Symbolic Construction of Community

Anthony P. Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138136977
• eBook ISBN: 9781134947485
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthony Cohen makes a distinct break with earlier approaches to the study of community, which treated the subject in largely structural terms. His view is interpretive and experiential, seeing the community as a cultural field with a complex of symbols whose meanings vary among its members. He delineates a concept applicable to local and ethnic communities through which people see themselves as belonging to society. The emphasis on boundary is sensitive to the circumstances in which people become aware of the implications of belonging to a community, and describes how they symbolise and utilise these boundaries to give substance to their values and identities.

1

Introduction

SYMBOLISM AND BOUNDARY

‘Community’ is one of those words – like ‘culture’, ‘myth’, ‘ritual’, ‘symbol’ – bandied around in ordinary, everyday speech, apparently readily intelligible to speaker and listener, which, when imported into the discourse of social science, however, causes immense difficulty. Over the years it has proved to be highly resistant to satisfactory definition in anthropology and sociology, perhaps for the simple reason that all definitions contain or imply theories, and the theory of community has been very contentious. At its most extreme, the debate has thrown up ideologically opposed propositions which are equally untenable. For example, it used to be claimed that modernity and community are irreconcilable, that the characteristic features of community cannot survive industrialization and urbanization. It is a spurious argument for its opposition of ‘community’ and ‘modernity’ rests only upon ascribing stipulatively to community those features of social life which are supposed, by definition, to be lacking from modernity! Moreover, it is an argument which unjustifiably claims the authority of such seminal scholars as Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies and Simmel – unjustifiably because, as I shall argue, it perpetrates a misinterpretation, or highly selective reading, of these earlier writers. Others have suggested that the domination of modern social life by the state, and the essential confrontation of classes in capitalist society, have made ‘community’ a nostalgic, bourgeois and anachronistic concept. Once again, the argument is based entirely upon a highly particularistic and sectarian definition. However, its redundancy can be claimed not only on philosophical grounds, but also as being evident in the massive upsurge of community consciousness – in such terms as ethnicity, localism, religion, and class itself – which has swept the ‘modern’ world in recent years.

There is no attempt made in this book to formulate yet another definition. Rather, it is proposed to follow Wittgenstein’s advice and seek not lexical meaning, but use. A reasonable interpretation of the word’s use would seem to imply two related suggestions: that the members of a group of people (a) have something in common with each other, which (b) distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other putative groups. ‘Community’ thus seems to imply simultaneously both similarity and difference. The word thus expresses a relational idea: the opposition of one community to others or to other social entities. Indeed, it will be argued that the use of the word is only occasioned by the desire or need to express such a distinction. It seems appropriate, therefore, to focus our examination of the nature of community on the element which embodies this sense of discrimination, namely, the boundary.

By definition, the boundary marks the beginning and end of a community. But why is such marking necessary? The simple answer is that the boundary encapsulates the identity of the community and, like the identity of an individual, is called into being by the exigencies of social interaction. Boundaries are marked because communities interact in some way or other with entities from which they are, or wish to be, distinguished (see Barth, 1969). The manner in which they are marked depends entirely upon the specific community in question. Some, like national or administrative boundaries, may be statutory and enshrined in law. Some may be physical, expressed, perhaps, by a mountain range or a sea. Some may be racial or linguistic or religious. But not all boundaries, and not all the components of any boundary, are so objectively apparent. They may be thought of, rather, as existing in the minds of their beholders. This being so, the boundary may be perceived in rather different terms, not only by people on opposite sides of it, but also by people on the same side.

