Community is a commonly used word, but it connotes several meanings. Some people use it almost as a synonym of Society; others use it for a geographically distinct local community or for a group of people who are of the same origin. In the West, it has also been used for ‘total institutions’ such as prison or mental asylum—as an extension, the term has also been used for residential schools.
To quote Jessie Bernard: ‘Four classical paradigms encompass most of what we know about the sociology of the community…’(Bernard, 1973: 8). These were:
- Ecological Paradigm: ‘which explained how populations have distributed themselves, how the resulting settlements have become spatially structured, and how the structural components have varied sociologically. The “exemplar” model here was the city of Chicago.’
- Ranked-status or social class paradigm: Its exemplar model was the study of the Yankee City.1
- Power Paradigm: Study of power relations in a community.2
- Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft,3 focusing on spatial aspects of settlements.
Of the four types, the first three concentrated mainly on single, and urban, communities, while the fourth paradigm classified the communities in terms of their habitat into rural and urban.
In all of these usages, the community was defined in terms of locale, common ties among people inhabiting the area, and social interaction between them, whether it was to divide the society in terms of classes or ranks, or to classify the communities in terms of the pattern of settlement. There are studies of different patterns of urban and rural settlements, or power structure, or the nature of social relationships.
Community studies, as they developed in the United States, focused on the city and studied distribution, sub-community social structure, urbanization, reorganization and social disorganization. Most settlements in America are urban; some have populations as low as 12 to 15 families. Even the communities that are called villages have nothing in common in terms of attributes with villages found in developing countries.4
Anthropologists treated tribes as communities living in small hamlets and villages, and studied their way of life. In the 1960s, when village studies were in vogue in India, this term—community—was quite often used as a qualifier–village community, that is, village as a community.
The term ‘community’ has variously been defined, particularly by the American rural sociologists. A strong Community Development Movement in the Unites States in the 1950s made this concept very crucial. But the communities addressed by the movement were mainly urban communities. Of course, some communities were called villages, but their profiles were basically urban, and in no way comparable to the villages in countries like India.
The word community assumed special significance in India when in the 1950s the government launched a massive programme for the upliftment of villages at the prompting of American experts—Albert Mayer and Douglas Ensminger. This was called Community Development Programme [CDP] and focused on village communities.
It should be mentioned that most sociologists working in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing Western society began to take the position that community—as a meaningful social structure—has only a historical significance. Following Simmel’s distinction of gemeinschaft and gesselschaft, these scholars argued that community traits were to be found in gemeinschaft and that the urbanizing society corresponds closely to gesselschaft. But there were others, like Harold F. Kaufman, who thought that community-type structures also exist in urban settings, and deserve to be studied because of their significance in planning community development.
Concern for community, both in the United States and in India, in the 1950s and 1960s drew some scholars to conceptualize the term Community. But most American authors focused on their own society and generated a definition for community that was applicable in their context.
To understand the conceptual crisis, it is important to understand the difference in the two societies, America and India.
American society is basically a society populated by migrants who generally settled in urban conglomerates. The native Americans—called Red Indians—were pushed into reserved areas. Thus, the New World residents drawn from different cultural contexts—mainly European—had to struggle to develop a community life within the city context. The ‘creation of a community’ and its ‘development’ was the key issue for American planners and policy makers.
In contrast to the US, India represented a host of village communities of great vintage. Here, it was not the question of ‘creating’ communities, but of ‘developing already existing communities’ by removing their backwardness and enlarging their cognitive horizons. The effort was intended to relate these communities with the wider world of the great civilization of India. Thus, despite having the same name, the Community Development Programme addressed two different issues in the two countries. In India, it meant the development of rural villages with a view to linking them with the wider Indian society. In the United States, it meant developing community life amongst people of common origins in the newly created urban settlements: as a spatial community with networks of communication and interaction. Additionally, migrant groups originating from the same culture area but located in different parts of the city also felt the need to develop a ‘community’ of their own—for example, Italians in Chicago, or Puerto Ricans in New York.
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