On Ambivalence and Hope in the Restless Search for Community: How to Work with the Idea of Community in the Global Age

Introduction

The very idea of community has agonized and polarized western sociologists since the academic discipline began to take shape towards the end of the 19th century. Dave Studdert (2005: 19) has suggested that sociology was born with a shared assumption – held by people ranging from ‘“radicals” like Marx to “conservatives” like Comte’ – that attachment to community would be effectively destroyed by industrialization and associated urbanization, while Joan Aldous et al. (1972) and Anthony Giddens (1971) have both noted that Emile Durkheim effectively began his sociological writing by strongly criticizing ideas about community life in urban society that had been articulated in Ferdinand Tönnies’ influential book entitled Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1957[1887]). As Aldous demonstrates, Durkheim had little sympathy for the rather rosy portrayal of old forms of face-to-face community embedded within Tönnies’ notion of Gemeinschaft and he also had no sympathy for the idea that the state needed to play a role in preventing social alienation in the shift to what Tönnies called Gesellschaft modes of social organization (Giddens, 1971: 71). There was nothing organic about pre-industrial rural life, Durkheim argued, because traditional forms of association involved little conscious effort and he subsequently built on this idea to suggest that new forms of social integration would arise both mechanically (through an aggregation of individual relationships; 1964[1893]: 129) and organically (through the negotiation of relationships that can respect both difference and collaboration; 1964[1893]: 131). In trying to give the emerging discipline of sociology new credibility as a ‘scientific’ study of society, Durkheim was keen to avoid words like ‘community’ that evade clear definition.

Many scholars have reviewed debates about the idea of community that have occurred within western sociology ever since it took shape as a distinctive field of thought (e.g. Delanty, 2003, 2010; Studdert, 2005). However, this article starts with Durkheim’s celebrated critique of Tönnies because it reflects a deep ambivalence about community that is still with us; and yet this article will argue that attempts to resort to other words and terms have failed. Delanty has noted (2010: xi) that the word ‘society’ has also had its critics, yet, as we will see below, the word ‘community’ seems to evoke stronger emotive response even from ‘impartial’ academics. We need to embrace and work with the idea of community rather than turn our back on it. ‘Far from disappearing, as the classical sociologists believed,’ Delanty noted (2010: x), ‘community has a contemporary relevance, which appears to have produced a worldwide search for roots, identity and aspirations for belonging.’ Predictions of the death of community have come to resemble the premature announcement of the death of Mark Twain and the time has come to refocus on the resilience of the idea.

An influential book by anthropologist Anthony Cohen (1985) went a long way towards resolving lingering doubts about the ongoing relevance of community and this article argues that Delanty’s work on the communicative construction of community (2003, 2010) provides another turning point. Delanty (2010) has argued that Cohen placed too much emphasis on the creation of boundaries between communities, especially in a world where communication technologies make it easier than ever to belong to a wide array of communities – both ‘local’ and spatially extended – at the same time. Delanty (2010: 153) has added his voice to the suggestion that community is an idea which can never be fully realized and he has noted that it has the power to fragment society as much as it can unite people (2010: 158). Nevertheless, Delanty has not paid enough attention to the ‘dark side’ of community and his later book falls into the trap of thinking that constructed communities have necessarily become disconnected from place. Escalating ecological crises – including human-induced climate change and the looming spectre of ‘peak oil’ – serve to remind us that we cannot live outside, or above, a relationship to space or place. Delanty makes an interesting point when he suggests that non-localized ‘virtual communities’ are better understood as being ‘imagined communities’ because they are no less real than place-based communities and a sense of proximity can be achieved through the exercise of imagination (2010: 157). However, this article suggests that it is better to draw a distinction between ‘grounded’ and ‘projected’ community to dissolve the distinction that Delanty – and others – make between place and imagination.

In relation to escalating ecological crises, it is interesting to note that natural disasters commonly evoke a strong desire to ‘rebuild’ local communities which have borne the brunt of the disaster. The author was a lead investigator on a major study of efforts to rebuild local communities in the wake of the 2004 tsunami disaster in Sri Lanka and this article contrasts the thinking about the nature of community that arose from that study with a more banal use of the term in a book focusing on social recovery in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (Angel et al., 2012). Finally, this article argues that academic debates about the relevance of community have failed to pay adequate attention to the practice of community development as it has emerged in a range of western and non-western societies since the late 1960s (see Craig, 2008[1989]). A wealth of practical experience – reflected for 40 years in the pages of the international Community Development Journal – does not suggest that lingering doubts about community will ever be fully expunged but it does suggest that we should not turn our back on the need to constantly contest narrow and shallow projections of community. The key argument of this article is that scholars and policy-makers alike need to work with a nuanced and dynamic understanding of community formation, reconciling more than a century of sociological debate on the topic.