We are talking here about what the boundary means to people, or, more precisely, about the meanings they give to it. This is the symbolic aspect of community boundary and, in so far as we aspire to under stand the importance of the community in people’s experience, it is the most crucial. To say that community boundaries are largely symbolic in character is, though, not merely to suggest that they imply different meanings for different people. It also suggests that boundaries perceived by some may be utterly imperceptible to others. For example, when the 1974-79 Labour Government formulated proposals for governmental devolution to Wales and Scotland, it did so on the apparent premise that there was sufficient unanimity of attitude within each of these entities to give particular legal expression to their boundaries. But such an assumption proved to be quite unjustified. The argument went very much further than whether devolution was, or was not a good thing, or whether this power or that discretion should or should not be devolved to the new authorities. Rather, it caused people within these entities to question whether the boundaries as envisaged by Whitehall were those most salient to them. The question became not simply, ‘Are the Scots different from the English?’, but, ‘How different am I, as a particular Scot, from him, another particular Scot?’ In other words, is the boundary dividing Scotland from England more meaningful to the highlander than those which distinguish him from the lowlander, the Glaswegian from the Edinburghian; the Shetlander from the Orcadian; the inhabitants of one Shetland island from those of another; the members of one township of a Shetland island from the members of another. As one goes ‘down’ the scale so the ‘objective’ referents of the boundary become less and less clear, until they may be quite invisible to those outside. But also as you go ‘down’ this scale, they become more important to their members for they relate to increasingly intimate areas of their lives or refer to more substantial areas of their identities.

Moreover, it is as one descends the scale that one approaches ‘community’ as something more than a rhetorical figment. When government leaders refer to the Common Market as a ‘community’, they may be regarded as indulging in rhetoric: stating an aspiration to common interest which is all too obviously missing in reality. But when the inhabitants of a Shetland island talk of ‘their community’, they refer to an entity, a reality, invested with all the sentiment attached to kinship, friendship, neighbouring, rivalry, familiarity, jealousy, as they inform the social process of everyday life. At this level, community is more than oratorical abstraction: it hinges crucially on consciousness.

This consciousness of community is, then, encapsulated in perception of its boundaries, boundaries which are themselves largely constituted by people in interaction. It is in part this process, the symbolic constitution of boundaries, that is referred to in the title of this book. But, in addition to recognizing the symbolic constituents of community consciousness, we have also to reveal the essentially symbolic nature of the idea of community itself, again essentially enshrined in the concept of boundary.

Boundaries enclose elements which may, for certain purposes and in certain respects, be considered to be more like each other than they are different. But they also mark off these elements from those which differ. In this regard, the boundaries of communities perform the same function as do the boundaries of all categories of knowledge. If we extract from this total cognitive stock a sub-genus, categories of social knowledge, we find that all such categories are marked by symbolism (see Needham, 1979). The symbolism may be explicit as, for example, in rituals which discriminate among roles, between life and death, between stages and statuses in the life cycle, between gender, between generations, between the pure and the polluted. It may be explicit in the arcane fantasy of myth and totem. But much of our symbolism does not have a special vocabulary or idiomatic behaviour: it is, rather, part of the meaning which we intuitively ascribe to more instrumental and pragmatic things in ordinary use – such as words. Philosophers have long since drawn our attention to the capacity of language to express attitude as well as to denote object. In Cranston’s examples, words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ do not merely describe forms of government and legal status. they also tell us how to regard these forms. They are ‘hurrah’ words, as opposed to ‘boo’ words (Cranston, 1954). The anthropologist, Mary Douglas, similarly shows that the use of the word ‘dirt’ does rather more than signify the particles which lie under the finger nail: it also expresses an attitude, ‘ugh!’, and prescribes a remedy, ‘scrub!’ (Douglas, 1966).

Symbols, then, do more than merely stand for or represent something else. Indeed, if that was all they did, they would be redundant. They also allow those who employ them to supply part of their meaning. If we refer again to the examples of categories mentioned above, age, life, father, purity, gender, death, doctor, are all symbols shared by those who use the same language, or participate in the same symbolic behaviour through which these categories are expressed and marked. But their meanings are not shared in the same way. Each is mediated by the idiosyncratic experience of the individual. When I think about ‘fatherhood’, my reflections on paternity in general are informed by my experience of my father and of my children. Where I a Scot voting in the devolution referendum, I should not merely mave measured myself against the English, but would refract ‘Scottishness’ through my personal experience – as Shetland fisherman, Kincardine farmer, Fife miner or Clydeside shipbuilder, father, son, brother, agnostic, music lover, socialist, and so forth. Symbols do not so much express meaning as give us the capacity to make meaning.

