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Community Studies: Anthropological
Community Studies: Anthropological Dan Rabinowitz, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; and Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by D. Rabinowitz, volume 4, pp. 2387–2389, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract The term ‘community’ has been used by anthropology in a variety of ways and contexts. On a concrete ethnographic level, ‘community’ and ‘community studies’ have two main denotations. One is generic, echoing the interest anthropology and anthropologists have always had in ordinary, stable, small-scale localized collectives. The other pertains to studies of rural populations (e.g., villages, parishes, counties) and urban enclaves (e.g., neighborhoods and quarters) within industrialized, developed Western countries. Analytically, the term tends to denote a syndrome rather than an accurately defined phenomenon. Used in various periods and within different theoretical orientations in reference to territorially based units, professional circles, solidarity groups and informal sociocultural amalgams, it could imply permanent collections with well-defined boundaries as well as loosely defined and transient formations. The efficacy of the term ‘community’ as an interpretative tool was rather limited prior to the 1970s. New anthropological and ethnographic vistas since, however, have imbued it with more theoretical currency. It became, for example, a significant element in new anthropological tool-boxes developed for the analysis of rural groups in the northern, southern, and western margins of Europe. Later it found new uses as anthropologists began grappling with the need to conceptualize and historicize transnational social formations in a globalizing world.
The Concept of Community in the Social Sciences Community, a rather ubiquitous and imprecise term in terms of social science theory, tends to be associated with an array of positive connotations, including solidarity, familiarity, common purpose, unity of values and a shared sense of 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, produced a category which, while exceedingly popular, was also perplexing in its ambiguity. Since affiliation and identification with nonterritorial communities can be unclear even to the actors themselves – let alone to social scientists attempting to characterize and study them – the concept can be (and has often been) used as an omnibus for a variety of related and unrelated 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 not withstanding, 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.
Community (Re)Enters Anthropology Anthropology, with its early emphasis on intensive field study focusing on small-scale groups whereby culture and society
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4
were assumed to be unproblematically linked to bounded space, had an inherent affinity with the view of communities as discernible sociocultural units. 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 à la Lévi-Strauss all offered, in their respective heydays, rich and convincing frameworks for studies of small-scale bounded groups. This may be the reason why the concept of community was not explored by anthropologists with any rigor, and why it was receiving limited critical attention in the discipline prior to the 1980s. 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 idiom with limited interpretative power, its capacity to become a dynamic theoretical tenet largely arrested. Committed to depicting ‘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 term 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 community and culture (see Arensberg and Kimball, 1965) undoubtedly inspired ethnographically oriented studies such as Robert Redfield’s (1955) The Little Community, Marriott’s edited volume on villages in India (Marriott, 1955) or Frankenberg’s (1965) Communities in Britain, 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 community as an analytical and theoretical category. One was the aforementioned
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12042-2
369
370
Community Studies: Anthropological
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 understanding of the relationship between local rural and urban communities and wider affiliations and identity, not least the ones connected to the nationstate. 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 themes of the inquiry: how people develop a sense of belonging in a small community; and how they develop an identity 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 semi-peripheral 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, become 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, similarity 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 shortcoming of anthropological (and, for that matter, sociological) studies of communities – their propensity to be apolitical. 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 communities 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.
Critical Anthropology and the Concept of Community Like ‘ethnography,’ ‘the ethnographic present,’ ‘fieldwork,’ ‘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 for 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 communities – Woodstock being a dramatic instance – 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, transnational, and diasporic, likewise uses an idealized icon of the term community in anthropology to develop a more sophisticated
Community Studies: Anthropological
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. The new (twenty-first) century is yet to see a revival of the theoretical efficacy of the term ‘community’ in anthropology a renewal of its definitional powers as an ethnographic idiom. If anything, the vagueness of it, the silo capacity it has to denote an intuitive sense rather than index a specific phenomenon, is sometimes exploited for book or article titles (see for example Monterescu and Rabinowitz (2007)) which, while having an appeal for wider audiences, do not necessarily push the analytical prowess of the term to new terrains. Likewise, the choice of some departments in academic institutions, mainly in community college in the US, to change their names from ‘Anthropology’ to ‘Community Studies’ indicates a further resignation to the fact that rather than indicating theoretical precision, the term becomes suggestive of a fuzzier sense of solidarity and social cohesiveness which, for some, can represent what anthropology should stand for.