The Persistence of Community

Durkheim’s hope that sociologists would be able to bury outdated terms like ‘community’ and replace them with more precise terms was never realistic. Interest in the possibility of community – in both urban and rural settings – persisted and it came to occupy the thinking of people ranging from Herman Schmalenbach in Germany (see Delanty, 2010: 30) to the ‘Chicago school’ of sociologists led by Robert Park (Park, 1915). Whereas Durkheim suggested that urbanization would sound the death knell of community, others began to suggest that human mobility more generally would make old forms of social integration irrelevant. By the latter stages of the 20th century it was being suggested that globalization would create new forms of social integration and fragmentation (Harvey, 1989; Hobsbawm, 1994). Hobsbawm was particularly bemused by the persistence of community in the era of late capitalism, suggesting that ‘Never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when community in the sociological sense became hard to find’ (1994: 428). The main problem with this ‘observation’ is that sociologists have never actually agreed on what community is. Yet Hobsbawm’s frustration was triggered by the fact that talk of community was not only persisting but undergoing something of a revival at the time he was writing. A similar frustration had been expressed a little earlier by Richard Sennett when he wrote that community only exists through ‘a continual hyping up of emotions’ (1986: 309) and that the desire for community ‘winds up as a bizarre kind of depoliticized withdrawal’ (1986: 296). An even more vitriolic assessment was offered by the feminist sociologist Iris Marion Young when she suggested that the ‘desire for community rests on the same desire for social wholeness and identification that underlies racism and chauvinism on the one hand and political sectarianism on the other’ (1990: 302).

As the notion of community began to enjoy an unexpected revival in the 1980s and 1990s, some commentators noted that it is very easy for politicians, in particular, to resort to insincere rhetoric about building ‘stronger’ communities. As early as 1981 Lois Bryson and Martin Mowbray argued that the rhetoric of community can be presented as a ‘spray-on solution’ for deep-seated and unaddressed ills of society. In 1999 Nikolas Rose noted that when it comes to talking about community, ‘sociologists, moralists, politicians and pamphleteers rehearse similar themes’ (1999: 172) and yet the seemingly common idea is ‘differently spacialized and differently temporized’. While he noted that the word ‘community’ can be used to mean very different things, Rose was not among those who thought that it had outlived its usefulness; indeed his influential 1996 essay suggested that scholars and policy-makers alike should be intrigued by the apparent turn to community.

Those who have suggested that globalization finally makes old ideas about community irrelevant include John Urry (2000), Saskia Sassen (2006) and Manuel Castells in his influential trilogy on the changing nature of society (1996, 1997, 1998). Castells developed the idea that we have moved from societies defined by geography to a society of global networks made possible by radically new communication technologies. As we see below, Urry argued that increasing mobility has made place largely irrelevant, while Sassen (2008) suggested that globalization has created new kinds of assemblages primarily located in big ‘global’ cities. Scholars like Urry and Sassen are attracted to Castells’ notion of a globally connected ‘network society’ as a kind of substitute for the language of community.

However, the suggestion that talk of community would give way to a new focus on mobilities and networks has once again underestimated the enduring appeal of the idea of community and a wide range of scholars (e.g. Bauman, 2001; Delanty, 2003; Maffesoli, 1996; Rose, 1996) have all suggested that we are seeing something of a turn to community in an era of growing global uncertainty. Bauman (2001) put aside his earlier hostility to community (1993) to argue that the desire for community is understandable in conditions that he called ‘liquid modernity’, while Maffesoli suggested that new forms of uncertainty are resulting in the emergence of ‘emotional communities’ which tend to be ‘unstable’ and ‘open’ and also a kind of challenge to the ‘established moral order’ (1996: 15). Rose countered the renewed arguments about the demise of community by suggesting that the manifest failings of modernity have raised questions about the death of the social (1996) rather than the death of community. The ‘idea of community’ has come to replace the obligation to the social, he wrote, because community is now being seen as an ‘antidote or even cure to the ills that the social had not been able to address’ (1999: 89).

