Community: The Career of a Concept

Two statements:1. Efforts to define and to build a body of theory around the concept have been a dismal failure.2. But, some of the best social science produced over the past decades has been our studies.My aim will be to explain this apparent contradiction. I shall begin with an overview of the shifting character of the topic over time, especially the almost total concentration of early studies in the industrialized West, the eventual links among community, culture and ethnicity, the decline of studies because of conceptual confusion and the impact of social change and recent efforts to rework the genre theoretically in order to resuscitate it.I shall then turn to new forms of interaction, notably personal relationships based on shared interests rather than place of residence, and the dramatic impact of the Community. As I shall argue, before these new forms emerged, the crowning success of studies had much less to do with theory than methodology: the small was the perfect vehicle for the ethnographic enterprise. Whether that remains the case is open to debate.1Community as a Western PhenomenonLet me begin with a question: Why has community, and studies, been a concern of sociologists not anthropologists unless anthropologists worked at Furthermore, why should studies be a at home, in Western society, but rarely in other culMy own experience in research exemplifies this In West Africa I conducted fieldwork (Barrett 1977) in a remote village in Nigeria's Niger Delta conto the Aladura independent church movement (see 1968). The village, built on stilts because the land flooded during the wet season, had clear physical and boundaries with nearby villages. It also more than met the criterion of solidarity and identity usually associated with community. The members, who called themselves the Holy Apostles, embraced their own distinctive religion and believed that God had granted them immortality, not in Heaven but in this world; and inspired by a message from God, they had embraced communalism to the extent that no money was exchanged for goods and services, the family unit was banned and marriage too for brief periods (the village also achieved a remarkable degree of economic success with very little outside help). Despite all this, and the fact that the term was part of the official name of the village (Aiyetoro Community), it never occurred to me, nor apparently to the many accomplished scholars who advised me, to conceptualize the project as a study. Yet when I later turned to fieldwork in a village in Canada (Barrett 1994), I was moved to deal with questions about the definition and morphology of community, the rural-urban continuum, and the myriad criticisms that had accumulated around studies.Part of the explanation of why studies have been associated with the industrialized West concerns their specialized character. In the U.S., where Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929) is sometimes pointed to as the beginning of the modern study, relatively little early social science was done in the village or small town, and even more rare was the project that adopted community as the primary focus of investigation. Instead quantitative-oriented sociologists concentrated on the city and the nation in order to investigate broad processes such as industrialization and urbanization. Eventually, of course, the sub-discipline of rural sociology made its appearance, but it had to struggle long and hard for recognition and legitimacy. In this context, the ethnographic study of the small was distinctive and deserved to be labelled as such. In contrast, there was nothing exceptional about the village focus of anthropologists abroad, at least until the end of the Second World War. Indeed, virtually all anthropological research took place in rural society - in villages, hamlets and neighbourhoods. …

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