Community Studies Research Paper

1. The Concept Of Community In The Social Sciences

Community, one of the most ubiquitous and imprecise terms in the social sciences, is usually associated with an array of positive connotations such as solidarity, familiarity, unity of purpose, interest, and identity. Earlier sociological debates of communities and their social significance stressed either a territorial base, i.e., groups whose members share a well-defined location (see Hawley 1950), or, later, community as state of mind—a collective sharing of an underlying feeling of sameness and belonging regardless of geographical dispersion (see Bell and Newby 1974). The latter option, while analytically promising and intellectually suggestive, produces a perplexing category. Since affiliation and identification with nonterritorial com-munities can be unclear even to the actors them-selves—let alone to social scientists attempting to characterize and study them—the concept can often be used and interpreted as an omnibus for a variety of intended and unintended meanings.

Not surprisingly, some sociological attention was given to the distinctions between the informal nature of communities and the more rigid structure of organizations (Gottshalk 1975, Azarya 1984) as well as to the problem of indeterminacy of community boundaries (Hillery 1955). These notwithstanding, community studies emerged since the 1920s and well into the 1980s as a solid branch of sociological inquiry, not least through the consistent preoccupation of the Chicago school with modernization and its impacts on urban culture, subcultures, and urban society.

2. Community (Re)Enters Anthropology

Anthropology, with its early emphasis on intensive field study focusing on small-scale groups, whereby culture and society were assumed to be unproblematic-ally linked to bounded space, had an inherent affinity with the view of communities as bounded territorial units. This may explain why the concept of community was not explored by anthropologists in earnest, receiving little explicit analytical and theoretical attention prior to the 1980s. Habitually working with bounded communities, anthropologists tended to develop context-specific tools for their analysis. Early emphasis on customs and manners, the subsequent emergence of the concept of culture, the paradigms of structural functionalism, transactionalism, symbolic interaction and structuralism a la Levi-Strauss all offered, in their respective heydays, rich and convincing frameworks for studies of small-scale bounded groups.

Thus, while the term community was always present in the anthropological lexicon, its syntactic status tended to be relegated to noun or synonym. It remained a finite, noninterpretative idiom and was arrested from becoming a dynamic theoretical tenet. In short, engulfed in ‘native’ ways of explaining solidarity and social relations, and taken by the concept of an immutable culture occupying an ethnographic present, anthropologists had little use for the community. And while Lynd and Lynd’s classic study of Muncie (eternalized as Middletown in Lynd and Lynd 1929), Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City volumes (Warner and Lunt 1941, Warner and Low 1947) and Arensberg’s work on the relationship between com-munity and culture (see Arensberg and Kimball 1965) undoubtedly inspired ethnographically oriented studies such as Robert Redfield’s The Little Community (1955), Marriott’s edited volume on villages in India (Marriott 1955) or Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain (1965), a strong and clear anthropological tradition of community studies was slow to materialize.

Two factors may have contributed to the emerging interest of anthropologists in the 1980s in the com-munity as an analytical and theoretical category. One was the aforementioned emergence in the 1960s and 1970s within sociology of the view of the community as a more abstract entity, whereby meaning and a sense of solidarity became more salient than tangible physical contact. The other was a growing need amongst anthropologists, by then more willing than ever before to study societies and cultures in the core and on the margins of Europe, to develop a theoretical toolbox for this new challenge.

An edited volume and an ethnography by Anthony Cohen (1982, 1985) indicated the efficacy of the concept of community for a more sophisticated under-standing of the relationship between local rural and urban communities and wider affiliations and identity, not least the ones connected to the nation state. The edited volume (Cohen 1982) had six anthropologists writing two essays each about rural communities in Britain. One essay was incorporated into a section of the book entitled ‘Belonging to the Part: Social Association within the Locality,’ while the other was included in a section called ‘Belonging to the Whole: The Community in Context.’ The sections corresponded to the dual theme of the inquiry: how people develop a sense of belonging in a small community; and how they develop an identification and a set of practices that reflect their sense of place in the broader realm that lies beyond the local. The first theme naturally focuses on kinship, sect, regional histories, and affiliations. The second theme, pursued in Cohen’s subsequent work, leads to a growing preoccupation with cultural boundaries and borders.

In terms of theory and analysis, the ethnographic attention paid by Cohen and his contributors to (mainly Celtic) rural Britain owes much to Clifford Geertz’s emphasis on meaning and cultural interpretation. The community, according to Cohen’s introduction to the volume, must be studied and interpreted not so much as a structured social organization but as an arena where experience is ordered, partly through a ‘local’ culture. This in turn produces a distinct local identity which is engaged in constant interplay with broader cultural formations, processes, and signals. Cohen’s volume thus signposted a new field of inquiry, the form and theoretical approach of which were different from those of the adjoining anthropological arena of peasant studies, the latter focusing mainly on rural communities in semiperipheral areas, including the margins of Europe and Latin America.