The Enduring Symbolic Importance of Community

Delanty notes (2010: 31–5) that the combined work of anthropologists Victor Turner and Anthony Cohen shifted the emphasis from thinking of community as a form of social integration to focus on its symbolic and cultural significance and the 1985 book by Cohen is widely seen as a seminal work on this topic. It is interesting to note that Cohen began his book by lambasting the ‘Chicago School’ of sociologists – led by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth – for what he considers to have been a rather mechanical rendering of Durkheim’s work on the interplay between ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ forms of solidarity within urban life. This critique of the Chicago School is probably a bit harsh because they did draw attention to what Park called the ‘mosaic of little worlds’ (1915: 40) within burgeoning cities and in doing so they gave birth to an ongoing body of work on the emergence of community in a wide array of diverse local urban settings. However, Cohen is right to say that in concentrating on the function of communities sociologists had lost sight of their symbolic importance.

Cohen went on to argue that the time has come to turn away from the effort to find ‘lexical meaning’ of community in order to focus instead on its use (1985: 12). While it might signify that members of a community have something in common, he suggested, it also serves to distinguish them ‘in some significant way from the members of other putative groups’ (1985: 12). This shifts the emphasis to the ways in which communities might be formed, rather than found, and this, in turn, raises the controversial topic of boundary-setting because physical and conceptual boundaries divide and exclude as much as they enclose and include. However, Cohen makes the point that any boundary will enclose difference or diversity as much as sameness and the whole process of boundary-setting can open up discussions about identity and belonging. In Cohen’s treatment, a community is not formed through the depiction of a territory but by clustering around symbols of a shared identity, even if geography sometimes suggests the ways in which one community might distinguish itself from another. The focus is on culture rather than geography even if cultural differentiation is influenced by geography. Boundaries emerge from this process rather than begin the process of community formation.

Cohen’s work on community was influenced by Turner’s work on ‘liminality’ (1969), which can be understood as moments evoked by ritualistic practices when normality is suspended (Delanty, 2003: 44). Like Esposito (2010), Turner (1969) returned to early notions of communitas in order to argue that some conception of community is present in all societies. He suggested that community exists ‘in resistance to structure, at the edges of structure, and from beneath structure’ (1969: 128). This led him to the view that community has both cognitive and symbolic significance and this served as an important point of departure for Cohen.

The Communicative Construction of Community

As indicated earlier, Delanty (2010) has argued that Cohen and Turner put too much emphasis on the importance of boundary formation at a time when the search for community was leading to the formation of multiple and overlapping community formations. Delanty began the first edition of his influential ‘key ideas’ book (2003) by noting that a notion of community is present in the cosmologies of many ancient societies. For example, the Ancient Greeks had a word for community that was imbued with multiple meanings; combining ‘nostalgic narratives of loss’ with ‘utopian dreams’ of the future (2003: 12) and referring to both ‘locality and particularness’ and also to the sense of a ‘universal community in which all human beings participate’. This foreshadows the multiple layers of meaning that are embedded within the English word ‘community’ and Delanty went on to argue that coexisting meanings have given the word its strong emotive appeal, noting that it has ‘exerted itself as a powerful idea of belonging in every age’ (2003: 12). At the same time, such complexities of meaning create ambivalence and Delanty (2010: 11) concludes that we have been left with three prevailing discourses: 1) that community has now been irretrievably lost; 2) that community signifies a powerful discourse of loss and possible recovery; and 3) that community is yet to be achieved. A noticeable turn to community in a world of increasing global uncertainties makes the first discourse untenable, Delanty concludes, while the interplay of the other two discourses suggests that community should not be seen as a mode of social integration but rather a ‘normative discourse about belonging’ (2010: xv). We are also left with the understanding that the meaning of community is ‘never settled for once and for all’ because there can always be ‘rival claims to community’ (2010: xiii).

