The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards - Hardcover

Berger, Bennett M.

9780520023888: The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520023889 ISBN 13: 9780520023888

Publisher: Univ of California Pr, 1981

The Survival of a Counterculture is a lively, engaging look into the ways communards, or people who live in communes, maintain, modify, use, and otherwise live with their convictions while they attempt to get through the problems of everyday life. Communal families shape their norms to the circumstances they live with, just as on a larger scale nations and major institutions also shape their ideologies to the pressures of circumstance they feel. With a new introduction by the author that brings his work up to date, this volume raises important questions regarding sociological theory.

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About the Author:

Bennett M. Berger, a sociologist for thirty years, is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of An Essay on Culture.

Review:

The Survival of a Counterculture is an "'ethnographic' description of a 60s commune's beliefs and practices as well as a 'microsociology of knowledge' that is concerned with ideological analysiswith examining, in this case, the interplay between ideals and the imperatives of survival."

– Choice

"A truly remarkable achievement. As sociology it reveals the same skillful, ingenious and perceptive approach Berger has for years brought to his research. And as literature, it is artistic, honest, filled with an amazing blend of deep feeling and scientific rigor. A joy to read, The Survival of a Counterculture is a stunning personal and sociological account of a group of innovative and courageous people, the communards. It is also a thoughtful and utterly serious exploration into the sources of ideologies and the very meaning of human groups and experimental life styles... In a sense, all of our lives touch the lives of the communards of "the Ranch," and thus all of us will want to become friends with this very special book."

– Thomas J. Cottle

"Berger accomplishes some very valuable things in this work. His sensitive depiction of communal lifestyle has the intended effect of illuminating some of the costs of conventional everyday life. His candor and reflexivity are challenges to the more usual, shallower styles of presenting claims to objectivity. Most important, his work here provides a model for describing and analyzing unconventional, deviant, 'alternative' ways of life that transcends both the romanticism and the cynicism that typically attend such efforts."

– Richard Flacks, Contemporary Sociology

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