Dr. Maria Burschel is a German sociologist and Professor for Social Work at the IU International University. She worked as a social researcher for several projects at the German Youth Institute in Munich. Her focus lies in family research, divorce and separation, gender, community building, sustainability, and transformation. In her doctoral thesis she analyzed the "Doing of Separation" between parents in Intentional Communities as an indicator for social sustainability.
Crystal Byrd Farmer is an engineer turned educator, organizer, and speaker who focuses on co-housing, Black, and polyamorous communities. She serves as a board member for the Foundation for Intentional Communities and is passionate about encouraging people to change their perspectives on diversity, relationships, and the world.
Full Transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Virtual colloquium on gender dynamics and intentional communities. April 27th, 2021.
DAN MCKANAN: Hello and welcome to today's virtual colloquium on gender dynamics and intentional communities. My name is Dan McKanan. I am joining you from Somerville on the unseeded lands of the Massachusetts people and the watershed of the Charles River.
I have the pleasure of serving as the founding director of Harvard's Program for the Evolution of Spirituality. I'll say just a word about our program and this colloquium series before passing the mic to today's moderator.
The Program for the Evolution of Spirituality aims to support the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established spiritual traditions.
We seek to build a scholarly community that fully includes practitioners of alternative spiritualities, and critics of those spiritualities, as well as those who take a neutral scholarly approach.
We hope that all of you will be able to join us either virtually or in person when we gather for our inaugural conference on ecological spiritualities, April 27th through 30th, 2022. And you just saw a little more information about that event. It's also available on the web, if you just Google HDS Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.
Today's session is part of a monthly series of events digging deeply into power dynamics in alternative spiritualities and communities. We hope these conversations will highlight diverse individual experiences and diverse approaches to the abuses and dynamics of power in a manner that invites everyone to think more deeply.
Our two guests will be in conversation for the next hour after which we will have 20 minutes for questions from all of you. And now it is my deep pleasure to welcome our assistant program director, Natalia Schwien, who has been the guiding spirit behind this series and who will be moderating today's conversation. Natalia.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you so much, Dan. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Natalia. And as Dan said, I'm assistant program director for the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at HDS joining you from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the traditional homelands of the Massachusetts people.
Today's conversation marks the fourth iteration in our series on abuse of power. And we'll be shifting our focus slightly to discuss gender dynamics and intentional communities.
Many of the spaces our two panelists have studied aspire to do family and sexuality in a better way than in mainstream society. But the reality does not always conform to this ideal. So our question today is, what happens when an intentional community articulates ideals that it is not able to fully realize in its practice?
We are so thrilled to have that-- we are so thrilled that our two speakers today have agreed to join us and to share their expertise. So without further ado, please meet Dr. Maria Burschel. She is a German sociologist and Professor for social work at the EIU International University.
She worked as a social researcher for several projects at the German Youth institute in Munich. Her focus lies in family research, divorce, and separation, gender, community building, sustainability, and transformation.
In her doctoral thesis, she analyzed the doing of separation between parents and intentional communities as an indicator for social sustainability.
And our second speaker, Crystal Byrd Farmer, is an engineer and educator, organizer, and speaker who focuses on co-housing, Black and polyamorous communities. She serves as a board member for the Foundation for Intentional Communities and is passionate about encouraging people to change their perspectives on diversity, relationships, and the world.
And to frame the conversation, I would like to begin by inviting our speakers to share a little bit more about their work and about the specific intentional communities which they have studied. We'll begin with Maria and then move on to Crystal. Thank you.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Thank you very much for the introduction. Yeah, I conducted interviews with parents who had separated in intentional communities. And I visited four intentional communities in Germany.
All were situated in rural areas and small villages. All were between five and over 40 years old, so not in an early founding phase, but already established. They all had a structured admission procedure, for example, and organizational structures.
They all had ecological agriculture. They did community building after Scott Peck and nonviolent communication after Marshall Rosenberg. Maybe I should say a few words about the nonviolent communication.
It's a form of communication, like a technique, to increase peace and empathy. And when conflict arises or when communication becomes difficult, it advises people to distinguish between observation and evaluation or judgment, and stick to the observation, to the facts, to distinguish between feelings, and thoughts, and stories around it, and just talk about yourself and your own feelings, what you feel at this moment.
You should talk about your needs. They think the underlying assumption is that there are universal needs. And you should distinguish these needs from strategies which might cause conflict.
And also to distinguish between request and demand. You should not express a demand, because this will cause a reaction and a no. And if you express a request, you have a much better chance that the other person might empathize with you, take your perspective, but still has the opportunity to say yes or no.
So this is important for my research, these postulates of the nonviolent communication. And I also want to say that each of the four intentional communities that I visited had a specific focus which formed this the specific character of the community.
So one was basically about exploring new forms of partnership, sexuality, and love. One was more about the community building and sociocracy. One had a strong focus on ecological building, water cycles, and architecture. And one was based on a jointly operated gastronomy, event location.
So that was which really shaped these intentional communities. But all of them considered themselves to be pilots for a new socially innovative and sustainable way of living.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Maria. And Crystal, I'll pass the mic over to you.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Hi. So I am a diversity consultant and somebody who has worked with intentional communities for the past few years now. So my experiences in community have been as a participant, and as an observer, and then as a trainer.
Specifically for this chat, we're going to be talking about new culture communities, which are an offshoot of communities that were started in Germany by Dieter [? Doom ?] and focus on kind of radical relationship building and sexuality.
So I was a part of that work in the US and then I've been a visitor to many international communities in the US. And to give a definition of intentional communities, these are usually residential communities where people gather around shared values and shared ideals for changing the world.