In focusing on the symbolic importance of community, Cohen’s book (1985) showed why community will always be a fluid and contestable idea. However, subsequent advances in transport and communication technologies have even made Cohen’s conception seem rather static and one-dimensional. Increasing mobility of people and an increased capacity to communicate across vast distances in real time has led many sociologists to argue that local forms of social integration have become largely irrelevant. As mentioned earlier, scholars such as John Urry (2000) and Saskia Sassen (2006) have argued that increasing global flows have made old place attachments irrelevant or regressive; while Urry suggests that ‘place communities’ are often ‘socially stratified’ and often ‘become places of consumption – including consumption of the landscape’ (2000: 141). While Mike Davis (1999) painted a rather bleak picture of spreading urban dystopias, Manual Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) was more optimistic about the growing opportunity for individuals, no matter where they are located in the world, to belong to transnational communities made possible by new forms of communication. Noting the rise of transnational ‘communities of dissent’ (Delanty, 2010: 85–100) and transnational communities created by increasing human migration (2010: 119–26), Delanty has adopted Castells’ ideas about the communicative construction of community. However, he prefers to work with the language of community formation rather than adopt Castells’ conception of the ‘network society’.

We need to understand the growing desire for community in the contemporary world, Delanty argues, because the ‘persistence of community consists in its ability to communicate ways of belonging, especially in the context of an increasingly insecure world’ (2010: 152). According to Delanty (2010: 152), community is ‘neither a form of social integration nor a form of meaning, but an open-ended system of communication about belonging’. In both editions of his book, Delanty himself suggests that his key argument is that:

Community is relevant today because, on the one side, the fragmentation of society has provoked a worldwide search for community, and on the other … cultural developments and global forms of communication have facilitated the construction of community. (2003: 193)

Although he does not adequately acknowledge it, Delanty’s argument builds on ideas that were articulated earlier by Nikolas Rose (1999). For example, Rose also argued that simplistic conceptions of community should be abandoned in order to think of them as ‘localized, fragmented, hybrid, multiple, overlapping and activated differently in different arenas and practices’ (1999: 178). ‘To community as essence, origin, fixity,’ Rose wrote (1999: 195), ‘one can thus counterpose community as a constructed form for the collective unworking of identities and moralities.’

It is interesting to note that the second edition of Delanty’s book (2010) puts much more emphasis on the ‘fragility’ of community in the contemporary world. It also puts more emphasis on the possibilities for creating ‘imagined’, spatially extended and transnational communities. It includes a discussion about increasing opportunities for individuals to participate in a wide array of ‘personal communities’ (2010: 103–12), noting that ‘postmodern’ thinking has encouraged us to ‘refocus on the self’. The second edition also includes a chapter on ‘political community’ which enables Delanty to tackle the problematic legacy of ‘communitarianism’ but does not, for this author, add to his understanding of social community formation. Frustratingly, the second edition ends with the same open-ended question that came at the end of the first edition about the need to better understand relationships between community and place.

Incompletion of Community

As we shift from thinking of community as a social structure to see it as an irrepressible aspiration for belonging we need to acknowledge that the desire for community can never actually be fulfilled. This idea about the essential ‘incompletion’ of community was probably best expressed by the French philosopher and art critic Jean-Luc Nancy in his famous essay, The Inoperative Community, which was first published in 1983 before being re-published in book form in 1991. Delanty (2003: 135) notes that Nancy’s compatriot Maurice Blanchot expressed similar thoughts about the incompletion of community in an essay also published in 1983 and Roberto Esposito (2010: 99) has noted that Georges Bataille made similar points in an essay published in 1985. Like Cohen after him, Nancy used his essay to emphasize the symbolic importance of community, arguing that community is more likely to be experienced as a loss rather than as something more tangible. He went on to say ‘incompletion’ is the necessary ‘principle’ of community, provided we understand ‘incompletion in an active sense … as designating not an insufficiency or lack, but the activity of sharing’ (1991: 35).

Delanty (2010: 107–8) notes that Nancy and Blanchot have added an important emotional dimension to the search for community without losing sight of the fact that it is the result of dialogue and communication. Delanty suggests that Nancy and Blanchot were the pioneers of a ‘postmodern theory’ of community and it is interesting to note that his earlier criticism of this approach has been dropped from the second edition. Even in the first edition, Delanty shared with Nancy and Blanchot the idea that the ‘finality’ of community is impossible because it ‘ends up [being] destroyed by the individualism that created the desire for it’ (2003: 192). However, he has probably embraced the ideas of Nancy more fully because they make it clear that communication alone does not create a bond. Indeed, Nancy foreshadowed the later thinking of Nikolas Rose (1999) when he wrote (1991: 11) that ‘community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society’. Perhaps Nancy made a mistake in using the word ‘inoperative’ in the title of his 1983 essay because that tends to suggest that community cannot be experienced even in partial or ephemeral forms. However, he went on to suggest that we need to think of ‘incompletion in an active sense’ of seeking and this is where his ideas overlap with Georges Bataille’s suggestion that ‘unfulfillment’, rather than the acquisition of knowledge, is what drives our desire to participate in the construction of shared knowledge (Esposito, 2010).

