|
|
|
Book Review
| Anarchy and Community in the New American West: Madrid, New Mexico, 1970–2000. By Kathryn Hovey. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xvi + 247 pp. Illustrations, bibliographies, index. $34.95.)
|
|
Anarchy and Community in the New American West is a study of the ongoing cultural and economic revival of the tiny community of Madrid. Like many other places throughout the West, Madrid currently is experiencing drastic change due to increased tourism, the development of exurbs and rural sprawl, and urbanite relocation. An abandoned mining town, Madrid became a haven during the 60s and 70s for counterculture hippies who sought alternative lifestyles and freedom from government restrictions. These "resettlers," as Hovey calls them, and the ways in which they interact amongst themselves and with the larger society to create or impede Madrid's development as a community, are the primary focus of the book. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, Hovey discusses the contributions, conflicts, and failures of Madrid's resettlers in their attempts to establish "alternative" forms of living. The book will interest those studying rural socioeconomic change, sociologists of counterculture movements, and historians of the West. |
1
|
|
The book also has weaknesses. Primarily, there is no clear articulation of what the book is about. It is a history of Madrid's hippies, but it is also economic history, ethnography, an analysis of community-building, and a critique of development, land use, and planning. While these issues might be related, the author never explains the linkages, specifying how and why those relations play out in Madrid. Characters and ideas are introduced and dropped, to reappear later without context, development, or continuity. Three chapters in, it was unclear what the book was really about, where we were going, and why Madrid was important. This is because the book lacks a formal introduction, but instead provides a detailed and excellent history of Spanish New Mexico, Madrid's history as coal camp, and reviews issues of development and growth in the West for the first fifty pages. Call me a traditionalist, but I like chapter maps, overviews of primary points, and a clearly outlined thesis. Some of these occur in the conclusion, where it is too late. |
2
|
|
Hovey's own relation to the counterculture movement and to Madrid, both personally and intellectually, is ambivalent, which, to her credit, she acknowledges. At times she maintains a scholarly distance, critiquing, for example, the excesses of rampant individualism as impediments to counterculture goals and positing the movement as an extension of bourgeois culture rather than a rejection of it. At others, she falls prey to its own ideology, suggesting, for example, that this community is somehow more authentic and offers an alternative to so-called homogenizing modernity. For those interested in examining the counterculture and its impact on rural western communities, however, this book remains useful. It has good information and insights, but its reading requires some tolerance and open-mindedness. In asking these of the reader, it perhaps achieves some of the goals of the counterculture movement itself. |
3
|
| Lisa Gabbert
|
| Utah State University |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
ISSN 1939-8603
|