Maintaining Solidarity: A Look Back at the Mormon Village

The present study suggests, in contrast to community dissolution theories, that community is maintained through a dialogue between ideological commitment and cooperative action within a cultural framework. The research follows up on a classic rural community study series, that of Lowry Nelson's Mormon villages . Replicating Nelson's ethnographic methods, the author reevaluates the earlier findings and extends the data by several decades. Nelson's findings on Mormon village dynamics are still relevant, although in modified forms, largely through community members' commitments to a common ideology. The author concludes that affectively based communities persist despite modernization. Mormon solidarity has endured because of its early articulation of expected interaction with the broader social world and because of its commitment to both ideals and practical action. Community and solidarity have figured prominently in sociological theorizing for more than a century. Indeed, one writer recently named solidarity "sociology's most revered topic" (Lindenberg 1998 :61). Familiarity with Durkheim's (1964) writings on mechanical and organic solidarity has become a rite of passage for aspiring American sociologists. Fewer sociologists are so familiar with the literature on community, although its history is at least as long. American rural and urban sociologists began to study community in earnest at the turn of the twentieth century, with a number of community studies that became classics . One of these-Lowry Nelson's Mormon village series -is often remembered for its integration of these two critical concepts. Nelson observed that the Mormon village is remarkable for its high degree of community solidarity . Because the literature suggests that viable and enduring social solidarity is rarely achieved and even more rarely maintained in the modern world, it seems important to understand the cultural dynamics that lead to this note-