The emotional allure of belonging to community is what led Delanty to conclude (2003: 195) that it ‘offers people what neither society nor the state can offer, namely a sense of belonging in an insecure world’. However, it is the emotional power of community which can also make it a rather dangerous idea.

The Dark Side of Community

While there is renewed global interest in community we need to take heed of persistent warnings that community is not always the wholesome experience that it promises to be. A projection of community will commonly create a sense of there being ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ and this inevitably causes resentment on the part of the excluded. ‘Security for some’, wrote Shaw (2007: 28), ‘may be achieved only by the exclusion of others’, as seen in the exclusion of asylum seekers from citizenship in most western societies. As Iris Marion Young stressed (1990), projections of community can often be bound up with ethnic, racial and class divisions and related feelings of either superiority or resentment. Indeed, communalism born of resentment can lead to sometimes sudden and unexpected outbreaks of communal violence.

Eruptions of communal violence can be made worse when tensions and resentments simmer from one generation to the next, and the Indian sociologist Manoj Jha (2010) has provided a perceptive account of how this played out in the alarmingly brutal attacks on Muslims living in the Indian state of Gujarat over a period of four months in 2002. Those responsible for the violence tried to characterize it as justifiable revenge for past injustices and Jha suggests that communities sometimes draw on stories of past humiliation as the ‘chosen traumas’ to justify revenge. Things that might have happened in the distant past can be ‘psychologised’ and ‘mythologised’ to become ‘markers of their identity’. Jha wrote (2010: 318), ‘Once a trauma becomes a “chosen trauma” the historical truth about it does not really matter’ and this makes it difficult to subject the conflict to ‘rational’ analysis. In such circumstances, Jha suggests, local authorities and community workers need to seek ways for the ‘strengthening of shared spaces, shared interests and shared destiny’, allowing for ‘points of encounter’ between ‘open expression of a painful past’ and the ‘articulation of a long-term independent future’ (2010: 318). Ultimately, Jha concludes, the aim is to build trust among communities ‘who have either forgotten the beauty of plural living or have fallen prey to … manufactured amnesia’ (2010: 318).

Inter-communal conflict has a long history in many societies across the world but the communal riots that broke out across the UK in August 2011 suggested that there is potential for sudden upsurges of communal violence in any society. This reminds us that the very idea of community can be emotionally fraught and hotly contested and here it is useful to turn to Roberto Esposito’s work on the ‘origins and destiny of community’ (2010). While this book is primarily interested in piecing together a more robust theory of ‘political community’ it begins with a very useful exploration of the etymology of the word ‘community’ within European languages.

Esposito suggests that we can start this etymological exploration with the Latin word communitas because all neo-Latin languages have some variation of the word commun to refer to that which ‘begins where what is proper ends’ (Esposito, 2010: 3) and some version of the word munus which is linked to notions of gift and obligation (2010: 4). It is interesting to note that the word commun appears in Greek as koinos and in German as gemein (2010: 4) and that the opposite of munus is immunus which translates loosely as immunity to exchange relationships that trigger obligations (2010: 4–6). According to Esposito’s analysis, the munus that comes to be shared publicly is not ‘a property’ or ‘possession’ but rather ‘a debt, a pledge, a gift that is to be given’ (2010: 6). This raises the idea that the sense of obligation that is embedded within the word communitas refers to a debt or a ‘lack’ rather than something that already exists. This innovative interpretation of the sense of obligation embedded within the word community helps to explain why the desire for community can sometimes evoke a strong fear of failure. Although Esposito has suggested that communitas is ‘the most suitable, indeed the sole dimension’ of what it means to be human (2010: 8) he also suggests that it offers only a fragile reassurance:

Seen from this point of view, therefore, community isn’t only to be identified with the rea publica, with the common ‘thing’, but rather it is the hole into which the common thing continually risks falling, a sort of landslide produced laterally and within. This fault-line that surrounds and penetrates the ‘social’ is always perceived as the constitute danger of our co-living … We need to watch out for this without forgetting that it is communitas itself that causes the landslide; the threshold that we can’t leave behind because it always outruns us … as the unreachable Object into which our subjectivity risks falling and being lost. Here then is the blinding truth that is kept within the etymological folds of communitas; the public thing [rea publica] is inseparable from the no-thing [niente]. (2010: 8)

Returning to Place: Grounded and Projected Community

As indicated earlier, Delanty ended the second edition of his ‘key ideas’ book with the suggestion that connection to place ‘will be an important topic for community research in the future’ (2010: 158). ‘The revival of community today is undoubtedly connected with the crisis of belonging in relation to place’, he wrote (2010: 158) and yet the second edition of his book seems to draw a much stronger distinction than the first between ‘imagined’ communities and communities of place. One problem here is that Delanty’s work on the sociology of community is not informed by a substantial body of work undertaken by human and cultural geographers since the 1980s on the growing importance of a ‘sense of place’ (e.g. Massey, 1984, 2005; Mugerauer, 1994). It also overlooks studies that are regularly reported in international sociology journals on the rise and demise of local communities and it makes no reference to place-based community development work that has been the subject of discussion and debate in the pages of the international Community Development Journal for more than 40 years.

From 2004 to 2014, the author has been involved in a number of big Australian research projects on the growing importance of community-based art (Mulligan et al., 2006; Mulligan and Smith, 2010, 2011). These studies have suggested that a national growth in community art practice reflects an underlying desire to create and project a sense of belonging to communities of place, and the work of Arlene Goldbard (2006) points to similar developments in the USA and UK. One of the studies in which the author was involved (Mulligan and Smith, 2010) showed that local government authorities in Australia have become key sponsors of community-based art because it helps them to project a sense of community identity to residents and the world at large. In communicating the outcomes of the first research study to the health promotion agency VicHealth, the author and his co-researchers (Mulligan et al., 2006) suggested that it is useful to draw a distinction between ‘grounded communities’ for which connections to place are important and ‘projected communities’ which may, or may not, include references to place. The study outcomes concurred with Delanty’s argument that a sense of community will not exist in the contemporary world unless it is ‘wilfully constructed’ (2003: 130) and the authors argued that ‘grounded communities’ only manifest themselves to the extent that they are constantly created and recreated. In other words, ‘grounded communities’ only come into being by being ‘projected’ and this echoes Delanty’s conception of communicative construction of community. At the same time, Delanty’s ‘imagined communities’ also come into existence by being ‘projected’ by their creators and advocates even if they have no reference to particular places or locales.

The distinction between ‘grounded’ and ‘projected’ community avoids the mistake of counterposing place-based and ‘virtual’ communities and it highlights the fact that projections related to the identity of a place-based community can always be contested. This, in turn, allows for contestation about the interplay of history and change in the way that the identity of any particular community might be projected. For example, visitors to the town of Glenrowan in Victoria, Australia, find that it has become something of a shrine to the outlaw Ned Kelly and his ‘gang’, who operated in the area in the last part of the 19th century. Kelly has long been adopted as a rather ironic cultural icon of Australian identity, as celebrated in the work of artist Sidney Nolan and, more recently, novelist Peter Carey. However, some local residents of Glenrowan, along with descendants of the policemen whom Kelly murdered, periodically protest the way that Kelly is portrayed at Glenrowan. It can become annoying to local residents when a particular story comes to dominate the way their community is projected, trapping them within a past-oriented mythology that transcends its locale. However, the Ned Kelly story has wide appeal in Australia because it invokes moral ambiguities and is open to interpretation. As a result, local debates about the outlaw’s legacy circulate nationally. Meanwhile, many people in the town are working hard to add other dimensions to the way in which the community projects itself to visitors and the world at large.

The Ned Kelly story will continue to invoke passionate debate at all levels from the local to the national and such debates can never be resolved. The grounded community is obliged to continue grappling with the story in the ways it might choose to project itself to the world at large but the story is also projected back into the local community as an inescapable part of its history and identity. Projections of community seek to define the identity to a grounded community but they will always be partial and incomplete. Meanwhile, evocative stories – such as the story of the Kelly gang – can circulate within much wider dialogues about identity and belonging. Different levels of belonging to community can interact with each other.