So a lot of people think of kind of the '60s and communes that come up. And so communes are communities that share income and share all the expenses in common. Nowadays, there are lots of different types of community.
So along with communes, we have housing co-ops and then we have housing co-housing communities, which focus more on private ownership and private income sources, but are still kind of built around those values of sharing location and sharing values with each other.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: So thank you so much, Crystal and Maria, for sharing more. And I'm curious, what ideas have you found in these communities, the ideals that they particularly seek with regards to family, sexuality, gender, and inclusivity? Maria, we'll begin with you again.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah, as a sociologist and family researcher, I was especially interested in the ideals of family life and partnership in intentional communities. So in general, in intentional community, there's a general openness towards alternative forms of family.
The borders of the core family are open and they merge with the community. So it's permeable, family and community. And they merge with each other. And also privacy, there's not this very strict private space in intentional communities, which is a very interesting, because it's a new concept of family.
And with partnership, it's also very interesting, because they really focus on something or they value something which is called a pure relationship. Anthony Giddens came up with this phrase in the 1990s.
And it means you see partnership as something based on voluntariness, on mutuality, there's a balance of power, there's no dependencies, a love, authenticity. And also, therefore, there's an openness towards open relationships and polyamory, which does not mean that they all live that way.
But it's a general openness towards alternative ways of living. And it's not only abstract, but people really reflect on these values. They practice it. They do a lot of emotional work. They call it peacework. It's spiritual work. It's about a spiritually growing with a nonviolent communication and so on.
And I really wanted to kind of study separation with the way parents separate under the microscope in this field with this awareness of the values of this pure relationship.
And I wanted to know how they distribute paid and unpaid work, how they establish equality, how they create equal footing, or if they do that, and how they communicate, how do they solve problems in a partnership with children.
That was important to me. And how do they co-parent after separation? Because it's all very difficult and there's lots of potential for conflict.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so the first thing I want to point out is that it might be kind of funny for people who are part of the culture movement in their communities to be talked about in a context of religion and spirituality.
But the reality is that new culture does kind of come with some philosophy towards spirituality and for how to live in relationship with others and with the world. There's no specific religion that new culture people follow, but there is a tendency towards progressive spiritualities that are here in the US.
So some of the new culture's other-- I would say their main tenet and their main focus is radical relationship building and communication. So new culture is very interested in the way that we relate to each other.
And I think Deter Doom especially saw that the things out of the material world and capitalism were kind of preventing us from having deep relationships. And so new culture is all about cultivating those deep relationships. It's about radical communication, which is done through what's called the zegg forum. And then also they also use nonviolent communication.
And also, being open to alternative sexualities and alternative ways of relating. So polyamory and non-monogamy are also present in new culture communities. I'll go back a little bit to describe what zegg is.
Z-E-G-G is a discipline or way of talking about community issues that helps everyone become clear on where people are with regards to a certain event or how they're feeling and community or their relationship to community.
And it's seen as-- it's a very different style of communication than what typical Americans are used to as far as when they're in conflict with each other. And so that is kind of helping with new culture's stance toward being radically honest, and vulnerable, and being willing to talk to each other on a deeper level than just the surface level.
Ecological stewardship is also important in the culture communities. And so being gentle with the Earth and having values such as being vegan or vegetarian and being supportive of environmental efforts is another part of new culture's philosophy.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. That's really interesting. And it's so interesting, the focus on relationship that the two of you have looked at in these intentional communities. That feeds into our next question, which I'm going to turn to Crystal first about, which is that much of your work has been to support and educate communities after they have identified problems or imbalance in their structure.
So could you speak with us a little bit about some of the ways in which these communities sometimes struggle with these goals, or fail to reach these goals, or recognize an issue within their own structure and attempt to address that imbalance?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so because new culture is focused so much on deep relationships and communication, people can feel like they're really getting deep on issues and addressing things.
But when there's an outside perspective, there may be things that they're kind of glossing over, because they have shared cultural values. So some of the work that I've done writing about new culture is to criticize the way that new culture handles diversity, especially racial diversity and gender diversity.
So new culture, of course, was kind of started by older white people. And that kind of carries that middle class, upper class American ethos of individuality and kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that kind of culture.
And so when people created the systems and the ways that new culture people work together, they weren't always considerate of lower class people, gender minorities, like trans and non-binary people, and then of racial minorities, and socioeconomic differences.
So when those people engage with new culture, it's kind of like walking on to Harvard and not even having a high school education where there's so much going on intellectually and, especially, about the communication and how people are relating to each other that it's difficult to connect and understand how can you feel like you're a part of this organization that really is built on belonging and everybody being in relationship with each other.
And so some of those things are just because of the assumptions about people's differences. And one of the things that happens in a lot of organizations that are progressive is kind of like this colorblindness where if you think, we love everybody, we treat everybody at the heart level, we're really connecting with them, and that makes all the other things not important.
That means that we're dealing with them as a person, not as a Black person. But in reality, people are bringing all of their traumas, all of their identities, all of their selves to a new culture event or to a community.
And that means that those things will block the relationships or will change the way that people communicate with each other. My observation that when those things pop up in community, they can kind of be dealt with in the regular cycle of a zegg forum or in a communication with nonviolent communication.
But what's missing is kind of this meta analysis of what, as a community, are we doing to recognize these marginalized people and the ways that they're not feeling supported in community.
