'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The
assumption, of much social science, has been that it is in communities
-- and to communities -- that human individuals, as social and cultural
beings, belong. Communities are said to embody that interactive
environment from which individuals' identities and senses of self
derive, and in which they continue to dwell.
The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the
personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut
collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can
prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and
identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.
In this provocative new book, anthropologists Vered Amit and Nigel
Rapport draw on their various ethnographic experiences to reappraise the
concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalization,
religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms.
How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are
intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to
say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the
on-going construction and the rightful expression of such migrant
identities? Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit give their own answers to these
questions before entering into dialogue to assess each other's
positions.
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies
at the University of St. Andrews. He is author of Transcendent
Individual (1997). Vered Amit is an Associate Professor at Concordia
University in Montreal. She is the editor of Realizing Community (2002).