Resisting the Lure of Substitute Language

Doubts about the enduring relevance of community have periodically encouraged scholars and policy-makers to latch onto words or terms that seem to be less ambiguous. Durkheim, for example, preferred to talk about new forms of civil association and ‘solidarity’, leading to a body of work focused on the notion of ‘civil society’ (see Alexander, 2006). In recent decades, it has become popular to substitute the language of ‘social capital’ for the language of community. A leading advocate for working with the notion of ‘social capital’, Robert Putnam, has said that the term ‘appears to have been invented at least six times during the twentieth century’ (2000: 19) with the first use he found being in a book written by Lyda Hanefan in 1916. While Putnam is keen to claim the American heritage of the term that he subsequently popularized with his rather famous book on the decline in ‘civic engagement’ in America (2000), he acknowledges that French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and German economist Ekkehart Schlicht were largely responsible for bringing the term into global discourse in the 1980s.

In the context of this article it is most relevant to examine Bourdieu’s use of the term (e.g. 1986) and it is clear that his purpose was more rhetorical than instrumental. In teasing out the idea of capital accumulation he wanted to challenge the narrowness of ‘economism’ by suggesting that both social and cultural capital are as important as economic capital. He argued that the accumulation of cultural and social capital begins with individuals and families but can be extended and ‘objectified’ to include practices and institutions. In using terms like ‘volume of social capital’, ‘profits which accrue from membership’, and ‘investment strategies’, Bourdieu invited a rather instrumental interpretation of his concept and there can be little doubt that subsequent applications of it have undermined its rhetorical value. Bourdieu admitted as much when he later said that he had speculated in the possibility of capital conversion ‘in terms that do not completely satisfy me’ (1993: 33) and that ‘if there is one person for whom it’s a problem, it’s myself’ (1993: 34). He reaffirmed the concept’s rhetorical value in arguing that it continues to raise ‘fertile questions’ (1993: 34) and those who have taken his rather playful use of economic language too literally should remember that he had argued that the ‘reproduction of social capital requires an unceasing effort of sociability’; an idea that is not amenable to quantification.

The term ‘social capital’ has been picked up in a wide range of social and political discourses since the 1980s, with Putnam and Coleman (1988) emerging as its most influential champions. It is interesting to note that the word ‘community’ is part of the subtitle of Putnam’s most influential book (2000) and yet he uses the word only fleetingly throughout the text and only in vague and general terms. He talks of ‘the American community’ and of ‘many diverse American communities’ (2000: 403) and suggests that community starts with family and friends and moves out from there (2000: 273). He notes that ‘community means different things to different people’ and endorses the efforts of communitarians such as Amitai Etzioni in trying to invest community with a renewed moral purpose (2000: 403).

Putnam’s Bowling Alone is an impressive documentation of the multiple forms of social association emerging in the USA and many sociologists have followed his lead in trying to turn the language of association into the language of social capital accumulation. However, like Putnam’s book, such accounts end up being descriptive rather than explanatory and offer no new insights on the contested meaning of community. Any attempt to substitute the language of community with the language of social capital has only taken us further away from an understanding of why the word is so widely and commonly invoked. Putnam’s use of the term has been widely criticized for introducing new conceptual and linguistic confusions (e.g. Fine, 2001) while Dave Studdert (2005) has argued persuasively that sociological interest in ‘social capital’ has become a distraction from dealing with the concept of community.

Rebuilding Communities in the Wake of Disasters

The suggestion – made by Delanty and others – that the desire for community reflects an ancient and perennial discourse of loss and recovery is reflected in the fact that ‘natural’ disasters often trigger an outpouring of rhetoric on the need to ‘rebuild’ affected communities, even to ‘build back better’ (Mulligan and Nadarajah, 2012). Unfortunately, the word ‘community’ is often used loosely and uncritically in the international literature on disaster recovery even if there is an awareness that projected claims about who belongs to the community can divide and further traumatize disaster-affected communities (Mulligan, 2013). Shallow or narrow projections of community can make long-term social recovery from a disaster more difficult (Khasalamwa, 2009; Mulligan and Nadarajah, 2012), while loose references to community can obscure a more nuanced understanding of social recovery. The latter point is well illustrated by a book on the challenges faced by survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (Angel et al., 2012). While ‘community’ features prominently, and seductively, in the book’s title, it is used sparingly in the text and the book touches loosely on forms of community ranging from ‘the Vietnamese community’ (2012: 74) to the ‘Austin community’ (2012: 20) to ‘low-income’ or ‘affluent communities’ of New Orleans (2012: 56–8). The book deploys the notion of ‘social capital’ quite effectively and presents as a key finding the idea that social capital is ‘transportable’. However, the reader is left wondering if ‘lost community’ can ever be recovered or even if the idea of community has relevance for people displaced by a major catastrophe.