And so in a time that I've worked with new culture people and been a part of the communities, I've seen them kind of recognize that, and acknowledge that, and start working with that to change just the culture that is a part of new culture.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Crystal. Maria, I'm curious, your experience has been specifically in Germany, which, obviously, has a slightly different context. I'm curious, has your experience been similar?
Have your findings around some of the struggles to reach those ideals or to live up to those ideals-- if you could speak a little bit about how those communities have adjusted, that would be great.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah, well, I would like to give you an insight into my findings. So even though there is this openness towards alternative forms of living and family, I found that-- and also the people that I interviewed-- they actually all lived quite traditionally, considering the division of work.
So the care work being done by the mother and the breadwinning was done by the father. Even if they maybe had open forms of relationship or something like that, they still kind of stuck to this concept.
And we all know that this concept bears imbalances. But these imbalances were kind of not problematized until the moment-- maybe there is no problem. If couples stay together, the problems never arise.
But they will arise eventually when separation happens. And I spoke to separated parents and, normally, there's conflict after these when there were imbalances in the relationship before. But not so much here.
And I was wondering-- they were all quite happy with their separation, the way it went, and with the parenting after separation. And I was wondering why is that. And I found that they have a very specific concept of motherhood and conflict in itself.
And this, on the one hand, prevented conflict and prevented very difficult separations, but had very problematic aspects as well. And I would like to explain that a little bit.
So motherhood was really seen as mothers wanted to be mothers, full time mothers. It was seen as something very healing for themselves, for the child, for the world. It was seen as something very mature to be a mother.
It's almost like a higher state of personhood, forgiving, giving, taking yourself back, putting other people first. All this was seen as something very good, and feminine, and what mothers do, and natural. There's always this biological explanation with it.
So this is the way it's meant to be and that's why it's the best. And also, which I find very interesting, it's seen as something rebellious. It's like resisting the mainstream pressure to go to work as a mother and give your kid to long hours of daycare.
So they even felt like they're doing something feminist by being a full time mother, basically. And conflict was seen as a way to grow. it's not about, OK, two people want different things and we need to somehow come together and find common grounds.
But actually, it's inside of me. I'm fully responsible for all my feelings. I take them to myself. Nobody is to blame from the outside world. No structure, nothing. It's all inside of me. I never blame others.
They never considered themselves as victims. That is really frowned upon if you have this victim mentality. And according to the nonviolent communication, they don't express demands.
And here is the link to something which I would really call emotional abuse in partnerships during the course of separation, because it becomes really, really difficult that you can't demand something and if you cannot point out power dynamics to point out power dynamics is impossible.
And this leads to something-- the mothers always blame themselves. So they took all the blame to themselves, even if they had a really horrible separation, really traumatic, especially when the separation happened around birth when mothers were really in a very vulnerable situation or it was very small children.
And for example-- I could tell you the stories, but I don't want to go into too much. And they still blamed themselves for being angry, for being frustrated, for demanding more support, for demanding change.
If they said to the father, you have to be here more, you have to support me more, they were really completely confused. They didn't expect that and that led to self blame. They put themselves down. They doubted their feelings.
They felt they felt the wrong way. They should feel differently. And they took the man's, the father's perspective. So this is a little bit like trauma bonding. And I don't want to diagnose anything here. I'm not a psychologist.
But you have to consider if you practice nonviolent communication that there are different personality types. Some people are really good at empathizing with others. Some people are not. Some people cannot do that.
If you look at the narcissistic spectrum or psychopathic spectrum of character traits, these people are not able to do that. And then the nonviolent communication becomes really toxic.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Following on that a little bit, in new culture communities, there is also kind of this idea of owning your feelings and owning what's happening to you. And that can definitely create the toxic atmosphere of not being able to ask for support.
Because when somebody experiences a microaggression, sometimes the idea that, oh, you are opening yourself up to experience. It's not a systemic thing, it's a personal thing and you have to work around your reactivity around that.
And so that's definitely one of the failings of the way that new culture has been set up. And I think some intentional communities use nonviolent communication as a way to not take responsibility for their actions.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yes. And if I may add this, if you look at gender dynamics, I find that there's a high risk of traditional hegemonic masculine structures being solidified by the postulates of the nonviolent communication.
Because if everything is your-- it's all inside of you, nothing from the outside affects you, then it stays like that. It's not going to change. And with all these words, like authenticity, and love, and mutuality, they also abstract.
And they might mean different things to different people. And to the genders, of course, it means something different. And it even allows people who consider themselves to be male to show themselves vulnerable, and emotional, and modern.
They talk about feelings or that you were so aggressive, that hurt me so much. So they show themselves vulnerable, but, actually, solidify the hegemonic masculinity, but in a covert way. And that makes it so tricky to detect.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Maria and Crystal. And before we move on to the next question, Maria, you also mentioned the payment structure.
Just really quickly, I wanted to touch on that within the difficulty where you were finding in your research that male members of the community were being paid for their work or were allowed to have jobs outside of the communities, whereas the mothers, people who are identifying as mothers, they were not paid in the same way or they were working full time jobs, but that wasn't part of the payment structure. Was it assisting in creating an imbalance?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Well, I don't know if I understood-- what I meant is they did the traditional thing. The father went out and did the breadwinning. He had a job, a paid job. And the mother did the care work, the family work.
And of course, that's a full time job, but it's not paid for. And there's an obvious imbalance. Of course, in the moment you separate, one person has money, the other one doesn't.
And this is not looked at. There's a gender blind spot. And they don't look at creating common-- what's it called-- equal footing for both. So they are very focused on emotional growth and development, but not so much of the practical work. So who's doing what? Are people on the same level? Do they have equal footing? That's what I meant.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah, no, that's really helpful. And that leads us perfectly into our next question, which I'll also turn to Crystal first. And the question is, in our meetings together, we've talked about restructuring rather than dismantling one's problems have been identified.
