Synopses & Reviews
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a large portion of the population had become disenchanted with the American way of life that they did not feel they belonged to. While some openly revolted in the streets, others took to turning away from the mainstream and headed toward a new world. Utopian visions, manifesting themselves in the form of communes, were aimed at breaking the bonds of capitalism, big business, and the reigning oligarchy and were popping up throughout the country. The San Francisco Bay Area was the hotbed of these communes, and from the Height-Ashbury in San Francisco, east to Berkeleys protest hub at Sproul Plaza, and south to Oaklands Black Panthers communal households, this is an exploration of this unique cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The history and vision of communal living is investigated in a series of essays aimed at explaining just what these communes were, how lives were lived within them, and what their goals entailed.
Review
"An amazing place and time that, for all its failures, changed the worldand which finally gets its due in this marvelous collection." Richard Walker, University of CaliforniaBerkeley, author, The Country in the City
Synopsis
In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and '70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury's gift economy--its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre--and Berkeley's liberated zones--Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People's Park--were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes.
Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties.
Due to the prevailing amnesia--partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat--West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use--indeed one they will need--in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.
About the Author
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian who is affiliated with the University of CaliforniaBerkeley and Birkbeck CollegeLondon. He is the author of The Green Machine and the coauthor of Retorts Afflicted Power. He lives in San Francisco. Janferie Stone is a teacher and writer whose essays have been published in Sustainable Feminisms. She lives in Mendocino, California. Michael Watts is a professor of geology and the chair of development studies at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley. He is the former director of the Institute of International Studies. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Cal Winslow is the author of Labors Civil War in California and the coauthor of Albions Fatal Tree. He lives in Mendocino, California.