ancient cities

172 Community
consciousness. Whereas traditional forms of human
association had produced organic communities of
social and moral cohesion, the sheer complexity of
modern society has led to the irreparable fragmentation
of communal and social bonds. The transition
from relatively close-knit and proximal spatial configurations
to the large-scale dispersal of population
aggregates within urban settings was seen by Tönnies
to fundamentally challenge the very existence of
community as traditionally conceived.
Although sharing a concern with Tönnies regarding
the disintegrative effects of social change,
Durkheim argued that the type of group solidarity
produced in complex urbanized societies could
also form the basis for the emergence of new forms
of communal life. A key question in this regard
was how a sense of collective morality could be
maintained amid the increasing differentiation and
complexity of modern society. The answer proposed
by Durkheim initially seems contradictory.
On the one hand, an increase in occupational specialization
and the development of complex social
arrangements has meant that traditional ways of
life have declined, thereby creating pervasive feelings
of social and moral disintegration. Durkheim
referred to this condition of social discord as “anomie.”
Conditions of anomie arise when sudden
and disruptive changes occur in social structure.
Rather than lament this state of affairs, however,
Durkheim suggested that new forms of solidarity
and community could grow from the institutional
bases of modern society. Although Durkheim
remains vague as to what precise shape these communal
forms may take, his emphasis upon the
nature of collective morality, social cohesion, and
the differentiation of modern life was to exercise a
significant influence upon subsequent theories of
community.
Such conceptualizations of community often
held it to be synonymous with an attachment to
locality. In this view, urbanization was gradually
transforming the Gemeinschaft of intimate communal
relations into the Gesellschaft of instrumentally
conceived and bureaucratized mass society. If
society is conceived as the locus of the lifeworld,
situated between the twin institutional pillars of
state and economy, community represented a
bounded spatiality in which cohesive social mores
could be embedded. This suggests community to
be, in essence, a value term. Despite the many ways
in which community has been defined, attention
should be directed to the fact that many such
descriptions posit a certain type of community as
the normative ideal. In this sense, debates on community
have been bedeviled by conceptual and
methodological disagreement as to where the
boundaries of community could or should be
drawn. Although differing in terms of theoretical
analysis, the classical theorists held the decline of
community to be of the most profound consequence
with regard to the effects on collective
morality and social life.
More recent discussions in social theory have
reformulated these dynamics in terms of the interconnections
between the local and the global. Given
the extent to which the forces of globalization have
intruded upon the lifeworld of the local context, the
study of community as a bounded entity has
undoubtedly lost much of the legitimacy it once
held. A prominent example of this has been the
decline of community studies as a clearly recognizable
field of study. Traditionally a strength of
Anglo-American anthropology and sociology, the
transformation of industrial and workforce relations
has revealed how the study of any particular
community must now by necessity take account of
an encompassing context of globalization. Indeed,
even to assume the existence of community is to
risk the accusation of adhering to a reactionary and
conservative interpretation of contemporary social
and political relations.
Although classical social theory presented the
decline of community as a critique of Western
industrialism and urbanization, such appraisals
have been of less salient concern in the global
South. Indeed, if the transformative dynamism of
industrialism in Western society was implicitly
juxtaposed with the perceived stasis of the non-
Western world, such considerations are indicative
of an ethnocentric bias informing classical theories
of community. Critiques of industrialism and urbanization
outside of the Western tradition, thus,
often eschew discussion on the decline of community
in favor of critical engagement with the effects
of global and economic growth. Ranging from
South Africa to Manila to Sydney, communitybased
grassroots activism and resistance to globalization
and capitalist expansion have been of more
urgent concern. Typically focusing on determinants
of employment, health, poverty, and demographic