And a big part of your work as well as Maria's work has been to encourage-- or especially your work, Crystal-- has been to encourage growth and transformation rather than to completely dismantle because the problem has been identified.
So based on your research, what advice would you give to intentional communities going forward as they're looking at power dynamics, as they're examining abuse of power, as they're examining roles within the community, what would your advice be going forward?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so the work that I do with communities and the advice that I give them is to step back, and take a look at those dynamics, and understand when it comes to race, a lot of communities don't have a huge number of people with minority races.
And so there is a need for them to understand more about that experience. And the easiest way to do that is through books or movies. And there's also ways that you can get feedback from people in the community that helps others to understand what's going on, but isn't it kind of traumatizing people to have to tell negative experiences.
But when it comes to gender, what I found has been similar to Maria is that they are very progressive and think that they're doing a lot around gender, but there are still very traditional roles that are defined.
And I think one thing that communities can do is look at how they value kind of the soft skills of emotional work and communication versus the hard skills of building a community, or milking the cows, and building the machines, and things like that and understand how they're seeing how that work is valued.
So there are lots of communities that try and create an equitable way of counting labor. And so it's important to think if people are building in assumptions that, oh, this is somebody sitting at a desk for two hours. And so maybe it's not as valuable as somebody working in the garden for two hours.
And especially, when it comes to child care, well, we're going to have a certain set of people do the child care. But those people may not be able to participate in community meetings or community meals, because they're always taking care of the kids.
So finding ways to value that work regardless of who's doing it and then kind of analyzing, are we making assumptions about what kind of body can do that work and what kind of body is best for doing that work?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: So the advice I would give them is the question, right? First of all, I feel the need to say that I found six types of separation. And I'm here talking about two types with this risk of emotional abuse.
I want to point out that there's all sorts of things also in intentional communities, but especially this one I could find in this atmosphere of the nonviolent communication.
So not to create the impression that it's all like this. But in general, I would like to give the advice to intentional communities to really look at their blind spots and to focus less on emotional and spiritual growth and more on who's doing what, on creating equal opportunities, on really reflecting on traditional gender roles, and to reflect on social sustainability.
Because that is what they want to achieve. They want to achieve sustainable living, new forms of living which create less pollution and less injustice. And they have to not only consider ecological and economical sustainability, but also social sustainability.
And I don't think that there's a clear definition of what that actually means. There are a few German sociologists, Matthias [? Grundman ?] and Iris [? Kunsther, ?] who worked around that and suggested something like, everything you do should create a connection between people.
And that could be something which could be a measurement for social sustainability. And I would like to add, everything we do should create equal opportunities for people. And that could be a measurement for social sustainability. Yeah, I think that's the main thing that I would advise them.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Maria and Crystal. That was really helpful and really interesting. And we will provide some resources that Crystal has sent over to us at the end of the session today.
So before we get into our Q&A with our audience, we'll explore a few more questions that came up during our conversations together. And either of you, Crystal or Maria, please feel free to jump in if you would like to respond.
We'll begin with how does the transient nature of some of these communities make it more or less difficult to maintain accountability around power dynamics? Do you have any advice on how this could be adjusted, or regulated, or structured in a way that helps to address some of the imbalances that both of you have studied in these communities?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah, well, maybe I start. What I found in the communities is-- I was studying separation of parents-- that it was really helpful for many mothers, especially, to be in the community when they separated, because they really felt looked after.
That says a lot of our mainstream society. They really felt that there's a container that can carry them through this difficult time of separation. They felt they had a human connection, they had friends, they had people to turn to.
They could find new partners. And they could find new alternative families if they shared flats or something like that, lived together with people. And they created something that feels like family, even if nobody was really related, but it feels like it.
And on the other hand, there is this fluctuation in intentional communities. People come and go. That doesn't mean that there's not a core. There's a core of people who live there for decades. But there's a lot of coming and going.
Some people stay just for an internship maybe, some for a few years, and then they leave. And that, of course, creates instability. And I think that's also reflection needed on this aspect.
Also, if you look at child development, how is it for children if they bond with people and find friends and then they go and there's this coming and going? I just think this is something that should be looked at.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: OK, yeah, what I've seen in intentional communities is it's kind of similar to what I saw when I worked as an engineer. There's kind of the formal policy, the written rules that you follow, and then there's kind of the hidden policies or hidden procedures that everybody actually does.
And when you're in an intentional community, I think it's really important to document the decisions that you've made, and why you made those decisions, and then how they're exactly supposed to work.
Because when you do have people moving on, people getting old, people dying, it's hard to keep that culture or keep that understanding through. Especially if it's like a 50-year-old community, there's only going to be a couple of people who were there at the founding that are still there 50 years later.
So I think when it comes to kind of creating some accountability, there just needs to be documentation for how do we go through these processes, what kind of incidents have we had before, and what did we do, and what worked with what we did, and what didn't work with what we did.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: I would like to add something here, if I may, again about the separation. Sometimes, I had the impression that for fathers, it was a bit like they felt they-- during the separation process, they felt good about, basically, leaving mother and child in the safe hands of the community and then going off.
So it even was a means for fathers to feel good, to present themselves as good and responsible fathers. But actually, they were left off the hook and they didn't, again, take the responsibility of the family work, and the work and relationship, and bringing up a child.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: It's really interesting. Thank you. Well, both of you, actually, have about foundation on myths in these spaces, especially with regards to how leadership is determined.
