The Community as Object and as Sample*

Abstract

ONE of the encouraging points of convergence in the various empirically based social sciences is the growing power and sophistication of the community study method (Arensberg 1954; Hollingshead 1948; Konig 1956; Chiva 1958; Redfield 1956a). The method has come to be much and ably used in ethnography. There it has added much to the emerging possibility of an atlast meaningful comparative sociology of the world's peoples (Steward 1950). The method, of course, has long roots in social surveys, in rural and agricultural sociology and economics, and in human geography (Pauline V. Young 1949; Wilson 1945; Taylor 1945; Utermann 1952; Maget 1953). It has not been confined to small and rural communities alone. It has as well been employed in urban sociology and in the studying and planning of urbanisme (Bott 1956; Young and Wilmott 1957; Shevky 1929; Simey 1954; Balandier 1955). This convergence upon the community study method signals the growing use of the community for many purposes. The community has served as a sample or unit of observation for the study of a culture or society, as a locus or local embodiment of a wider or general social problem or phenomenon, as a testing ground for plans of change, amelioration, or development (Batten 1958; Ruopp 1953; Ware 1952). Convergence upon the community study method thus marks a reentrance of the community, small and large, into the forefront of social science activity. We say reentrance because much of the earliest social science, in the seminal period of the late decades of the last century, was also focused on the community. Such seminal work explored the repeated, often widespread, elementary or simple forms of the local commonwealth; the village, its land-use and settlement pattern, its village constitution; the polis, the early city (Maine 1871; Maurer 1854; Peake 1954; Fustel de Coulange 1905; Meitzen 1895). Problems were different then, of course, but the community as field for their study or sample of their universe was even then the workplace. Despite the long and now renewed history of the community as a center and workplace of social science interest, much confusion about it still persists. The thing-in-itself, the community as object, is imperfectly separated, in concept and in practice, from the use of it, as field or sample, where the community is that within which work is done, observations made, relationships traced out. The separation of the problems is clear enough in the abstract; it is clearly a