The Concept of Community

Readings with Interpretations

Scott Greer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351484565
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

"Community" is a basic concept, perhaps the basic concept, in social science and in social philosophy. Its meanings are many and varied, yet it is pre-eminent in discussions of man and his world. The editors of this book have selected material from many sources in an attempt to explore the meaning and relevance of the idea of community as it is used in social science, political commentary, and general literature.

The book is organized around four basic problems: What aspect of social life is community? What is the character of community in different settings? What is the relationship of politics to community? What is the prospect for community in today's changing world? To answer these questions, the editors have drawn from historical and contemporary sources in political philosophy, empirical social science, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, and ancient and modern literature (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer, C. P. Snow, Lawrence Durrell, and others)--all reflecting a broad spectrum of attitudes and approaches. Community is considered in both Western and non-Western societies. The editors introduce each chapter of the book with a critique and provide the reader with an informed general commentary.

Including some of the classic statements on the meaning and importance of "community" while drawing upon new sources of insight, this book supplements courses relating to this central concept. Emphasizing the idea of community as an aspect of social organization and political life, it is especially useful in political science and sociology courses dealing with local politics and the urban world.

PART I

Roots of Community in Social Life Scenes and Kinds of Social Interaction

CHAPTER 1

Human Life and Social Interaction

At the roots of the human community lie the brute facts of social life: organization. It has been suggested that life and the potential for life are coterminous with matter. In like manner, it is probably true that some kind of social organization is coterminous with life: society is a universal. And society begins with interaction and the mutual modification of behavior. Such interaction, in turn, becomes patterned by the nature of the activity which calls it into being; it is structured. Certain structures are partly defined by the spatial scene they occur in; through interaction emerge shared perspectives and commitments to the place and its group—that is, the community.

Social interaction is thus an inescapable aspect of human life, L produces organization, and organization in turn structures the interaction. It begins with the interaction of the unborn child and his environment, his mother. It continues through years of dependency, during which the child is taught the shared perspectives of his elders and peers and unwittingly makes his own commitments to place. It continues as he emerges into adult status.

Thus it makes sense to begin our consideration of community by looking at the relationship between interaction and commitment to a given place and its group. In the selection from George Romans’ The Human Group we have a clear and elegant analysis of certain aspects of observable movement, which he then conceptualizes as action, interaction, and sentiment. His general thesis, argued powerfully in the remainder of his book, is that out of our interdependence and the activity it entails comes interaction, which in turn results in sentiments of the individual for the interdependent group. Thus the strength of a group, a spatial community, to unite and direct its members’ actions will be a result of the degree of interdependence and sentiment generated between members and for the group as a whole.

Romans’ discussion is also valuable for its extreme clarity in developing an empirically relevant set of concepts. His insistence that we trace words to observable events is a first commandment in social science; when we deal with words as global as “community” we do well to keep that directive uppermost.

The selection from Goldirig’s novel Lord of the Flies indicates the process by which a randomly collected number of children, lost on a desert island, come together. Out of the activities of the first two children emerges a symbol and a social action: the blowing of the conch. Beginning as play, it results in function. The assemblage then begins slowly to structure itself, the interaction part purposeful, part play, part accident. Yet the central tendency, as a statistician would say, is in one direction: toward the generation of interpersonal relationships, sentiment, a community. The treatment of one boy indicates the poignant fact that community-building often finds reinforcement through excluding as well as including the actors in the scene. This is easily documented in everyday life, from the Men’s Houses of New Guinea to the Sigma Chi house of any university.

George Homans
Elements of Behavior

EVENTS IN THE SINGLE GROUP

We are going to begin with a description of everyday social events in a society not our own. The world is a stage, and one of its many scenes opens:

The room is low and rectangular. The left wall is filled by a door, closed, and a big stone fireplace, fitted for cooking. Chairs and benches are set around the fireplace. Against the back wall a table stands, and to the right of the table a colored picture hangs over a cabinet containing a small figure. The right wall is taken up by a dresser, full of kitchen gear and crockery, on one side of which is a door and on the other a staircase leading upstairs. Through a window over the table a yard, with a cart in it, is seen in dim light.

