Community

What is a Community?

Community is a collective of human beings that is more unified around networks of solidarity than a usual social association—to use the classic distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and organization (Gesellschaft) made by Ferdinand Tönnies in 1887. Community is characterized by specific culture, identities, practices, organizations, definition of a prime collective good, and boundaries between it and the nation-state as well as various other institutions. Various subcategories of communities are based on their main characteristic: national communities, religious communities, ethnic communities, and so forth. Communities may be nonruling (namely minorities) or ruling communities (often majorities).

After the demolition of some totalistic secular ideologies toward the outset of the 21st century and the [Page 251]inability of any concrete culture to be endorsed in all localities as a global transnational culture, the importance of communities as pillars in globalization is crucial. Communities have been crucial as sources of support, empowerment, and struggles for equality. Accordingly, communities are not merely symptoms of multiculturalism; rather, they generate and empower multiplicity of identities and their practices. A community is a bounded space of power, culture, and practices that may be real, imagined, mythological, or practical.

Importance

Why are communities so important in our life and to democracies? First, they are sources of identity construction, individual empowerment, and identity articulation. Our identities are significantly shaped by communities, which is especially important if communities aspire to maintain cultures and identities that are not endorsed or represented by the nation-state. Second, communities are necessary for generating social struggles for either real-location of public goods or changing the structure of political power to gain more sociopolitical equality and to resolve issues of discrimination and deprivation. In other words, communities are important for the development and generation of civic societies and civic engagement.

Third, communities are crucial for democratic trust. Communities are the foci of social capital, and once governments crush the autonomy of nonruling communities, more violence may take place. Fourth, communities regard law and justice as flexible and relative terms, and therefore, they enable legal pluralism. In actuality, communities may provide more pluralization to definitions of rights and other collective goods that need to be promoted. Fifth, communities are narrative tellers and are bounded spaces of legal knowledge, legal consciousness, and legal culture. Hence, they might be major structures and agents of particularistic contexts in the conflict over what we think law is and what we think that we know. Communities provide us with prisms for relativity of law and culture, and hence, they are important constitutive sources of multiculturalism.

...