Speaker: Martin BOEWE (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong)
Date:
1:00 – 2:30PM, 19 February 2016 (Friday)
Venue: Room 401, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK
On 19 February, Martin Boewe, our PhD
candidate, gave a seminar on “Utopian Communities: Making Better Worlds”. He
discussed the social implications of utopian communities by describing three
communities he had been doing field research on: Life Chanyuan in China, Christiania
in Denmark, and Damanhur in Italy. He described utopian communities, which were
intentionally formed, as social laboratories demonstrating an alternative way
to live and challenging the dominating paradigms of society.
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| Martin Boewe |
Life Chanyuan, Boewe said, practiced
religious syncretism with its ideology coming from Christian, Buddhist, Taoist
and the New Age religions. The charismatic community founder promoted an egalitarian
lifestyle and taught about the purpose of human life, self-refinement, and emotional
and material detachment. As Boewe put it, Life Chanyuan was a communist utopia
that criticized the urban-based Chinese modernization model. It addressed the
problem of social alienation, and sought to establish a heaven on earth based
on communism and free love.
Christiania was a political community that
practiced self-administration and participatory decision making. It embraced
the ideology of freedom, and was against neo-liberalism and the concepts of
leadership, hierarchy, and domination. Community members included activists,
pushers (drug-dealers), and social drop-outs. Christiania members were concerned
about humans’ losing control against forces of global capitalism, and attempted
to build an anarchist place of freedom.
Damanhur was more hierarchical and focused
on lifelong spiritual development. It emphasized rituality, which was
manifested in its monastic lifestyle. The interplay of humanity and divinity within
the community was central, as it blurred the boundary between story-telling and
reality sometimes. Damanhur used alchemy and magic as tools of war, and fought
against state, church and capitalism. Its ideology was in opposition to global
capitalism, and it addressed the question of how to live better life by looking
for the divine in oneself and in society.
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| The audience |
Boewe also talked about the value contests in the three surrounding societies,
which were addressed by the communities. The path towards modernization in
China alternates between collective and individualistic approaches. Denmark as
a tiny nation at the fringe of the European Union is engaged in a search of a
new identity in the globalizing world, and is caught between a conservative
longing for the egalitarian and ethnically inclusive life of the former village
collectives and global capitalism. In Italy idealistic models of a unified
nation contrast with a pragmatic model of statehood,
which always led to factionalism. His analysis showed that all these utopian
communities acted as distorted mirrors of their societies and were historically
specific to them. They all had a message to their respective societies about
how life could be better.
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