ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the physical layout and patterns in the daily life of Kibbutz Vatik. The social arrangement of a continuous communal village like the kibbutz contributes to a form of interpersonal alliance and administrative affinity that is hard for inhabitants of less interdependent communities to imagine. Vatik's supportive, integrated, actively socially controlled, and moderately geographically bound community, with its strong emphasis on the flexible social relationship between members and the institutional orientation toward protecting human diversity, has a membership overwhelmingly committed to kibbutz methods. The social structure of Vatik tries to maximize individual options and preserve the kibbutz because circumstances of differentiation in the population, in conditions in Israel, and in ideology have shaped its development as a communal village. Vatik needs a boundary, the place where the community ends and the outside begins. A few kibbutzim have tried to erase the boundary with little success.
