us the story of how the charismatic leader/teacher Stephen Gaskin with a couple of hundreds of people around him left California (San Francisco) in 1971 and came to Tennessee to find a piece of land where they could create a commune. this was, and still is, a poor region, and it was possibile to get land relatively cheap. Penny gives us a panorama of the fruits of The Farm’s labor – while the produce of the actual farming activities mainly flow back into the community itself (with the exception of their Soy bean business), the Farm consists of a number of businesses, cooperatives, assocations. a company that produces radiation detection devices, which kind of surprises us, but apparently there were issues with radioactive waste in the region and no doubt the Cold War climate at the time played a role. a publishing collective. the school. a development aid organization (Plenty) that on first sight shares the problematic charity approach of many organizations in that sector. a peace organization that also doesn’t seem very promising. an ecovillage, which does look more interesting. a summercamp program to get urban and poor kids to the country side.
what interests us most in her story is the great change of 1981. the community was much larger at the time, with more than 1000 people living on the Farm, and was in permanent debt. then one of the community members got into an accident and needed serious medical care, and there was no escaping the fact that they could not pay the bills. the community decided, not without many discussions, fall-outs and bitterness on the part of some who left, that the Farm should be de-collectivized. the Farm had been set up in a collective way – property was collective and income generated by members would be collectively managed. after the 1981 transformation some parts of the infrastructure remain collectives, but people would own the houses they live in. if people want to come or stay on the Farm, they need to prove that they are self-sufficient, able to make their own living and contribute to costs of the collective infrastructure.
another thing that caught my interest is the importance of widwivery at the Farm. women come to give birth at the Farm, and the Farm midwives deliver babies in the region. midwivery on the Farm was initiated by Ina May Gaskin and is said to have contributed to the home-birth movement in the USA. but i’m interested in how the Farm’s midwivery effectively covers a part of health care in the region (with better success rates than birthing in hospitals) and what kinds of interactions and bonds that might establish between the Farm and its surroundings. penny tells us how the midwives notably provide reproductive health care for an Amish community close by.
the tiny “museum”, which includes a display of hippie clothes, is cute. before i leave the office i see a map on the wall with the territory of the Farm, entitled The Motherland. the land is beautiful and the ecovillage looks interesting. our visit ends in The Farm’s purple shop (where my eye falls on Ecover, straight from the Antwerpen region, imagine), which is all nice and cosy but we’re not tempted to (try to) stay overnight for what is announced as the coldest night.
in honesty it looks better then what i had imagined when looking at the website (yep, i got all worked up about Californian hippies behind my computer screen…). but it also becomes clearer why projects such as these make me uncomfortable. something about a project of a new settlement, creating a new society, rabula rasa, pioneers all over again – in a country where these gestures have such a violent history. i would so much long for some critical engagement with the meaning of that gesture…
when we drive away we soon hit an obscene overdosis of stripmalls and car dealers in Columbia – kind of surreal in this small place. (i eat a big rare steak in one of these meat places with buckets of peanuts on the table and where everybody throws peanut shells on the ground.) the contrast with the Farm is sharp, yet it’s also the contrast that tells me that i’m not so sure that i like the Farm better. it strikes me that somehow these two keep each other smoothly in balance: a small alternative community focused on itself (and here the Farm doesn’t look all that different from the Amish) and the big bad capitalist world outside. with respect, but i can’t help feeling this is not a time and place for this kind of retreat.
(view on the Farm at the entrance)
(at the Ecovillage)