| How do residents of a small town go about creating a community today, when so much of what Americans associate with small-town life has changed? Combining the tools from the tradition of ethnographic community studies with the analytical tools of cultural sociology, this study of Viroqua, Wisconsin (population 4135), found that the answer depended on which social group within the town one was talking about. While existing literatures implicitly study community against a benchmark of an ideal-typical small village, this research argues that if a researcher remains agnostic about the definition of community, it becomes possible to see Americans making "community" in a variety of ways, depending on their own definitions of it.; Based on nearly two years of fieldwork, this dissertation describes three different communities within the town---the Alternatives, Main Streeters, and Regulars---distinguished by the different logics of commitment and ethics of agency that provided the bases for residents' practice of community life. The Alternatives, mostly newcomers to the area, shared with the Main Streeters, a deep belief in their own abilities to get things done through hard work and the deliberate building of community. The Alternatives, however, were less committed to Viroqua as a place than to an ideal of rural social life that drew them to the area. The Main Streeters and the Regulars were committed to Viroqua, by virtue of their sense of it as their hometown. The Regulars, however, felt that community was something that ought to occur organically, and should not require deliberate work. These differences in orientation to community life provided each group with different sets of constraints and opportunities, and formed the basis of social distinctions that were readily recognizable and important to Viroquans, and that trumped historically important distinctions such as religious, national, and ethnic identities. |