And Crystal, you just brought that up. And I'm really curious, especially with some of what Maria is saying, could you speak a bit more about how these stories, how the foundational myths of intentional communities affect gender dynamics in the spaces you've studied, and how they either support or complicate accountability in group dynamics?
And this might also be a good point for either of you, after Crystal addresses this question, to note the role of any charismatic leaders, if you've encountered them in intentional communities, and how that fits within foundational myths for these spaces.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so the cycle of creating an intentional community is roughly the same for different types of communities. They start out with some small group that has shared ideals and wants to implement the work.
But when it comes to the type of work that is done, there's definitely differences in which genders take on which roles. And so you may see the men kind of being seen as the figurehead, as the leader, as kind of the visionary.
But it's women who are usually doing a lot of those soft skills, again, a lot of that connecting, they're organizing potlucks, they're organizing book clubs, they're helping people to find them and to communicate with them about what the community is about.
And then you have the men who are doing roles like finding architects. The men are architects. Doing the actual construction and building are going to be mostly male bodies.
And so that is something that kind of gets overlooked when people are building communities, but it's just like when you see a forming community, which means a community that hasn't moved in yet, your first interaction is probably going to be with the women of the community.
And especially when it comes to seekers of community, it's more often the wife of a heterosexual couple that is looking for a community and then they're trying to convince their husband that this is a good idea.
But then when you get into community, the leaders, the people who are seen as like the influential people, are going to be male, just because we have that kind of expectation that men are strong, and dominant, and all of those types of things.
When it comes to charismatic leaders, there's definitely been a lot of communities that have charismatic leaders. And new culture has had that as well. Deter Doom himself was kind of a very charismatic person.
And so these people exert a lot of influence on what happens in the community. And when it comes to accountability, sometimes that influence prevents there from being accountability, especially if there's somebody who's doing harm and they're closely aligned with the leaders.
And that person is not going to be held accountable as somebody who's in the out group or just a general member of the community. So that's definitely been a problem in several communities that I've seen where you have people in power who are kind of protecting the status quo.
And when that status quo is causing harm, you might have people who are interacting with the community. They get harmed and they leave, because they don't see a way that they can change what is happening in that community, because they don't have that power.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's so interesting. Maria, do you have anything that you'd like to add in response to Crystal?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: No, I find it really very interesting. And I completely agree. I didn't study that, but my impression was the same. And also, I found that if women have a leading role, it's mostly elderly women or older women.
Women with children, the mothers, they are a different thing, somehow. But that's my impression. I didn't really study that. But that's what I saw.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. So we've talked a lot about motherhood and how the idea of motherhood kind of becomes a third category of personhood in these communities, almost as if the role is another gender or gender in and of itself.
And so could you please speak a little to how you see this play out, and how does this dynamic shift within a community which is inclusive of trans and non-binary people, or if it shifts at all?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: I think this idea of motherhood as being completely-- it's not about myself. It's all about giving, giving, giving, being there for others, taking responsibility for others, making it all nice for others.
And it's not only motherhood, it's also connected, of course, with femininity. And it's happening in families, so the place where socialization happens, where children learn the gender roles, the gender stereotypes.
And this is what is lived very much also in intentional communities. And it leads to, for example, many fathers that I interviewed said to me they feel left out in the family. They feel unimportant, especially when the children are little or babies.
They feel it's their role to keep this family kind of safe and to earn the money. But they as a person with emotions, with the ability to bond with people, with a child, they feel unimportant and even not important.
And they become more important once the kid is a bit older and then they go cycling, and climbing, and in the woods, and do the man things. So extremely traditional, very traditional.
So I found that really interesting. But they're not aware of it. They think or the way it is talked about, the concept is this is how it should be. This is good and this is natural.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so in my experience with new cultures, specifically, the ideas around motherhood and parenthood and then the inclusion of non-traditional nonconforming genders is very difficult for people to adjust to.
Because they are kind of raised in that middle class white culture where maybe the mom stayed home while the dad worked. The women did a lot of the cooking, and organizing, and things like that.
And so when it turns into a residential community, that work carries on and the children of that community are kind of brought into those same ideals without being challenged.
Since new culture is-- most of new culture is not residential communities, meaning people are coming to an event to live in that kind of a temporary space. There wasn't a lot of space for families.
There was some provision, if you wanted to bring your kid. But your kid also had to have a measure of independence and ability to take care of themselves while they were at the event.
When I was there, they hired a babysitter or a nanny who could help with that. But that person only worked during the daytime hours, meaning if parents wanted to participate in more of the sexuality activities that happened later at night, they had to get somebody to watch their kid or they had to stay home.
So there was definitely this kind of distinction between a woman who can participate fully in new culture and the mother who kind of has to worry about what is my kid being exposed to, who's taking care of my kid, is my kid wandering off in the woods, and things like that that are just kind of traditional associated with being a mother.
But when you have a temporary kind of residential camp and people can come and kind of be free of society's structures, the one thing that remains is kind of your motherhood, and your parent, and whether you have a child you have to take care of.
Oh, and then when it comes to trains and non-binary people, it was definitely a challenge for new culture, as I saw it, to integrate those people into community, just because, again, people grow up having an experience of gender and expectations around that.
And then there was a lot of safety issues, trust issues when it came to people who were gender nonconforming, because it's like, I'm expecting you to do a certain thing or to be a certain thing.
And maybe that person wasn't meeting those expectations, which, again, new culture would try and deal with through zegg and through nonviolent communication, but it was really about a cultural kind of held belief about what male and female bodies do.
