CONCEPTUALISING COMMUNITY: POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR ATLANTIC CANADA

Abstract

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN'S IMPRESSIVE WORK on community asserts that: Words have meanings: some words, however, also have a 'feel'. The word 'community' is one of them. It feels good: whatever the word 'community' may mean, it is good 'to have a community', to be 'in a community.' Company or society can be bad; but not the community. Community, we feel, is always a good thing. (Bauman 2001:1) Bauman (2001) begins his book 'Welcome to elusive community', and it is. As a concept, community is slippery, difficult to pin down and deeply frustrating. Yet Anthony Cohen has pointed out 'the remarkable hold that the idea of community exerts over both the intellectual and popular mind' (1985: 7). He goes on: 'the concept of community has been one of the most compelling and attractive themes in modern social science, and at the same time one of the most elusive to define'. Cohen has suggested that it may indeed be this quality of the word, its very vagueness and elasticity, which has led it to be declared by academics in recent years to be no longer relevant. Yet, surely this is the quality that has proved to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage in our fast-growing, complex and globalising world. Being able to use words to mean different things to different groups of people at different times may prove useful. This has allowed the word 'community', in particular, to be of use to governments struggling to find ways to glue together individuals, groups, regions and nations. In 1983 Lee and Newby were able to devise three broad definitions of what community was: community as 'geographical expression' (bounded locality), as 'local social system' (a set of social relations taking place in a locality, a network of interrelationships and the content of these relationships) and, finally, as 'identity' and commonality among a group of individuals (p. 57). More recently, in attempting to analyse the concept of community and to operationalise it, Elizabeth Frazer suggested it was made up of 'network density, relationship complexity, smallness of membership [and] confinement to locality' (1999: 56). All these variations on a theme continue to be intensely relevant and pertinent into the twenty-first century. Bauman adds the notion that community, when interpreted as the negotiation of meaning, promises enormous pleasures. It holds out the possibility that: [C]ommunity is a 'warm' place, a cosy and comfortable place . . . In here, in the community, we can relax - we are safe, there are no dangers looming in the dark corners . . . In a community, we all understand each other well, we may trust what we hear, we are safe most of the time and hardly ever puzzled or taken aback. We are never strangers to each other . . . Our duty, purely and simply, is to help each other, and so our right, purely and simply, is to expect that the help we need will be forthcoming. (2001: 1-2) Charles Taylor argues convincingly against the idea that the individual is independent of society, supporting the view that 'the individual is constituted by the language and culture which can only be maintained and renewed in the communities he is part of ' (1985: 8). He goes on: [T]he community is not simply an aggregation of individuals; nor is it simply a casual interaction between the two. The community is also constitutive of the individual, in a sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange which community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility, not just de facto, but as it were de jure. (1985: 8) Community then is, as Cohen (1985) points out, used in a way to indicate that members of a group of people have something in common, something that binds them. At the same time, this very thing also ensures that they have qualities in common which separates them from others. So community is very much a living and relational concept. It marks out boundaries between groups who, for whatever reason, perceive themselves to be different from others. …