Beginning of Essay
Throughout the history of anthropology it has been a popular view that people are largely products of their culture, and not the other way around. Yet culture is an exclusively human phenomenon. While it is true that everyone lives within a cultural context, and t ....

Middle of Essay
.... from the cultural context from which it came, was surprisingly successful. The Oneida Community, in Oneida, New York was a unique religious communist society in the mid-nineteenth century. The community was based on the radical religious beliefs, and biblical interpretations of John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes grew up in a well to do household in Vermont. He Graduated from Dartmouth College in 1830 with high honors. Up to that point he had been cynically agnostic. But in 1831 he attended a revival with his mother lead by Charles Finney, the leader of a large religious movement in the northeast. Deeply moved he decided to enter the ministry. Noyes attended ....