And so there was definitely some challenges, and kind of pushing away some of those traditional thoughts about gender, and being accepting to how people present themselves and how they want it to be addressed.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. It's so interesting. So our last question before we move on to our Q&A with our audience is we talked about how emotional training and intellectual training around structural racism and structural patriarchal norms plays out in these communities, essentially, how we don't function as autonomous, unaffected individuals, individual agents just moving to the world.
That we are always affected by the structures which are in play, the larger structures that are in play beyond our community. And so I'm wondering, could you speak to how training does or does not play a role in the communities you've encountered?
And by training, I mean is there part of an initiation process or an onboarding process where structural racism, structural patriarchy is discussed, where people start to try to look at how it could be undone or dismantled within their community, how to support those from marginalized groups who are joining the community?
And if that even has happened in the spaces that you've studied and if it has not, how could communities adjust their process or even adjust their trainings every year, their meetings every year in order to look at how these imbalances are affecting the health and social sustainability within their community?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, I'll say the reason I have a job is because communities haven't addressed these things. Whether it's been a community for 50 years or it's a forming community, sometimes those ideas about diversity and structural racism are only considered when they realize they don't have diversity.
So there's definitely a need for people to recognize that there's a problem and then to somehow address that problem. And training is kind of the first step to get everybody on the same page. And I've definitely seen a resistance to that training.
In new culture, there's a lot of emphasis on the sexuality, and the spirituality, and the personal work. And so that means when you're asking people to do work around kind of like structural things, it's like there's some pushback, because that's not something we can affect or that's something that's in the outside world.
And so there was a lot of resistance to doing this work and to thinking about how marginalized groups show up in new culture spaces. Yeah, and so most communities don't do any kind of training.
But some kind of yearly training or just some kind of guidelines for people to read and to think about when they enter a community is really helpful for helping the majority population or white people to understand what other people might be going through.
But also for marginalized people to come into a situation and say, OK, I see that they have some training, so I know that, at least, some of my needs will be attended to.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah, I agree. I made the same observations. Also in Germany, it's basically white people, white middle class people, academics. And, of course, they carry this habitus with them, this culture.
And I completely agree. They don't really look at structure and socialization. And all this is not their focus. It's this concept that everything's happening inside of me and that I'm responsible for everything. And this is, I think, a very dangerous concept.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you all. Thank you to our attendees for joining us. We have about 20 minutes, a little bit more, to ask or to respond to questions from the audience.
So our first question is from Helen, which is, do any of the communities that either of you have studied include the elderly? And Crystal, you did talk a little bit about this in foundation myths and looking at leaders within communities. And are the communities you've studied prepared to have older members? And if not, what does that say about the community?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yes. So know there's kind of this cycle of a community. And a lot of communities are founded by young excited people with families. Especially in the '60s, a lot of kind of the long term communities in the US have experienced a whole generation.
And they find that those communities did not prepare for people to be old and not being able to walk around, and work in the garden, or fix the roof, or whatever. And so when that happens, the community thinks, OK, now we need young families. We need more people in.
And then they kind of repeat the cycle of we didn't plan for this, so now we have to put more work in to get those types of people. So yeah, there is this concept now of aging in place.
And so a lot of forming communities are trying to focus specifically on what happens when we get older and we need more support. Intentional communities do not want to become a nursing home. They want to be someplace where people are active and involved in the community from start to finish.
And so that means making kind of plans for adjusting to people at their end of life. And so if that means not having a lot of two level buildings, having less stairs, or having pads that are navigatable by wheelchairs or walkers, having enough people and different ages of people that when these people get older, these younger people will still be able to take on some of that physical labor, those are considerations that forming communities are trying to include now that they know.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Maria, has your experience been similar?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yes, absolutely. So they're coming up with this problem. They're seeing it and they're addressing it. And I found some people are a bit scared.
They're like, oh, god, I just moved in and I'm already old. And I'm not going to be able to put in that much and then I going to need so much help. So they feel this imbalance and they're a bit scared about that, because it's not established yet.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: I will also add that problem comes up when you talk about people with disabilities joining a community, because the idea of intentional communities has always been, oh, you're coming to put some work in.
But there are some people who have disabilities and they will always need to be cared for in their entire life. And intentional communities, in general, have not been set up that way.
So [INAUDIBLE] has done a lot of research with camp [INAUDIBLE]. So those communities are specifically created to have a support person to help that person with disabilities throughout their entire life. But most intentional communities are not set up that way and don't have any way to support people who have needs.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. Our next question comes from Sheamus, which is, what can be done in a community where people with more social capital use the presence of token community members to infer that there is no issue with inclusivity?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: So my suggestion is always to ask the token members what's going on with them and can I-- I brought my book. So I wrote a book kind from the perspective of a token.
And these people are tokens or somebody who's one of the only of a group. They're coming into community knowing that they're one of the only and knowing that there might be some extra stress related to their identity.
But it is not appropriate for the people in the majority to say, oh, that person is getting along fine, because that person may not be getting along fine. They may be experiencing microaggressions and conflicts that may or may not be related to their identity.
But when you think of the whole context of it, somebody with a marginalized identity is dealing with a higher level of [INAUDIBLE] the community. There's a lot to be worked out.
