How to Share

Intentional communities are spaces where many forms of sharing are practiced. In this chapter, I explore an everyday example of sharing in a community, – a communal mug collection – and consider how it might be understood using Gregory Bateson’s concept of the relational metaphor. Observing the use of a mug collection in a particular community, I consider how the way mugs are shared draws visitors and residents into specific relations, and explore the various ways in which residents navigate these relations. I use a loose auto-ethnography of informal observations about mugs, other objects, and experiences of sharing made while living as a community resident to assemble observations about the way in which individuals engage in, experience and have shifted their personal approaches to sharing through the mug collection and the navigation of other commonly used objects in their community. Through this discussion I hope to enrich how we think about the experiential dimension of commoning by drawing out ideas about relational know-how — what it is, how it is communicated, and what engaging with it can offer. In describing the communal mug collection this way I suggest that intentional communities offer spaces for participants to expand or challenge their repertoires of interpersonal skill, play at shifting their expectations and understandings of their own individual needs in terms of ownership, and through metaphor, build a common sense of a multiplicitous, ecological world.