A woman opens the door, right, and comes into the room. She goes to the fireplace, rakes together the ashes on the hearth, some of them still alive, puts on new fuel, and rekindles the blaze. Then she fills a kettle with water and hangs it on a hook over the fire. When it boils, she makes tea; meanwhile she lays out dishes, cutlery, bread, and milk on the table, and gets ready to cook eggs.

A middle-aged man and two younger ones enter, exchange a few words with the woman, pull up chairs, sit down at the table, and begin to eat. The woman herself does not sit, but stands by, ready to bring up more food and drink if the men ask for them. When the men have eaten, the older one says to the younger ones, “Well, we’d better be off.” They go out.

By this time a girl has joined the woman in the room, but not until the men have left do the two sit down for their meal. Before they have finished, crying is heard outside, right. The woman leaves and later returns carrying a young child in her arms. She fondles and comforts it, then feeds it in its turn.

She turns to the girl, who is already washing the dishes, with a remark about making butter. . . .¹

We need not go on. This scene or something much like it, has been enacted millions of times in the history of mankind, and it shows, of course, a farm family beginning a working clay. It is not an American farm family, though families of this sort were common not so long ago in America and survive in some places still. It is a countryman’s family in the southwest of Ireland. Farm families differing from this one in some outward appearances, but perhaps not very different in essentials, have for centuries formed the foundations of society in Europe, the Near East, India, China, and much of the Americas. This social unit is characteristic of many of the countries that have the largest populations. Only in recent years and in a few places have we begun to see the appearance of a new kind of family. The old-fashioned farm family—if we may call it that—is still the commonest of human groups.

The scene is familiar. We begin and end with the familiar and are lucky to be able to do so, but the important point at the moment is not the familiarity of the scene. It is rather that a scene like this is part of the raw material of sociology: a description of a series of events, in each of which at one particular place and time a person did certain things, in certain physical surroundings, perhaps with certain implements and together with certain other persons. All science begins with process, the flux of things, the passing scene. Generalization must be true to events. We forget their vividness at our peril. And how refreshing they are! “Here,” we can say, “is one kind of certainty. No matter how we interpret them, and no matter how far they fall short of telling the whole story, these things, at least these things, happened.”

There can be little interpretation of, generalization from, single events. We can learn much—and it is good discipline, too—from trying merely to report, that is, from trying to describe human behavior in words altogether flat, simply descriptive, devoid of interpretation. In any strict sense, it cannot be done. Any noun implies some context; even a word like table implies something about the use of a physical object. But in the effort to leave out at least the higher levels of meaning, we can discover how much meaning we regularly put into our descriptions. Perhaps we shall see how easy it is to commit ourselves to an interpretation before we know what we are doing.

Our description of the farm family beginning the clay is just such a flat description as a playwright might write in setting the opening scene of his play. The meaning unfolds only as the action of the play develops. Thus the older woman is not called the mother of the family, nor the man the father. “Mother” and “father” assume a certain scheme of social relationships, and from the single scene we cannot be sure that we are dealing with that kind of scheme. It is better to begin with distinctions like those between man and woman, youth and age. In the same way, the cabinet is not called a shrine. If we had called it that, we should have been assuming something that the single scene cannot tell us. Nevertheless, there are items in the description that might be remembered, should he run across them again, by anyone anxious to build up a picture of the relationships between the members of the family. For instance, the older man gives orders to the two younger ones or at least gives the signal to go out and begin the day’s work. The woman likewise points out to the girl the job—making butter—that the two of them will do in the course of the day. Both women wait for the men to finish eating before they sit down themselves. The older woman comforts and plays with the baby. And so on. An observer builds up his picture of social relationships from repeated events like these.