And so I would say to any community that's thinking about this, what are those people saying? And you have to do it in a way that helps those people to feel safe and comfortable actually saying it. Because, otherwise, you're never going to hear it until they're out of the community and they have completely gone.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Maria, do you have anything in response in your research that reflects that?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: No. I find that really interesting what Crystal's saying. But that was not my focus of study.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah, thank you. Our next question is from Stuart. They say, I've studied levers of new or nontraditional religious communities. What did you find-- specifically directed at Maria-- among your couples separating? Does this lead to one or the other leaving? And if so, was there a gender difference?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Absolutely. I don't have quantitative data on that. I don't know the numbers. But my impression is it is easier for the fathers to leave the community. And this is what happens a lot, I find.
Because there are a little bit more women in communities than men. Maybe that's why. And what was the second part of the question?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Did this lead to one or the other in a partnership leaving? And if so, was there a gender difference?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: OK. Then I answered that. And I found that men feel and even women feel thankful. They feel thankful to be able to be in the community, what I said, they feel safe there. And men also feel good. The fathers also feel good, because the felt they are in a good place.
I pay, I go there when I have time and do the climbing, and that's all fine. And they were happy with it. Both were happy with it. And again, the traditional roles are solidified.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. And thank you for your question, everyone-- questions, everyone. I am going to call Dan back onto the screen as he has a question for Crystal and Maria. And to our attendees, we do have some extra time, so if you have any questions or comments, please go ahead and put that into the Q&A, because we do have a little time to address them. Thank you.
DAN MCKANAN: So thank you both for your really important analysis. It seems like the communities we've been talking about share a tendency to put emotional openness in the foreground and structures of power in the deep background.
And that makes me kind of curious about communities where the opposite might be the case, communities that are built around changing structures of power, and whether they may be vulnerable to some of the same challenges if they don't give equal attention to the emotional openness piece.
And I don't know if you've seen the memoir by Alexandra Stein, Inside Out, which is about her experience in a Maoist community where everything was about putting each person into a particular pigeonhole as privileged or oppressed And everything kind of flowed from there in a manner that was quite coercive. So I wonder if you've experienced communities that start with the structures and what dynamics you've seen there?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Well, I think they all want to be democratic and sociocratically organized. They want to build decision making on consent rather than majority vote.
They want everybody to be seen. They do all these practices, these workshops, the forum, and all that. But for some reason, if you don't really consciously want to change your behavior, your gender specific behavior, which is deep in your DNA, if you don't consciously want to change it, it will always find-- like water, it will always find ways to come up again. That's my impression. And you have to want to change.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, I have been working with one group that is trying to address that in a really explicit way. So the foundation for intentional community created a group called the BIPOC Fund last year.
And so we have this what we call the BIPOC Council. And this council is specifically trying to create intentional communities that are centered around the needs of BIPOC and to give money to communities, to give resources to those communities.
And we have definitely formed kind of not just an egalitarian, democratic structure, but it's also a structure recognizing that we want BIPOC to hold the power. So that means limiting the voices of white people and how they're interacting with the council.
And so that really does lead to very explicit kind of like, here's the line of how much you can interact with us and control our policies, and our ideas, and our initiatives. And that's going to also come into play when we're applying for grants and other types of money from investors.
We want our money to come from a source of empowering BIPOC and not just us begging for money from rich white people. So yeah, there's definitely exciting work that we're doing there.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Maybe I can add something. Sorry, I just want to add and I didn't study that either, but that was my impression. I interviewed people who were in the mid or late 30s and mid 50s, this age range.
I think the younger people coming up, they're different. I think there's more a gender openness, more gender fluidity, more playfulness with the gender roles. And I think there's a change probably happening. But that's just-- maybe it's just a hope.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. And thank you, Dan, for the question. Thank you, Crystal and Maria, for such interesting and really thought-provoking answers.
So we do have another question from our audience from Stuart, which is, Maria, you said you found six types of separation. Could you discuss those, please?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: All right. Oh, god. I don't want to-- to put it briefly, I found six types of separation. One was where equality was from the very beginning the main focus. And then they retraditionalized when the first child was born and that was a reason to split up. And then the separation was the solution to come back to equality. So that was quite interesting.
Then I had a high conflict type. And then I had four types with very emotionalized gender concepts. And these four types I found in intentional communities, but not only.
And I also found, because now I was only talking about this very traditional concept of relationship partnership, but I also found within this traditional concept, mothers who were really-- I called this type devaluating, because they really devaluated their ex partners.
Using the feminine and attribution of being very empathic and very understanding. So they really analyzed their ex partner, went deep into his childhood and could tell everything about him, and then explain why he is completely useless in every way.
So they really devalued their ex partner in quite an impressive way as a man, as a father, as in every way. But they still wanted him to be in the life of the children, because he was the father. But they used him a lot. They instrumentalized the father a lot.
So just to show you, I'm not trying to make this good or bad. So also these gender specific characters can be also used in a toxic way on the feminine side. And maybe if I can add one more thing, which is a separation type, which I only found in intentional communities, was partners who really merged into each other, like a symbiosis.
They were completely into this sustainable living. And they dedicated their whole life to that and became one unit. And it kind of was not important who did what, because it was all for this one purpose.
And when they split up, it obviously became very difficult for a long time, because they really had to get out of this unity, which is become individuals again. But then they managed to do a shared parenthood afterwards in a way they were happy with.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Maria. Crystal, did you find anything similar in your research? I know you weren't specifically or don't specifically study separation, but I'm curious in the communities that you've studied if there is a similar way of approaching separation?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: I think what I've seen is kind of [INAUDIBLE] saying in that there's some absorbing of some of the responsibility, or at least the idea that the mother and the child can stay in the community and be OK, and that the menfolk will be able to move on and do whatever they want.
