Community

• 1. Introduction

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  Community is a word that populist politicians reach for, that advertisers exploit, and that promises mutual well-being, happiness, and togetherness. The source notes it veers toward an almost-achievable utopian community. The same word travels strange distances. It can mean a forest or a lake. It can mean QAnon. It can mean ancestral spirits the Shona people of Zimbabwe call midzimu. The English word descends from the Old French comuneté, and behind that sits the Latin communitas, meaning community and public spirit, from communis, common. So a single term carries warmth, danger, biology, and the dead. How do scholars pin down something this slippery? What happens when the same word does duty across archaeology, ecology, philosophy, and sociology? And why did a group of European philosophers decide the West had been thinking about it wrong?

• 2. One Word, Many Disciplines

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  Archaeologists use the term in two ways at once. In its literal sense, a community is simply a place where people used to live, synonymous with an ancient settlement, whether a hamlet, village, town, or city. The second meaning is harder to dig up. Social interaction on a small scale is difficult to identify from archaeological data alone. Researchers lean on a principle: that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. A small village settlement likely formed one social community. To reconstruct it, archaeologists compare similarities in material culture, from house types to styles of pottery, assuming people shared more with neighbors than with outsiders. Ecology takes the word somewhere unexpected. There, a community is an assemblage of populations, potentially of different species, interacting with one another. Community ecology studies how those interactions, plus interactions with the abiotic environment, shape species richness, diversity, and patterns of abundance. Species interact in three ways. Competition typically produces a double negative, where both species lose. Predation is a win/lose situation, with one species winning. Mutualism sees both cooperating, with both winning. Ecologists also separate major communities, which are self-sustaining and self-regulating like a forest or a lake, from minor communities, which rely on others, like fungi decomposing a log. The semantics cut both ways too. The epidemiological term community transmission carries negative implications, and a criminal community is usually called a criminal underworld or criminal fraternity instead.

• 3. Rethinking Belonging

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  Jean-Luc Nancy is credited with starting a debate when he published The Inoperative Community. The argument grew out of disputes over the meaning of the European Community, and it asked whether closed, exclusionary, identitarian models of belonging suited a globalized world. Maurice Blanchot answered with The Unavowable Community. Giorgio Agamben wrote The Coming Community, and Roberto Esposito wrote Communitas. Nancy himself returned to the question in Being Singular Plural, then reflected on the whole exchange in The Disavowed Community. These thinkers did not abandon the desire to belong. They tried to reconceptualize community in an open and inclusive way. The conversation widened further. Related titles include Zygmunt Bauman's Community, Greg Bird's Containing Community, Miranda Joseph's Against the Romance of Community, and Alphonso Lingis' The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. That last title names the paradox at the heart of the project.

• 4. Gemeinschaft And Gesellschaft

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  In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and split human association into two kinds. Gemeinschaft, usually translated as community, stresses personal social interactions and the roles, values, and beliefs that grow from them. Gesellschaft, translated as society or association, stresses indirect interactions, impersonal roles, and formal values. Tönnies offered this as a dichotomy, a way to think about social ties. He insisted no group is exclusively one or the other. Sociology kept circling the concept. Early studies identified communities as fringe groups operating at the behest of local power elites. Such work includes Who Governs? by Robert Dahl and the papers by Floyd Hunter on Atlanta. At the turn of the 21st century, academics, politicians, and activists rediscovered the idea, and politicians hoping for a democratic election began to realign with community interests.

• 5. The Sense Of Community

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  A seminal 1986 study by McMillan and Chavis identified four elements of a sense of community. The first is membership, a feeling of belonging or personal relatedness. The second is influence, the sense of mattering to a group and of the group mattering to its members. The third is reinforcement, the integration and fulfillment of needs. The fourth is shared emotional connection. From this work, Chavis and colleagues built a sense of community index, the SCI, later revised and adapted by others. Designed first to measure sense of community in neighborhoods, it was reworked for schools, the workplace, and other settings. The stakes turn out to be clinical. Studies conducted by the American Psychological Association indicate that young adults who feel a sense of belonging, particularly in small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who lack the feeling of love and belonging. Belonging is learned before it is felt. The process of adopting a community's behavior patterns is called socialization, and the family teaches it first.

• 6. Learning The Rules

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  Socialization runs most fertile in the early stages of life, when individuals develop the skills, knowledge, and roles needed to function within their culture. Some psychologists in the psychodynamic tradition place the most important period between the ages of one and ten. The process never fully stops, since adults entering a significantly different environment must learn a new set of behaviors. The family does the first work, teaching children community norms, before schools, peer groups, mass media, the workplace, and government take their turns. The norms that matter most are tolerance, reciprocity, and trust, which de Tocqueville called habits of the heart. How much a person adopts a community's norms shapes their willingness to engage with others.

• 7. Building It On Purpose

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  In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, published in 1987, Scott Peck argued that the accidental sense of community born in a crisis can be built on purpose. He described a deliberate design that passes through four stages. It begins with pseudocommunity, where people try to be nice and present their friendliest characteristics. Then comes chaos, where they feel safe enough to reveal their shadow selves. Emptiness follows, when everyone acknowledges their own woundedness and brokenness. Finally there is true community, marked by deep respect and true listening. In 1991, Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining it is difficult in the modern world. Deliberate building takes organized forms. The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and institution-based community organizing, which includes faith-based or congregation-based forms. When good-faith negotiations fail, constituency-led organizations apply pressure through picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics. The aim often reaches past any single issue toward a widely accessible power structure that distributes power equally. One example of structured method is the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University, which helps communities build by mobilizing neighborhood assets, from the inside out rather than the outside in.

• 8. Mapping The Forms

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  Paul James and his colleagues developed a taxonomy because the usual categories kept failing. Older breakdowns gave the false impression a community could be defined as just one kind, conflated modern and customary relations, and treated categories like ethnicity or race as given. The James taxonomy instead allows a single community to hold several kinds of relations at once. Grounded community relations involve enduring attachment to particular places and people, the dominant form in customary and tribal communities, where land is fundamental to identity. Life-style community relations gather people around chosen ways of life, whether morally bounded faith communities, interest-based sporting or business groups, or neighbors joined by convenience. Projected community relations describe a community self-consciously treated as an entity to be projected and recreated, from a gated community's advertising slogan to a nation, which the source calls one of the largest forms of projected or imagined community. These forms can nest and intersect. A location-based community may contain several ethnic communities inside it. The newest forms live online. Virtual communities treat knowledge and information as currency, and they differ from physical ones in the reach of weak ties, the relationships strangers form to acquire information through online networks. That openness has a dark edge. An epidemic of bullying and harassment has arisen from the exchange of information between strangers, especially among teenagers. Sheri Bauman, a professor of counselling at the University of Arizona, argues the most effective strategies to prevent bullying may cost companies revenue, which is exactly where the next fight over online community will be decided.