Spiritual_Wellness_Holistic_Health_and_the_Practic

266 Philosophical Foundations of Health Education
chameleon like. The reason for this is the many ways in which community and participation
are defined.
There have been numerous attempts to clarify the concept of community (see
McMillan and Chavis [1986] for an excellent overview). According to Rifkin, Muller,
and Bichmann (1988), community can be defined as concretely as “ a group of people
living in the same defined area sharing the same basic values and organization, ” or as
abstractly as “ a group of people sharing the same basic interests ” (p. 933). The former
definition is a static geographically based version of community whereas the latter, a
more fluid version stressing relationships, admits that “ the interests change from time
to time with the consequence that the actual members of the ‘ community ’ change from
time to time ” (p. 933).
In the face of these competing definitions of community, McKnight (1987) rightly
asks: “ How will people know when they are in community? ” (p. 57). He answers by
arguing that communities are characterized by four features:
1. An emphasis on capacity as opposed to the deficiency approach of professionals
2. An informality, which often gives the appearance to professionals of communities
as “ disordered, messy, and inefficient ” (p. 58)
3. Community stories that “ allow people to reach back into their common history
and their individual experience for knowledge about truth and direction for the
future, ” and which are often ignored and even threatened by professionals who
want communities to “ count up things rather than communicate ” (p. 58)
4. The incorporation of celebration, tragedy, and fallibility into the life of the
community
Inherent in the above characterization of community is a sense of connectedness,
a sense that McKnight elaborates further when he goes on to describe community as
the social space used by family, friends, neighbors, neighborhood associations, clubs,
civic groups, local enterprises, churches, ethnic associations, temples, local unions,
local government, and local media. In addition to being called the community, this
social environment is also described as the informal sector, the unmanaged environment,
and the associational sector. (p. 56; emphasis added)
These social spaces that McKnight names constitutes the mediating structures that
intervene between the domain of the everyday life of individuals (the micro level) and
the larger social/political/economic context within which these lives are lived out (the
macro level). It could be argued that it is at the level of these mediating structures —
that is, at the level of community — where the dialectical relationship between micro
and macro forces discussed earlier happens, where they meet, produce, and reproduce
each other. One aspect of the notion of capacity building, referred to earlier, is strengthening
individual membership in mediating structures — a micro level strategy that may
be itself health enhancing (Leighton & Stone, 1974; Thomas, 1985). At the macro