No, but I haven't really talked to a lot of people about kind of the separation or what happens when families are kind of broken apart. Because a lot of the communities I've been involved with are non-monogamous, there's definitely the drama and the difficulties associated with non-monogamy in general, which is kind of like the relationships breaking down, and then people picking sides, and then kind of conflict there.
So that's what I've seen. And that's worked through the same way that other kind of conflicts is worked through, usually with nonviolent communication.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Got it. Thank you so much, Crystal. So we have a question from Jeffrey, which is, many intentional communities seem to attract people by presenting themselves as having figured it out and being unique in their opposition to the status quo.
Could you speak two ways communities can increase humility and fluidity of process without losing the draw that people will have to going to a special community with a unique insight?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Crystal, can you start? Because I really did not quite get the question. I'm sorry.
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, so the question was kind of about communities being really special and unique. And how do communities recognize that they're not special and unique.
So I always want to communicate to communities that they think they're doing something super progressive and different, but they still if they haven't examined all those things that they're bringing into it, then it's going to be exactly the same structures that they're replicating from the outside world.
So how to increase humility? I think just part of my job is to help them understand that they have those things that haven't been brought up that other people are seeing, but they as a community are not seeing.
And definitely having an community that's open to visitors and open to people, to new people coming into the community is a way to kind of keep that fresh. Because when you do have new people, they're recognizing things that the older community members haven't really thought of. And that can help push communities forward.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah. As I said, I think they should focus less on this spirituality and more on have a practical approach on how do we live, how do we divide the work, and how do we create equal chances for everybody to do soft skill, and hard skills, to do the family work, the relationship building, and to do the hands-on work.
And both genders should be involved in the same way. And I think this is something that cannot be done voluntarily, I'm afraid. I think it needs to be-- somehow, it needs to be, we're going to do this. It has to be done. Otherwise, we're not going to change the inequality.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Well said, both of you. Thank you so much. So I think our final question, unless we have anyone else who has something brewing they'd like to present to our panelists today, is from Sue [? Aro. ?]
And the question is, I thought specific gender has genetically, as Maria mentioned, already set abilities such as female-- OK, so let me think through this for a second. It seems like gender inequality, in the sense of traditional gender roles, seems very difficult to be changed.
What are some practical ways in which that inequality could be-- either already is being changed within the communities that you've seen, especially for you, Crystal, in spaces that have been open to non-binary and trans members joining their communities.
And Maria, you mentioned that in the communities you've studied there's been pretty specifically people who identify as male and people who identify as female and very heteronormative relationships.
So I'm curious how that sense of traditional gender roles, how are some ways, practical ways, besides just examining it, what are some ways which that could be shifted or adjusted?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, I have a strong reaction to the idea that because a woman has a child that she is somehow more responsible for the child. So I think the genetics of it aren't really-- they aren't in play, because we're not just animals who just do our genetics tell us to do.
We have the ability to examine these structures. And a male parent can participate in the upbringing of a child from birth just like a female parent can. So I think when we think about gender equality, we have to move away from the idea that somebody is meant for this role.
And also, now that we do have this gender nonconforming thing, there are people who identify as male who have a uterus and who can have a child. And so does that mean that they have to be the one that stays home with the child? Or can we reexamine those roles and do what works best for each person instead of what their genitals are telling us they should do?
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Crystal. Excellent response. Thank you so much. Maria?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yeah, I would like to add, if you look at what we know about separation, if you look at the research, we see this financial struggle for women after-- in a nutshell-- after divorce and the social struggle for men.
They feel left out. They feel abandoned. They feel alone and all the rest of it. And women feel overwhelmed by the work and blah blah blah. So this is what we know. And divorce and separation is it's a normality nowadays.
So why don't we consider this when we start a family and just say, OK, let's live in a way and let's organize our family in a way that we can separate and nobody's going to be disadvantaged. And I think that would solve so many problems.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah, that's really helpful, the idea of family planning with separation as a part of that. And community planning then at large in these spaces.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Yes. Exactly.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. OK, so really quickly, we have one last question from Beth, which was, I agree with the answers to the question. Thank you, Crystal.
Also, who are the male bodied folks working on these challenges within intentional communities? And if there aren't many who identify as men, will things really change?
CRYSTAL BYRD FARMER: Yeah, that's a tough one. There are leaders within the intentional communities movement who are really taking on this idea of diversity and trying to change power dynamics.
Do any of them identify as men? I don't know. Skye Blue used to be the director of the Foundation for Intentional Community. And they have always used kind of their role as a leader of the movement and as part of this non-profit organization to encourage communities to think about these gender dynamics. And so I think Sky's work is probably the most relevant.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Crystal. Maria, do you have anything to add?
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: No. Thank you, no. Not to this one.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Wonderful. These were such wonderful responses. Thank you, Crystal and Maria, so much. And thank you to our attendees, to our audience for joining us today.
We encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter for more information on future events, including upcoming colloquia and information on our inaugural conference on ecological spiritualities in April, 2022.
You can find more information about the colloquia as well as the conference on our website. Crystal today has suggested some information and resources for those of you who would like to follow up on some of the topics we covered today. I'm going to go ahead and pop those into the chat. Thank you, Crystal, so much for sharing these. And it was just so interesting to hear about your work today, both of you. Thank you.
DR. MARIA BURSCHEL: Thank you too. Thank you for the interesting questions.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yes, for sure. Thank you and to our audience as well. All right, well, thank you so much, again. Wishing you all health and safety in these complicated times.
And we hope to see you next time. Please feel free to write at pes@hds.harvard.edu if you have any follow up questions and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you, again, Crystal and Maria. And hope to see you soon.
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