See also: Community Sociology; Community, Social Context of: The US Case; Practice: An Anthropological Approach.
371
Bibliography Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities. Verso, London. Appadurai, A., 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Arensberg, C., Kimball, S., 1965. Culture and Community. Harcourt Brace, New York. Aronoff, M., 1984. Review of Cohen 1982 belonging: identity and social organization in British rural cultures. Contemporary Sociology 13 (1), 46–47. Azarya, V., 1984. The Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Bell, C., Newby, H. (Eds.), 1974. The Sociology of Community: A Selection of Reading. Frank Cass, London. Cohen, A., 1982. Belonging: Identity and Social Organization in British Rural Cultures. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. Cohen, A., 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Methuen (Tavistock), New York. Cox, G., 1987. Review of Cohen 1985 the symbolic construction of community. Sociologia Ruralis 27 (1), 76–77. Frankenberg, R., 1965. Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country. Penguin Books, London. Gottshalk, S., 1975. Communities and Alternatives: an Exploration of the Limits of Planning. Shenkman, Cambridge, MA. Hannerz, U., 1980. Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. Columbia University Press, New York. Hawley, A., 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. Roland Press, New York. Hillery, G.A., 1955. Definitions of community: areas of agreement. Rural Sociology 20 (2), 111–123. Lynd, R.S., Lynd, H.M., 1929. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. Harcourt Brace, New York. Malkki, L., 1997. News and culture: transitory phenomena and the fieldwork tradition. In: Gupta, A., Ferguson, J. (Eds.), Anthropological Locations. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, pp. 86–101. Marriott, M. (Ed.), 1955. Village India: Studies in the Little Community. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Monterescu, D., Rabinowitz, D. (Eds.), 2007. Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian–Israeli Towns. Ashgate, London. Redfield, R., 1955. The Little Community: Viewpoints for a Study of a Human Whole. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rouse, R., 1991. Mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism. Diaspora 1 (1), 8–23. Stein, M., 1960. The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Warner, L., Low, J.O., 1947. Social System of the Modern Factory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Warner, L., Lunt, P., 1941. The Social Life of a Modern Community. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. West, J., 1961. Plainville, USA. Columbia University Press, New York.
Abstract The term ‘community’ has been used by anthropology in a variety of ways and contexts. On a concrete ethnographic level, ‘community’ and ‘community studies’ have two main denotations. One is generic, echoing the interest anthropology and anthropologists have always had in ordinary, stable, small-scale localized collectives. The other pertains to studies of rural populations (e.g., villages, parishes, counties) and urban enclaves (e.g., neighborhoods and quarters) within industrialized, developed Western countries. Analytically, the term tends to denote a syndrome rather than an accurately defined phenomenon. Used in various periods and within different theoretical orientations in reference to territorially based units, professional circles, solidarity groups and informal sociocultural amalgams, it could imply permanent collections with well-defined boundaries as well as loosely defined and transient formations. The efficacy of the term ‘community’ as an interpretative tool was rather limited prior to the 1970s. New anthropological and ethnographic vistas since, however, have imbued it with more theoretical currency. It became, for example, a significant element in new anthropological tool-boxes developed for the analysis of rural groups in the northern, southern, and western margins of Europe. Later it found new uses as anthropologists began grappling with the need to conceptualize and historicize transnational social formations in a globalizing world.
The Concept of Community in the Social Sciences Community, a rather ubiquitous and imprecise term in terms of social science theory, tends to be associated with an array of positive connotations, including solidarity, familiarity, common purpose, unity of values and a shared sense of 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, produced a category which, while exceedingly popular, was also perplexing in its ambiguity. Since affiliation and identification with nonterritorial communities can be unclear even to the actors themselves – let alone to social scientists attempting to characterize and study them – the concept can be (and has often been) used as an omnibus for a variety of related and unrelated 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 not withstanding, 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.