Not all social categories are so variable in meaning. But those whose meanings are the most elusive, the hardest to pin down, tend to be those also hedged around by the most ambiguous symbolism. In these cases the content of the categories is so unclear that they exist largely or only in terms of their symbolic boundaries. Such categories as justice, goodness, patriotism, duty, love, peace, are almost impossible to spell out with precision. The attempt to do so invariably generates argument, sometimes worse. But their range of meanings can be glossed over in a commonly accepted symbol – precisely because it allows its adherents to attach their own meanings to it. They share the symbol, but do not necessarily share its meanings. Community is just such a boundary-expressing symbol. As a symbol, it is held in common by its members; but its meaning varies with its members’ unique orientations to it. In the face of this variability of meaning, the consciousness of community has to be kept alive through manipulation of its symbols. The reality and efficacy of the community’s boundary – and, therefore, of the community itself – depends upon its symbolic construction and embellishment. This essay discusses some of the features most commonly associated with this process.

SYMBOLISM AND MEANING

‘If you live in Shinohata’, wrote Ronald Dore, ‘the “outside world” begins three hundred yards down the road . . .’ (Dore, 1978, p. 60). We do not have to construe community just in terms of locality, but more properly, in the sense which Dore expresses so lucidly and describes with such affectionate evocation of the Japanese village he studied at intervals for twenty-five years: the sense of a primacy of belonging. Community is that entity to which one belongs, greater than kinship but more immediately than the abstraction we call ‘society’. It is the arena in which people acquire their most fundamental and most substantial experience of social life outside the confines of the home. In it they learn the meaning of kinship through being able to perceive its boundaries – that is, by juxtaposing it to non-kinship; they learn ‘friendship’; they acquire the sentiments of close social association and the capacity to express or otherwise manage these in their social relationships. Community, therefore, is where one learns and continues to practice how to ‘be social’. At the risk of substituting one indefinable category for another, we could say it is where one acquires ‘culture’.

Learning to be social is not like learning grammar or the Highway Code. It is not reducible to a body of rules. Of course, one can identify rule-like principles in culture. Thus, for example, we can say that the Temne of Sierra Leone reserve the right hand to upper bodily behaviour; the left, to cope with the lower body (Littlejohn, 1972). We could make a similarly generalized statement in suggesting that the Whalsay Islanders of Shetland avoid open dispute or the public assertion of opinion (Cohen, 1977). These ‘principles’ are sufficiently observed in practice that their contravention would identify the perpetrator as outsider or as deviant. They differ from more objective rules, however, in that they are not associated unambiguously, nor even obviously, with a fixed and shared rationale. The Temne might well discriminate between left- and right-handedness, but this is not to say that they all do so for the same reason, nor for any ‘conscious’ reason, nor that they would accept the interpretations of their behaviour offered by Littlejohn’s supposedly authoritative informant. People attach their own meanings to such prescriptions and proscriptions. In this respect, they are less rules of society than its symbols. Thus, when we speak of people acquiring culture, or learning to be social, we mean that they acquire the symbols which will equip them to be social.

This symbolic equipment might be compared to vocabulary. Learning words, acquiring the components of language, gives you the capacity to communicate with other people, but does not tell you what to communicate. Similarly with symbols: they do not tell us what to mean, but give us the capacity to make meaning. Culture, constituted by symbols, does not impose itself in such a way as to determine that all its adherents should make the same sense of the world. Rather, it merely gives them the capacity to make sense and, if they tend to make a similar kind of sense it is not because of any deterministic influence but because they are doing so with the same symbols. The quintessential referent of community is that its members make, or believe they make, a similar sense of things either generally or with respect to specific and significant interests, and, further, that they think that that sense may differ from one made elsewhere. The reality of community in people’s experience thus inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols. Much of the boundary-maintaining process we shall look at later is concerned with maintaining and further developing this commonality of symbol. But it must again be emphasized that the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning.

