Close, interdependent communities not based on family relationships, communes have a long history in the United States and continue to represent a strand of American culture and ideology that sanctions the search for a utopia of peace, love, and equality. Researcher Benjamin Zablocki defines a commune as a group of unrelated people who voluntarily elect to live together for an indefinite time period in order to achieve a sense of community that they feel is missing from mainstream American society. Most commonly associated with the hippie and flower child members of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, communes have professed a variety of reasons for existence and can be politically, religiously, or socially based and exist in both rural and urban environments. Keith Melville has observed that commune members are linked by "a refusal to share the dominant assumptions that are the ideological underpinnings of Western society." They are...