custom

The next stage in the analysis of human behavior—and it always implies the first—is reached when we recognize simple recurrences in events, recurrences at different intervals. To go back to our farm family, we note that almost every day the men go out to work in the fields; that every year, at about the same season, they dig potatoes; that in this work the father directs the activities of the sons. The women do the chores around the house but do not work in the fields; so long as there is a youngster in the house, the mother feeds it, goes to it when it cries, comforts and protects it. And so on. The behavior of the members of a group is a symphony, a symphony that may have discords. There are different voices—as the wood winds are a voice in a symphony—each with its themes, which come in at different intervals, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. Often there is a conductor who is himself a voice, and there are recurrences in the group of voices, in the movement as a whole. Like lazy listeners, we who are at the symphony never hear all the voices and all their harmonies. We hear only the ones we are interested in hearing.

These recurrences in social behavior, when recognized as recurrences, are called customs. For the moment we are simply going to accept custom as a fact, giving notice at the same time that the fact raises an important question, which will be considered in a later chapter. We mention the question now only to show we are aware of it. Some students of society are inclined to take the recurrences in the behavior of a group for granted. They are interested in the details of particular customs, but not in custom itself as an aspect of group life. Other students go further, as Edmund Burke did years ago, and see custom as useful, even necessary. Men cannot plan for the future without relying on the massive regularities of expected behavior. Yet when everything intelligent has been said about the usefulness of custom, one more profound question remains: What makes custom customary? For the brute fact is that customs do change. In view of the constantly varied forces playing on society, it is amazing that anything can be recognized as persistent. The recurrences are miracles, not commonplaces; and miracles, if they happen often, are just, the things we should study most closely. As soon as we do, we find that nothing is more defenseless than a custom, alone. Not single customs, but systems of custom, survive. Anthropologists used to talk about the “tyranny of custom” as if custom were a mold pressing social organization into a shape. This view is misleading. Custom is not something outside of, and apart from, social organization but is implicit in organization. These are large generalizations. We state them now, but only in a much later chapter shall we try to back them up. By that time we hope to have the tools to do the job.

The usual descriptions of groups consist of statements of custom, that is, recurrences in human behavior at different places or at different intervals. “The Irish countrymen live on isolated farms” . . . “The men of a Tikopia village commonly put out to sea together when they go fishing.” The books and articles that are our sources, that we must work with, are full of such remarks. But we must never forget, having a lively sense of the shifting sands on which we build, that; statements of custom, if they are worth anything, are founded on repeated observations of individual events in single scenes. With this in mind, let us return to the Irish (arm family, and now study a description of the relationships between its members, particularly father, mother, and son. The description is a statement of custom: a summary of the recurrences in many single scenes like the one with which this chapter opened.

The growing child ordinarily sees his father as owner and principal worker of the farm. When the whole family group of father, mother, children, and whatever other relatives may be living with them, works in concert, as at the potato planting, the turf cutting, and the haymaking, it is the father who directs the group’s activities, himself doing the heavy tasks. . . .

In his earliest childhood, of course, the mother looms larger in the child’s consciousness than the father. The child’s first duties, as soon as he can speak and walk, are to run on petty errands to neighbors and near-bv “friends.” Soon he is taking his father’s meals to him in the fields or going on errands to the nearest shop. Until he is seven and has gone through First Communion, his place is in the house with the women, and his labor is of very little importance. After First Communion, at six or seven he begins to be thrown more with his elder brothers, and comes to do small chores which bring him more and more into contact with his father and with the other men of the neighborhood . . . But not till he passes Confirmation and leaves school (generally at the same time) does he take on full men’s work. Even then, as he becomes adult and takes on more and more of the heavy tasks of the farm work, he never escapes his father’s direction, until his father dies or makes over the farm to him at his marriage. . . .