People’s experience and understanding of their community thus resides in their orientation to its symbolism. It will be clear, then, that a crucial step for us in attempting to unravel analytically the concept of community must involve some further discussion of the relations among symbolism, culture and meaning.

In what has become one of the most celebrated statements in recent anthropological writing, Geertz proclaims, ‘. . . man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun . . .’. These webs constitute ‘culture’, whose analysis is, ‘. . . not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (1975a, p. 5). There are three interrelated and powerful principles contained within Geertz’s precise and eloquent formulation. The first is that culture (‘webs of significance’) is created and continually recreated by people through their social interaction, rather than imposed upon them as a Durkheimian body of social fact or as Marxist superstructure. Secondly, being continuously in process, culture has neither deterministic power nor objectively identifiable referents (‘law’). Third, it is manifest, rather, in the capacity with which it endows people to perceive meaning in, or to attach meaning to social behaviour. Behaviour does not ‘contain’ meaning intrinsically; rather, it is found to be meaningful by an act of interpretation: we ‘make sense’ of what we observe. The sense we make is ‘ours’, and may or may not coincide with that intended by those whose behaviour it was. Thus, in so far as we ‘understand’ the behaviour which goes on around us and in which we participate, we make and act upon interpretations of it: we seek to attach meaning to it. Social interaction is contingent upon such interpretation; it is, essentially, the transaction of meanings.

Interpretation implies a substantial degree of what, faute de mieux, we must call ‘subjectivity’. When it is a feature of social interaction, subjectivity clearly suggests the possibility of imprecision, of inexactitude of match, of ambiguity, of idiosyncracy. In other words, different people oriented to the same phenomenon are likely to differ from each other in certain respects in their interpretations of it. They may not be aware of this difference, especially if the phenomenon is a common feature of their lives. Their disagreement is not necessarily, then, an impediment to their successful interaction. Indeed, often the contrary is the case. People can find common currency in behaviour whilst still tailoring it subjectively (and interpretively) to their own needs.

These interpretations are not random. They tend to be made within the terms characteristic of a given society, and influenced by its language, ecology, its traditions of belief and ideology, and so forth. But neither are they immutable. They are, rather, responsive to the circumstances of interaction, both among individuals, and between the society as a whole and those across its boundaries. The vehicles of such interpretations are symbols. By their very nature symbols permit interpretation and provide scope for interpretive manoeuvre by those who use them. Symbols are often defined as things ‘standing for’ other things. But they do not represent these ‘other things’ unambiguously: indeed, as argued above, if they did so they would be superfluous and redundant. Rather, they ‘express’ other things in ways which allow their common form to be retained and shared among the members of a group, whilst not imposing upon these people the constraints of uniform meaning. Because symbols are malleable in this way, they can be made to ‘fit’ the circumstances of the individual. They can thus provide media through which individuals can experience and express their attachment to a society without compromising their individuality. So versatile are symbols they can often be bent into these idiosyncratic shapes of meaning without such distortions becoming visible to other people who use the same symbol at the same time.

Consider the following symbol as an example:

. On any demonstration or procession at which this symbol is prominently displayed, sympathizers could all comfortably associate themselves with it and, indeed, find it an adequate expression of their position for the purposes of a certain kind of discourse. Yet, were they to debate among themselves the merits of unilateralism as opposed to multilateralism; the advisability of one kind of compaigning strategy as opposed to another; their attitude towards NATO or to the Soviet bloc; the importance of Christianity, pacifism or socialism to their support for nuclear disarmament, the simple symbol would become revealed as an effective, but very superficial gloss upon an eno...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Series Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• CHAPTER 1 – Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 – Symbolizing the Boundary
• CHAPTER 3 – Communities of Meaning
• CHAPTER 4 – The Symbolic Construction of Community
• References
• Index