[Air-l] Community and our Conceptual Lexicon

[John Postill]

Ian Goodwin wrote:

>...I think it would be a
> large mistake to discount community altogether as a theoretically
> unproductive term.
>  
> [...] the most 
> important point about community is that it pervades everyday life. I'd
> go so far as to say it seems to be indispensable to social discourse.

I agree that community as an ideal appears to pervade everyday life, and
particularly the discourse of policy-makers, politicians, activists and
journalists **in Britain and other Anglophone countries **, but not so in my
own country of origin, Spain, or, for instance, among Iban people in rural
Sarawak where I conducted anthropological research in 1996-98 in longhouses
(rumah panjai). These buildings look like ´villages under one roof´, to use
an English phrase. People spoke of their ´rumah´ (house), not their
´community´ for which there is no vernacular term. As a folk notion, rumah
panjai is indispendable to Iban scholars, just like community would be to
scholars doing research on local authorities in Derbyshire, UK, or in
Vancouver, British Columbia. So we have to be aware of the particular
histories of community as part of certain social discourses (tied to powerful
interests) in the English-speaking world. 

>  
> It is for this reason we should be careful about discounting community.

I am not discounting community as part of social discourse in certain
countries and on the internet. As I said in a previous email, it is still a
very important folk, non-technical notion in those countries.  But as a
technical, social scientific term it is far too vague and it is preventing us
from exploring *actual social formations* such as working committees,
neighbourhood watch patrols, peer groups, web forums, etc.