It goes without saying that the father exercises Ms control -over the whole activity of the “boy.” It is by no means confined to their work together. Indeed, the father is the court of last resort, which dispenses punishment for deviations from the norm of conduct in all spheres. Within the hounds of custom and law he has full power to exercise discipline. Corporal punishment is not a thing of the past in Ireland, and, especially in the intermediate stages of the child’s development, from seven to puberty, it gets full play.

It is during those years that the characteristic relationship between father and son is developed in rural communities. The son has suffered a remove from the previous almost exclusive control of its mother, in which an affective content of sympathy and indulgence was predominant, and is brought into c ~ tact for the first time with the father and older men. But the transfer is not completed. There is a hiatus in his development through the years of school when his participation in men’s work and his relationship with his father has little chance of developing into an effective partnership. A real union of interests does not take place until after Confirmation and school-leaving, when for the first time his exclusive contacts and his entire day-to-day activity, particularly in farm work, will be with his father and the older men.

This fact colors greatly the relationship of father and son, as far as affective content goes. There is none of the close companionship and intimate sympathy which characterizes, at least ideally, the relationship in other groups. Where such exists, it is a matter for surprised comment to the small farmers. In its place there is developed, necessarily perhaps, a marked respect, expressing itself in the tabooing of many actions, such as smoking, drinking, and physical contact of any sort, which can be readily observed in any small farm family. Coupled with this is the life-long subordination . . . which is never relaxed even in the one sphere in which farmer father and son can develop an intense community of interest—farm work. Nothing prevents the development of great mutual pride, the boy in his experienced and skillful mentor, tutor, and captain in work, and the man in a worthy and skillful successor and fellow workman, but on the other hand everything within the behavior developed in the relationship militates against the growth of close mutual sympathy. As a result, the antagonisms inherent in such a situation often break through very strongly when conflicts arise. . . .

On the other hand, the relationship of mother and son has a very different content. Like that between father and son, it is the product of years of development. It is marked, too, by a similar retention of subordinate status on the part of the son. In farm work the boy is subject to the commands of his mother even when, fully adult, he has passed over exclusively to men’s work . . . But within the scope of such a subordination there is a quite different affective history. The relationship is the first and earliest into which a child enters. It is very close, intimate, and all-embracing for the first years of life; only gradually does the experience of the child expand to include brothers, sisters, and last, the older male members of the household.

Until seven, the child of either sex is the constant companion of its mother. If the family is numerous an elder child, usually a sister, may take over much of the mother’s role, but the mother is always near-by. As the woman works in the house or fields, the child is kept by her side. In the house it usually sits in a crib by the fire or plays about on the floor, but always within sight and sound. It learns its speech from its mother, amid a flood of constant endearments, admonitions, and encouragements. The woman’s work never separates her from the child. Custom imposes no restraints or interruptions in her solicitude. She looks after its comforts, gives it food, dresses it, etc. She constantly exercises restraints and controls over it, teaching it day by day in a thousand situations the elements of prudery, modesty and good conduct.

The controls she exercises are of a different kind from those of the father. She is both guide and companion. Her authority most often makes itself felt through praise, persuasion, and endearment. Only when a grave breach of discipline demands a restraining power greater than hers, or when an appeal to ultimate authority is needed, does the father begin to play his role. Especially in the years before puberty, the farm father enters the child’s cognizance as a disciplinary force. The barriers of authority, respect, extra-household interests, and the imperatives of duty rather than of encouragement make it difficult for any intimacy to develop.

Even after Confirmation the child’s relationship to his mother is not materially weakened. He becomes confirmed, it is true, in a masculine scorn for feminine interests and pursuits, but he can and must still look for protection to his mother against a too-arbitrary exercise of his fathei’s power. In family disputes the mother takes a dipl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY
• PART I ROOTS OF COMMUNITY IN SOCIAL LIFE SCENES AND KINDS OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
• PART II KINDS OF COMMUNITIES
• PART III POLITICS AND COMMUNITY
• PART IV COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN TODAY’S WORLD
• Index