The importance attributed by Cohen to meaning and imagination, and the Wittgensteinian supremacy he advocates of context of use over lexical occurrence, becomes even clearer in The Symbolic Construction of Community (Cohen 1985). Simple people too, he shows, are preoccupied with symbols, constantly using them to make comparisons (and sense) of appearance and reality, likeness and diversity, similiarity and difference. Once more, social structure collapses at the feet of culture, subverting the monopoly of sociology over the concept of community. Significantly, more emphasis than ever before was now directed at the borders. Writers came to recognize that it is near boundaries, and across them, that community culture and identity were being determined.

Community studies reduce methodological, analytical, and theoretical differences between anthropology and sociology. Conrad Arensberg’s works of the 1950s and 1960s are by no means wholly sociological, and the same is true for Maurice Stein’s The Eclipse of Community (Stein 1960). By the same token, the strongly ethnographic turn of Warner’s Yankee City volumes, West’s Plainville (West 1961) or the Lynds’ Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929) probably warrant counting them as anthropological, while the preoccupation displayed by Cohen (1982, 1985), Frankenberg (1965) and Hannerz (1980) with broad sociological issues merit labeling their works at least partly sociological.

Some writers have alluded to an obvious short-coming of anthropological (and, for that matter, sociological) studies of communities—their propensity to be a-political. Rich in analyses of inherent traits and characteristics, such studies lend themselves willingly to elaborate treatments of culture, cultural identity, and demarcation. This, however, can often serve as a cover for shying away from and even blindfolding themselves to issues of internal and external power disparities, political economy, and historicity (cf. Aronoff 1984, Cox 1987).

A strength that anthropological studies of com-munities have had, at least since the 1980s, has been their emphasis on abstract experiences, not least imagination, as idioms shaping human identity and agency. Major inspiration for this project undoubtedly came from Benedict Anderson’s work, not least from his creative employment of this notion in his seminal work on nationalism, Imagined Communities (Anderson 1983). The focus on imagination resurfaced later in attempts to explore new ways in which anthropology could tackle the paradoxes and complexities of transnational experience and culture.

3. Critical Anthropology And The Concept Of Community

Like ‘ethnography,’ ‘the ethnographic present,’ ‘field-work,’ ‘informants,’ and other key anthropological idioms, ‘community’ became, in the 1990s, a construct. Idealized as a composite, unproblematized pillar of old guard anthropology, it could now serve as a hammering block against which critical ideas could be articulated.

Malkki (1997) looks at the connection between the concept of community and anthropology’s propensity to look for the ordinary, durable, ‘everyday’ routines and practices. This approach, which gained anthropology justified rewards and insights, gradually bred an expectation that all people studied by ethnographers are not just haphazard collections of humans somehow thrown together into the same location. Rather, they were expected to have always been part of a stable, permanent and—in particular—localized ‘community.’ But while such groups do of course exist, the emphasis on communities pushed anthropologists to overlook other possibilities, including those where life does create transient collections of humans randomly united. Such, Malkki (1997, p. 91) indicates, are what Barbara Myerhoff called accidental com-munities—Woodstock 1968 being a dramatic in-stance—and what Malkki herself found in refugee camps in Rwanda, where displaced people from a variety of places of origin huddled together, reinventing a sense of communal rootedness they may or may not have had in the lives they had before their dislocation.

Arjun Appadurai (1996), in his seminal work on the relationship between bounded place and culture in a world that is rapidly becoming dislocated, trans-national, and diasporic, likewise uses an idealized icon of the term community in anthropology to develop a more sophisticated concept of culture. Localities and communities, he asserts, must be historicized and contextualized, identified as processes of growth and shrinkage. Not least, anthropology should—and can—become more sensitive to what he calls the global production of locality.

Traditional concepts of community in the social sciences, as they had been applied to studies of rural Mexico, give Roger Rouse’s (1991) study of migration into the USA a much needed structure against which to prop his concept of transnational migration. Earlier migration studies, he aptly indicates, had a bipolar picture, with culturally and demographically stable and homogeneous collectives on both ends. Immigrants, within this framework of analysis, simply moved—more or less successfully—between two ‘communities.’ His own ethnography, however, convinced him that what was taking place in fact was a more complex phenomenon, a translocal movement backward and forward. This productively subverts the wholesome view of the community—be it in rural Mexico or in the migrants’ quarters of western USA—offering new tools for understanding of these complex and uneasy situations.

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