The author has joined others (e.g. Khasalamwa, 2009) in arguing that people involved in disaster relief and recovery need to take the time to understand the local dynamics and ‘pre-existing vulnerabilities’ within disaster-affected communities before putting in place any resettlement plans that could, potentially, open up pre-existing fault-lines. In examining what might be learnt about rebuilding disaster-affected communities from the Sri Lanka tsunami disaster of 2004, the author and his co-researchers sought out examples of good practice and were surprised to find that some people with no past experience in this kind of work did better than some who arrived with pre-existing ideas about what should be done. The author concluded (Mulligan, 2013) that haste is the enemy of effective long-term disaster recovery work because ‘outside’ aid workers need to take time to identify and work with respected locals who understand the potential for division and conflict within the traumatized community. The 2004 tsunami struck coastal Sri Lankan communities that included a delicate mix of sub-communities divided by ethnic origin and religious affiliations. For example, one community could have a community of Tamil-speaking Muslims living among Tamil-speaking Hindus and Sinhalese-speaking Buddhists and some of these communities were in areas affected by a long-running civil war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and Tamil-Hindu separatists. In such circumstances it was critically important to attend to the different needs of religious and ethnic communities – including, for example, access to places of worship – while also thinking about the needs for the community as a whole in relation to things like employment, education, and the maintenance of pre-existing social networks. The opportunity to ‘build back better’ was only realized in the few locations where adequate attention was paid to the complexities of community formation (Mulligan and Nadarajah, 2012).

Conclusions

The author’s work on rebuilding local communities in the wake of the tsunami disaster led him to advocate a conscious and deliberative ‘community development’ approach to the rebuilding of traumatized communities (Mulligan, 2013). Use of the term ‘community development’ acknowledges the existence of the field of practice that first emerged in countries such as the UK, USA and Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Craig, 2008[1989]; Kenny, 2007). Craig (2008[1989]: 182) notes that the early practice in the UK was partially co-opted by the state through the formation of Britain’s Community Development Project (CDP) in 1968. This prompted Nikolas Rose (1999: 175) to subsequently argue that there had been a shift from seeing community as ‘critique and opposition directed against remote bureaucracy’ to an ‘expert discourse and a professional vocation’, raising the ‘suspicion’ that ‘the space of community was being colonized by agents, institutions and practices of control’ (1999: 176). However, scholars of community development practice (e.g. Mayo, 1994; Shaw, 2007) have argued that experienced practitioners understand the contested nature of community yet they can use it to force the state to become more responsive to communities that might otherwise be neglected. A Community Development Journal that was launched in Britain in 1968 has subsequently become a forum for scholarly debate and reflection on community development practice internationally and yet that literature is rarely cited within the debates about the meaning of community that have been reviewed in this article.

The starting point for community development practice is the understanding that community is not the given it might have been in a pre-modern world and hence it must be ‘wilfully constructed’, to borrow Delanty’s phrase. This shifts the emphasis from debating the existence of community to considering the possibilities for the creation of community. This article has argued for a dynamic understanding of community formation and, in doing so, it has suggested four key considerations:

Many commentators have noted that the word community is frequently abused. In keeping with the suggestion that there is more to be learnt from many years of community development practice, the last word here goes to a highly experienced UK practitioner, Jeremy Brent, whose erudite PhD on the topic was turned into a posthumous book by a group of his friends and admirers (Brent, 2009). ‘Community is not a simple concept and is dangerous if it is simplified,’ he wrote (2009: 261). However, he concluded his reflections on 25 years of practice by saying (2009: 261) that: ‘Engaging with community is a practice full of ambivalence, but always one full of hope.’