Material Visions
Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past can invite conflicting views among scholars and community descendants. This chapter spans the volume's widest temporal range, from eighteenth-century ceramics and food remains left by Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister to twentieth-century vinyl records listened to by members of California's Chosen Family. Examples from the Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians demonstrate the importance of building community-specific contexts of interpretation that are sensitive to differences between individual groups as well as temporal changes within long-lived communities.