Testing Utopia: My Summer MAP

I meet up with my guide in the Argiro Student Center.  She’s a Maharishi Vedic Science (MVS) Ph.D. student at Maharishi University of Management (MUM) in Fairfield, Iowa, and she’s agreed to show me one of the meditation domes today. The two domes are where the many hundreds of practitioners of Transcendental Meditation who live in Fairfield come twice a day to meditate.  The principles of Vastu architecture, the origins of which date back over a  thousand years, require all meditator buildings to be surrounded by a white fence, and as we pass through the gate in the fence surrounding the dome I have a feeling that I've just passed a metaphorical threshold. There's no going back now, you're really in it this time! I think as I close the latch behind us and make sure my face is composed to reveal none of my incredulity, excitement, and skepticism. I turn around and face the Bagambhrini Golden Dome for the lady meditators. Here we go….

This past summer, I completed a Mentored Advanced Project with Professor Andelson in which I conducted seven weeks of ethnographic research in Fairfield (pop. 9,500), the county seat of Jefferson Co. in southeast Iowa.  I engaged in participant-observation and conducted interviews with a focus on the surprisingly numerous sustainability initiatives in Fairfield.   Among the questions we addressed were why so many sustainability projects were occurring in Fairfield and whether the community’s accomplishments in this area could be models for other communities such as Grinnell.  My final report, “A Taste of Utopia: Cultivating a Community of Sustainability in Fairfield, Iowa (PDF)", is posted on the Center for Prairie Studies website.

While I was pleased with the outcome of the MAP and the paper, I did not feel as though I was quite finished with Fairfield.  In particular, I wanted to explore the spirituality component of the town in greater detail.  As part of my MAP research, I learned a lot about the role the Transcendental Meditation Movement has played in fostering sustainability initiatives in Fairfield.  However, the role of the Movement is much larger than its impact on sustainability.  The story of the Meditators’ arrival in Fairfield, their influence on the town’s character, the nature of TM (is it a religion, a philosophy, a world view?), divisions within the Movement, and the Movement’s response to the death of its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,  in 2008 are topics I hope to explore in a senior thesis in the spring semester.