Community,Class,and Kinship—Bases for Collective Action within Localities

The relationship between community and class has largely been neglected. In this paper, this relationship is focused upon, and a model is developed which allows the identification of significant aspects of locality and class relationships. The model identifies three sets of relationships, those based on propinquity, those based on property, and those based on kinship, and argues that the basis of communion within a locality can be found within any one of these three main sets of relationships. The research which stimulated this paper started with a focus upon the relationship between space and class as expressed in the pattern of landownership. Working from this beginning point, the analysis moves to examine the nature of boundaries and the structure of local organisations which constitute ‘latent’ community. A further dimension, which was pivotal in many traditional rural community studies, is then explored, namely kinship. For each of these three sets of relationships, it is possible to identify objective patterns based upon boundaries and upon local organisation, property ownership, and kin connections. The process by which these objective relationships acquire subjective meaning is similar in each of the three cases. The possibility both of contradiction and of reinforcement therefore exists in the development of communion within localities. The conditions under which propinquity produces community through the development of subjective consciousness are then explored. In the conclusions a number of issues are highlighted which are brought into focus by this approach. These are the interconnections of community and class, the relationship between transience and social structure, and between male mateship and egalitarianism, the role of gender within communities, and, finally, the relationship between localities and the wider society.