Intentional community building is a phenomenon of socio-cultural resistance with a deep, cross-cultural history. It has been most prevalent in the nations of the Global North where people have sought ways to respond to changes wrought by the development of industrial capitalist political economies. In intentional communities, they have responded by joining together to live according to values different from those of the predominant society, to create small-scale cooperative or communal political economic institutions and alternative production and consumption rationalities. Interdisciplinary scholars have typically described intentional communities as utopian in nature, but they have disagreed with regards to the transformative potential of such utopian undertakings, their ability to successfully achieve the goals they set for themselves and their utility as sites for social science research. This research builds on recent theorizations of intentional communities to suggest that they are of increasing relevance to contemporary social and environmental problems and of increasing utility to social scientists wishing to engage with potential solutions to those problems. Most prominently, it empirically tests a recent conceptualization of intentional communities as explicit forms of cultural critique similar to the cultural critiques implicit in much of anthropological knowledge production. Through participant observation in two intentional communities in western North Carolina, analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted there and analysis of the communities political economic institutions, it reveals how contemporary intentional communities are manifestations of cultural critique. These cultural critiques consist of two components: epistemological critiques of dominant ideologies and institutions and cross-cultural juxtapositions through which alternative ideologies and institutions are created. Through the articulation of the concept of developmental utopianism, this research asserts that the processes of cultural critique and utopian striving inherent to intentional communities are ongoing processes that cannot be evaluated solely within the boundaries of individual intentional communities. It also suggests that through the ethnography of cultural critique in places such as contemporary, sustainability-oriented intentional communities, anthropologists might be able to navigate some of the epistemological and methodological challenges that have confronted the discipline in the wake of the science wars and in our quest to address social and environmental problems.