Chaos, Organization, and Imagined Community: An Ethnography of an Anarchist Collective.

This paper is the result of two months of participant observation in an anarchist collective in a large Midwestern American city. Theories of collectivist organizations, social movements, and leisure groups provide relevant insights but fail to completely capture the distinctiveness of this group. I argue that it is best viewed primarily as an imagined community that provides its members with identity, meaning, and moral vision that are transportable to their lives outside the collective. In order to provide powerful transportable meaning and moral vision, the group must provide individual and collective identities that demand commitment to a distinctive, organic community of other equally committed persons. In other words, in order for this collective to be an effective imagined community, it must become a powerful actual local grounded organizational community. The paper gives ethnographic details to illustrate how collective and individual identities are formed and maintained through the resolution of means/ends conflicts, by defining protagonists and antagonists, and by the ritualized recounting of narratives. I argue that this group derives particular strength from distinguishing itself from other imagined communities by articulating and appropriating an extreme and unusual ideology in contemporary American life, anarchism. In this endeavor, the collective must enter into moments of both chaos and organization. The tenuous balance of these moments against each other is not a strange paradox of contradictory values, but rather precisely and effectively provides a powerful pathway through life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]