Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

Handy Highlights for Student Researchers

Dancing Rabbit (DR) is an ecovillage with an outreach mission. Over the years there have been thousands of visitors to the community, with many researchers among them. Like anyone, researchers can’t just “show up” but have to arrange in advance to visit the community, meet Rabbits, and ask questions. Several intensive and long-term studies have been conducted in the community across (mostly) the social sciences and humanities. 

One of the research projects that has been oft cited and prominently displayed on the website is a consumption audit done by a team of anthropologists. This was led by Joshua Lockyer (2017) of Arkansas Tech, along with University of North Texas graduate student Brooke Jones (2014), and undergraduate students from Arkansas Tech and Grinnell College. They took turns weighing trash, monitoring electrical panels, tracking use of the DR vehicle co—ops, and asking people to keep journals of water consumption. In the end, they found that Rabbits used 80-90% less than the typical American in these key resources.

This is what the village hopes to achieve, as religious studies professor at the University of Florida A. Whitney Sanford (2014) ascribes it, to “be the change you wish to see in the world” – often attributed to Gandhi. In academia, we would call that “prefigurative politics” and several researchers have come to discuss various aspects of prefigurative politics after spending time at DR, mostly through interviews and participant observation. Sociologist Chelsea Schelly (2017) of Michigan Tech wrote in her book “Dwelling in Resistance” a chapter about DR’s buildings. In it, she discusses how the village’s emphasis on alternative, low impact technologies creates a mutually supportive environment for members to live simply, downsize, and embrace ecological living. People building their own houses learn what is possible in the world, and “alternative forms of practice very quickly become new norms in practice.” (p. 224). Geographer Robert Boyer (2016) of University of North Carolina – Charlotte also describes how by managing certain systems and resources collectively at the community level, DR is more able to embrace ideas outside the mainstream of society, like their infamous no flush toilets rule. 

The idea of alternative social systems is also a major theme of what people have studied at DR. Sociologist Zach Rubin of Lander University conducted a nearly year long ethnography at DR and published several things about these. For one, Rabbits tend to operate in a mindset alternative to modernist notions of “progress” as stemming mainly from growth, and that we could not economically grow our way out of problems as much of the world suggests (2019). Despite being an open community, Rabbits do have to work hard to set norms and boundaries around what it means to live there and what they hope to accomplish in order to maintain a balance between growing in size and maintaining a cohesive collective identity (2021). 

Are you interested in joining the list of people who have come to study some aspect of DR, and to show the rest of the world what is possible when a group of people dare to think beyond the hegemonies of Western, capitalist culture? Academics of all stripes are welcome, including the physical sciences since that’s a huge gap in ecovillage research writ large. Reach out and ask today. Rabbits don’t bite. Well, at least not just for asking questions. 

Boyer, R. H. W. (2016). Achieving one-planet living through transitions in social practice: A case study of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 12(1), 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2016.11908153

Jones, K. B. (2014). Toward sustainable community: Assessing progress at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage [M.A.]. University of North Texas.

Lockyer, J. (2017). Community, commons, and degrowth at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Journal of Political Ecology, 24, 519–542. https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20890 

Rubin, Z. (2019). Ecovillagers’ assessment of sustainability: Differing perceptions of technology as a differing account of modernism. Sustainability, 11(21), 6167. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11216167 

Rubin, Z. (2021). “We Do This at Dancing Rabbit”: Recruitment and Collective Identity Processes in the Ecovillage. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 50(4), 0891241621994651. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241621994651

Sanford, A. W. (2014). Being the change: Food, nonviolence, and self-sufficiency in contemporary intentional communities. Communal Societies, 34(1), 28–53. 

Schelly, C. (2017). Dwelling in resistance: Living with alternative technologies in America. Rutgers University Press.