Anthropologists, as well as other social scientists, have provided so many definitions of community that Hillery (1955) decided to list those which, according
to him, could bring scholars to a much needed agreement. The list was highly unsuccessful; not only have some authors stressed the pointlessness of making it, but many have asked whether, today, we still need the word ‘community’ at all. For example, Baumann has concluded, ‘Hillery researched a grand total of ninety-four meanings attributed to the term by sociologists, and the word appears quite clearly as a common-sense term with no theoretical potential for analytic use’ (1996: 14).3 The concept of community, however, remains central to anthropological studies, or at least it is very difficult to avoid. So, Olwig has observed that there are two main notions of communities seen ‘as cultural constructions’ (2002: 125): on the one hand, communities have been discussed as ‘belonging entities’, and on the other as imagined unities based on ‘sentiments’ (see Appadurai 1996). In the first case, face-to-face-relationships (Strathern 1982; Rapport 1993) enable people to negotiate and shape their identity as a ‘community’. In these terms, people have to ‘adjust to each other to produce and maintain order and coherence. If such a community is to survive in its valued form, its structure must be organised accordingly, and a strict regime recognised and accepted for its maintenance’ (Cohen 1982: 11).
Cohen, however, in a famous essay has moved from an idea of community as embedded in local social structures to one that can act as a symbolic entity (see Cohen 1985). Such a community is not so much rooted in a physical place, as ‘in its members’ perception of the vitality of its culture. People construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and referent of their identity’ (Cohen 1985: 124). By observing the relationship between social structures, symbols, identities and the formation of boundaries, he has suggested a strongly constructivist approach in which,
[Community] is a largely mental construct, whose ‘objective’ manifestations in locality or ethnicity give it credibility. It is highly symbolized, with the consequence that its members can invest it with their selves. Its character is sufficiently malleable that it can accommodate all of its members’ selves without them feeling their individuality to be overly compromised. Indeed, the gloss of commonality which it paints over its diverse components gives to each of them an additional referent for their identities. (1995: 109)
However, Amit (2002) suggests that even in this revised and attractive conceptu-alization of community, Cohen has still focused on the central role played by face-to-face relationships, though in this case mediated by symbols instead of acts, kinship and exchanges.
A historian, however, has provided probably the most widely accepted and quoted conceptualization of community. Anderson has suggested that communities do not need any contact among members, not even virtual, since ‘community’ is part of a collective imagination process, since, he has argued,
the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion . . . it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (1991: 5–7)
Anderson’s definition has shifted the idea of community from the one based on interactions mediated through fully encompassing symbols to a community based on ‘sentiments’ (Appadurai 1996: 8); in other words, a community that needs to generate ideas and beliefs in order to perpetrate itself. This concept of community has opened the door for complex analyses of what have been called
‘diasporic and transnational communities’ (Clifford 1994; Vetrovec 2001). In his studies of migration and mass media, Appadurai has developed further the insight of Anderson. He has tried to argue that today a complex media network connects the world, enabling people to overcome the concept of nation-state and rethink their lives through the complex circulations of cultural domains. From this point of view, the mass media can create a new genre of community structures, which before were unthinkable. The geographical dimension of place, in this case, should be rearticulated into a new form of locality.
Appadurai has introduced a distinction between what he calls ‘locality’ and
‘neighbourhood’ to define a world in which ‘locality seems to have lost its onto-logical moorings’ (1995: 204). According to Appadurai, ‘locality [is] primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial’, while ‘neighbourhood . . . refers to the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized’ (1995: 204). In other words, ‘neighbourhood’ replaces the concept of territorial community. Neighbourhoods ‘are contexts, and at the same time require, and produce contexts’ (1995: 209, emphasis in the original). Yet contexts could be crossed or even shared to produce ‘trans-local’ neighbourhoods.
The result of this is that distinguishing the context of one neighbourhood from another becomes increasingly difficult. Therefore, the ‘task of producing locality (as a structure of feeling, a property of social life and an ideology of situated community) is increasingly a struggle’ (1995: 213). In the case of the concept of ‘home’ according to these authors, locality becomes, not a fixed point, but a personal category in which people can move freely.
Nevertheless, there is still a point that these theories seem not to have clarified.
Neither Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, nor Appadurai’s locality, embedded in global dimensions, answers the question of why people, from different national, ethnic and cultural backgrounds are ready, for instance, to sacrifice their lives (Herzfeld 1997), as for example in the case of international violent jihads. To address this question, Herzfeld has developed the concept of ‘cultural intimacy’.
According to him, cultural means or stereotypes can construct a strong sense of community. So cultural meanings, when shared, can produce a sense of ‘cultural intimacy’, enabling people to overcome their national and personal differences, and form global communities, as in the case of the ummah.
One point on which all these theories seem to agree, however, is that the act of sharing is the main reason why people form communities. What tends to vary are the explanations for why people decide to share as well as what they share. In the aforementioned studies, another recurrent question is the issue of locality: when the community is beyond physical places, as in the case of the ummah, where do people ‘locate’ their community? Localizing community, as Appadurai argues, has become difficult. The new media of communication, such as the Internet (Bunt 2003) and ‘global’ networks open new possibilities to rethink not only space and geographical dimensions but also the role of culture itself (Herzfeld 1997).
I have explained in the previous chapter, and in my previous book (Marranci 2006a), that I consider culture to be part of nature and that I do not see symbols as a primum movens through which human beings can assign significance to the external world (Ingold 1996). I suggest that symbols do not lie outside the individual but are part of that mechanism that allows us to ‘feel’ deeply personal, and directly incommunicable, human feelings. Turner (1967) has described symbols as ‘storage units’ filled with information that not only carry meaning, but also transform human attitudes and behaviour. He described symbols as a ‘set of evocative devices for rousing, channelling, and domesticating powerful emotions’ (1969: 42–3).
Although I agree with Turner’s definition, following Damasio, we have to read
‘feelings’ where Turner speaks of emotions. In other words, symbols are storage units filled with references to stimuli capable of provoking emotions, which induce certain selected feelings. Damasio has told us that emotions have a direct impact on our minds:
In organisms equipped to sense emotions, that is, to have feelings, emotions also have an impact on the mind, as they occur, in the here and now. But in organisms equipped with consciousness, that is, capable of knowing they have feelings, another level of regulation is reached. Consciousness allows feelings to be known and thus promotes the impact of emotion internally, allows emotions to permeate the thought process through the agency of feelings. (Damasio 2000:
56)
Thus we can argue that symbols also have a direct impact on minds, and they are used (not only among human beings but also among non-humans) to communicate, at an inner level, feelings, which would in other ways be, at the level of direct experience, incommunicable.