Community (Re)Enters Anthropology Anthropology, with its early emphasis on intensive field study focusing on small-scale groups whereby culture and society
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4
were assumed to be unproblematically linked to bounded space, had an inherent affinity with the view of communities as discernible sociocultural units. 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 à la Lévi-Strauss all offered, in their respective heydays, rich and convincing frameworks for studies of small-scale bounded groups. This may be the reason why the concept of community was not explored by anthropologists with any rigor, and why it was receiving limited critical attention in the discipline prior to the 1980s. 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 idiom with limited interpretative power, its capacity to become a dynamic theoretical tenet largely arrested. Committed to depicting ‘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 term 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 community and culture (see Arensberg and Kimball, 1965) undoubtedly inspired ethnographically oriented studies such as Robert Redfield’s (1955) The Little Community, Marriott’s edited volume on villages in India (Marriott, 1955) or Frankenberg’s (1965) Communities in Britain, 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 community as an analytical and theoretical category. One was the aforementioned
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12042-2
369
370
Community Studies: Anthropological
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 understanding of the relationship between local rural and urban communities and wider affiliations and identity, not least the ones connected to the nationstate. 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 themes of the inquiry: how people develop a sense of belonging in a small community; and how they develop an identity 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 semi-peripheral 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, become 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, similarity 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 shortcoming of anthropological (and, for that matter, sociological) studies of communities – their propensity to be apolitical. 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 communities 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.
Critical Anthropology and the Concept of Community Like ‘ethnography,’ ‘the ethnographic present,’ ‘fieldwork,’ ‘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 for 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 communities – Woodstock being a dramatic instance – 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, transnational, and diasporic, likewise uses an idealized icon of the term community in anthropology to develop a more sophisticated
Community Studies: Anthropological
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. The new (twenty-first) century is yet to see a revival of the theoretical efficacy of the term ‘community’ in anthropology a renewal of its definitional powers as an ethnographic idiom. If anything, the vagueness of it, the silo capacity it has to denote an intuitive sense rather than index a specific phenomenon, is sometimes exploited for book or article titles (see for example Monterescu and Rabinowitz (2007)) which, while having an appeal for wider audiences, do not necessarily push the analytical prowess of the term to new terrains. Likewise, the choice of some departments in academic institutions, mainly in community college in the US, to change their names from ‘Anthropology’ to ‘Community Studies’ indicates a further resignation to the fact that rather than indicating theoretical precision, the term becomes suggestive of a fuzzier sense of solidarity and social cohesiveness which, for some, can represent what anthropology should stand for.
See also: Community Sociology; Community, Social Context of: The US Case; Practice: An Anthropological Approach.
371
Bibliography Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities. Verso, London. Appadurai, A., 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Arensberg, C., Kimball, S., 1965. Culture and Community. Harcourt Brace, New York. Aronoff, M., 1984. Review of Cohen 1982 belonging: identity and social organization in British rural cultures. Contemporary Sociology 13 (1), 46–47. Azarya, V., 1984. The Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Bell, C., Newby, H. (Eds.), 1974. The Sociology of Community: A Selection of Reading. Frank Cass, London. Cohen, A., 1982. Belonging: Identity and Social Organization in British Rural Cultures. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. Cohen, A., 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Methuen (Tavistock), New York. Cox, G., 1987. Review of Cohen 1985 the symbolic construction of community. Sociologia Ruralis 27 (1), 76–77. Frankenberg, R., 1965. Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country. Penguin Books, London. Gottshalk, S., 1975. Communities and Alternatives: an Exploration of the Limits of Planning. Shenkman, Cambridge, MA. Hannerz, U., 1980. Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. Columbia University Press, New York. Hawley, A., 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. Roland Press, New York. Hillery, G.A., 1955. Definitions of community: areas of agreement. Rural Sociology 20 (2), 111–123. Lynd, R.S., Lynd, H.M., 1929. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. Harcourt Brace, New York. Malkki, L., 1997. News and culture: transitory phenomena and the fieldwork tradition. In: Gupta, A., Ferguson, J. (Eds.), Anthropological Locations. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, pp. 86–101. Marriott, M. (Ed.), 1955. Village India: Studies in the Little Community. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Monterescu, D., Rabinowitz, D. (Eds.), 2007. Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian–Israeli Towns. Ashgate, London. Redfield, R., 1955. The Little Community: Viewpoints for a Study of a Human Whole. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rouse, R., 1991. Mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism. Diaspora 1 (1), 8–23. Stein, M., 1960. The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Warner, L., Low, J.O., 1947. Social System of the Modern Factory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Warner, L., Lunt, P., 1941. The Social Life of a Modern Community. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. West, J., 1961. Plainville, USA. Columbia University Press, New York.