Community on the Edge

I have a background as an anthropologist. Back in the day, when I was studying the subject, I had a deep interest in Community studies. This interest stuck with me after grad school. And it continued to influence me while I worked as a practicing or applied anthropologist.

As an anthropologist, I’ve always been interested in the mechanisms in communities that foster and create community identity. Community is not just a thrown-together aggregate. Ideally, it’s not just a jumble of a few thousand individuals who happen to live inside an arbitrary geographical boundary.

Now, depending upon the nature of the community we focus on, you might say that it’s the political organization that’s important. There’s a town or city government that is elected or appointed. But people have needs that governments don’t provide. You then notice non-governmental agencies like churches, synagogues, museums, charitable or fraternal organizations, and more.

Then, we notice boundaries, neighborhoods, and other geographical aggregates within the jurisdiction. These areas are frequently named the Highlands, Eastie, the West End, and so on. They often have different characteristics assigned to them: upper class, working class, Downtown, and so on.

This brings us to social groups living in the community. Are they of different racial, economic, ethnic, or religious groupings?

As an anthropologist, I am interested in studying how these different areas, community institutions, and groups cohere as an entity we could consider a community. Questions I would ask and investigate are: What mechanisms exist that operate across boundaries to foster and maintain a wider identity? How are those institutions maintained? And how effective are the institutions?

I was lucky to work in a smaller urban community with a closely woven community identity. It had a very defined border, a large core of multigenerational residence, and effective mechanisms that solidified and reinforced community identity. In terms used by some of us interested in community study, it displayed an exceptional degree of corporate unity. All this unity was despite it being made up of residents from at least five different ethnic groups and several different religious persuasions.

No, it was not one big happy choir singing in unison. There were prejudices, bickering, and conflicts, but there was also a huge amount of community solidarity.

Do things like that happen over night. No. I did fairly extensive historical research on the community and from around 1814 when settlement started It slowly developed. It wasn’t something that came about without dispute, trial or compromise. It did however develop in contrast to a wider urban community around it that held it in low esteem. That oppositional force may have played a role in creating it’s unified identity.

It’s not the anthropologist’s role or tendency to play social engineer, so I hesitate to critique other communities or suggest that they need this or that. However, I do notice that many aggregates get called communities that seem to lack mechanisms to reinforce a common identity other than the economic ability to buy in. There is no other feature that pulls the whole together.

Some aggregates clearly have historical roots as more closely integrated units. Others have always been disparate conglomerations where the parts don’t quite make up a whole. But since the end of the Second World War, we have created many new “communities” that lack much cohesion. Additionally, we now play games with the concept of community. We designate things like gated housing units as communities without any sense or understanding of what the concept means.

You might feel that, as a society, we no longer need or want the sort of corporateness that was a prominent feature of communities like the one I worked in. Some people see it as a sort of free-will thing. They don’t like the sort of social and personal control they equate with a close-knit community. This may be true, but I’d suggest that more closely knit communities are more resilient to community-wide calamities, difficulties, or economic challenges. There already exists a sense of cohesiveness – a sense of “we” that transcends the class, ethnic, religious, geographic, or other boundaries that otherwise divide us.

To quote a popular statement attributed to Ben Franklin, “We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately.” Before we say farewell to older models of community organization, we should investigate what might replace them. There is a laissez-faire lack of concern regarding community.