Becoming Utopia

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.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. Arriving: Utopia on the Prairie2. Discovering: Bishop Hill as American Identity Story3. Forgetting: Bishop Hill as Imperialist Amnesia4. Remembering: Commemoration, Preservation, and Heritage5. Creating: Fluid Swedish Heritages in the Twenty-First Century6. Sustaining: Clean Energy Economies and Social Change7. Departing: Utopia Revisited and RevisedNotesBibliographyIndex

"Heritage politics and environmental politics, both of which are active agents in the Bishop Hill community's ability to sustain itself, are also subjects of broader interest in twenty-first-century America. Within political science and anthropology, Becoming Utopia provides an excellent case study for how heritage and environmental decision-making play out at the local level."—Jennifer Eastman Attebery, author of As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity"Why do some places become important to us? And what (and who) has to be devalued for them to accrue certain kinds of personal, historical, and economic values over time? Becoming Utopia answers these questions through a unique dialogue between American studies; rural anthropology; studies of place, landscape, and cultural meaning; critiques of settler colonialism and constructions of whiteness; and recent and ongoing critiques of cultural heritage and tourist industries around the world. It offers an invaluable contribution to each of these in turn, all while remaining empirically sound and carefully researched."—Joshua O. Reno, coauthor of Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest