“Community” is a word that pleasant to be felt. For myself, there is a good feeling, sense, and imagination when hearing community. I feel like being part of something that completes me as a human being. Hearing these words may bring our imagination on things that are interesting in our lives, such as the place where we were born, the family where we grew up, the school where we meet playmates, a religion in which we hold, and to the work that we enjoy being surrounded by peoples that have in common with us. This word brings us to the places and people with all the different routine and ritual. Our relationship with the place, people, and environment subsequently continue to shape our identity today and in the future.
A. Community, Place, and Technology
Communities often refer to the group of people in a particular place. For example, people who live in a small town, rural, urban, churches, mosques, schools and places in other physical association. The shared sense of place involves relationships with people, culture, and environment (Flora, 2016:14). The sense of community that inherent to the place defined by some sociologists, such as Robert Park, Earnest Burgess, Roderick McKenzie, and Louis Wirth from the Chicago School of Social Ecology. Their early work, which was published in 1925, examines the urban settlement of the City of Chicago. They provided the simplest possible description of a community as a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined area, but a community is more than that. A community is not only a collection of people, but it is a collective of institutions. Not people, but institutions, are final and decisive in distinguishing the community from other social constellations (Halsall, 2014:93).
The embeddedness of the community to the places can be said as an association with ‘traditional’ understandings of community. The problem from this traditional views of community is their almost romanticized attachment to the powers of locality or place, such as a close network of households, a high degree of participate in common social activities, a belonging together, exchange information, most of whom are known to one another, and conscious of a common identity. This paradigm tends to be portrayed as spatially bounded, tight-knit networks that act as structural supports for friendship, kinship and place attachment. However, it is now argued that they have become much less spatially orientated. In other words, the idea of territorial-based communities is increasingly being seen as irrelevant to contemporary social life (Clark, 2007). Just because people might dwell in the same geographic space does not mean they have any ties either to that space or other people around them; geographic propinquity does not mean social communality.
Within the modern and postmodern community, geographical space is also less of consideration, since the globe can be traversed almost instantaneously (Willson, 2006:41). It means that geographical place can not avoid the extended community where members can hold experiences of being bonded together to the same community without meeting one another. People can choose to be several characters within community and several communities at one time. Furthermore, the things that make the forms of community is not the only place but also technology. Technology usage, such as internet, has contributed to the increasing of extended social forms and social practices.
Therefore, community is subjectively in the minds and feelings of individuals in which ontological self-healing and fulfilling human feelings. Community is a psychological reality of the individual (Rousseau, 1991). The involvement of individuals in a community can also be measured by the degree of individual’s sacrifice for the community which so-called “altruistic love.” However, there is a community which requires places and psychological bond at the same time. As an example of a religious community, which is united by the same religion or belief, is need a place of worship to perform their ritual together. This form of the religious community became an example of a community with social relations relatively strong compared with other communities. The sacrifice of individuals in these religious groups, often also remarkable because it can come to the extreme point at the expense of their lives in defense of what is believed by the community. For example, the radicalization in the name of religion is usually very powerful into various forms of violence in humanity. Conversely, a much extreme altruism that is also found in the name of religious groups, such as what was done by Mother Theresa.
In addition, a group of people who are willing to live on the frontier and remote areas, for instance, is another example of how communities are formed due to people and environment in the isolated places. As in the story of the small town Midwest written by Julianne Coach (2016), many people prefer to stay in the countryside with all of the difficulties because they have an emotional attachment to the place. Deep sense as part of a community can be a driving force for giving back to the community. This force called resilience, the ability to accept conditions exist even worse than before. Resilience is the strength of the community that makes people willing and able to survive living in places that are full of limitations.
In the urban context, community depends less on territory and is more a function of the network of friends and relatives dispersed in space (Gottdiener, 2015:211-214). From this reasons, we know the differences between community and neighborhood in suburban or urban life. A neighborhood can be defined as any sociospatial environment where primary relations among residents dominate. An individual who is relatively isolated and has few outside involvements will depend on their neighbors. Learning from the neighborhood revitalization in City Heights, San Diego, CA, we can identify the different types of neighborhoods and community interaction in the urban community. For instance, the anomic neighborhood like City Heights (characteristic of many poor people, weak community organizations, little interaction and connectedness among residents, high level of social disorganization and crime) can be transformed into the defended neighborhood (result from response to an external threat, a heightened sense of community identity, and increased social interaction to build linkages to local government) by the community revitalization planning based on the importance of place and space.
On the other hand, digital technology is a challenge in the future of our community. Particularly in the spread of network access which has facilitated the rapid growth of virtual communities (Chiu, et.al. 2006). The term ‘virtual community,’ was coined by Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold (1993), who defined them as ‘social aggregations that emerge from the net when enough people carry on... public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (Kozinets, 1999).’ These gatherings have been variously termed ‘online,’ ‘virtual,’ or ‘computer-mediated’ communities. The social capital theory suggests that individuals' behavior is a product of their social network. For this reason, we can imagine how is our social network in future will be significantly transformed by this fluid and dynamic revolution of virtual community.
B. Community, Ritual, and Meanings
Each community has a different social capital in the form of norms, networks, and trust among its members. The norms in the community can be observed from the routines and rituals that run among its members. Routines and rituals can be contrasted along the dimensions of communication, commitment, and continuity (Fiese et.al, 2002:382). Routines involve instrumental communication that “this is what needs to be done.” Routines are repeated over time and recognized by continuity in behavior. Rituals differ from routines regarding their symbolic communication. Rituals are “this is who we are” as a group. Ritual is an affective commitment that leaves the individual feeling, and it also provides continuity in meaning across generations. When routines are disrupted, it is a hassle. However, when rituals are disrupted, there is a threat to group cohesion.
Ritual is also a set of symbolic actions that have specific meanings for members, “meaning upon experience.” Durkheim argued that religion is composed of beliefs and rites: beliefs consist of representations of the sacred; rites are determined modes of action that can be characterized only regarding the representations of the sacred that are their object (Bell, 2009:16). Ritual as the means by which collective beliefs and ideals are simultaneously generated, experienced, and affirmed as real by the community. Hence, ritual is the means by which individual perception and behavior are socially appropriated or conditioned. In Durkheim's model the ritual activity of cult constitutes the necessary interaction between the collective representations of social life (as a mental or meta mental category) and individual experience and behavior (as a category of activity).
The easiest example to see the ritual and meaning in it is to come and observe the religious communities, such as my observations (place experience) during this semester in the Muslim community in the Islamic Center Central Missouri (ICCM), Columbia. In this place, we will find and feel the differences of norms, rituals, and identity among its members. Although still in the same religion, Muslims community in the ICCM is more heterogeneous because they came from various countries with a variety of identity and ritual. Interesting when we looking at the differences were assembled in the one place, a “melting pot.” In the Muslim-majority country like Indonesia, differences become the dividing wall between Islamic groups, but in the Muslim-minority country like in the U.S, the community will try to focus more on similarities rather than the differences. By searching this similarity so that the difference between identity, ritual, and other symbolic beliefs becomes irrelevant among its members.
C. Community, Power, and Social Relations
Homo sapiens is highly sociable species. Therefore, in every form of community that was formed by homo sapiens civilization to the present, social relations is stored in it. Emile Durkheim, who is a father of modern sociology, identify a fundamental distinction between social relationships based on organic solidarity and those based on mechanical solidarity (Forgass & Fitness, 2008:6). Durkheim’s equation of traditional societies with “mechanical” solidarity and modern societies with “organic” solidarity. In traditional, small-scale societies social relationships are typically long-term, stable, and highly regulated. One’s place in society is largely determined by ascribed status and rigid norms. Mobility is restricted, and relationships mainly function at the direct, interpersonal level. Compare this with life in modern mass societies which function by indirect, impersonal, and disembodied networks of relationships that do not require face-to-face interaction. We now depend on and are influenced by strangers we never meet, and our relationships are increasingly regulated by rules and contractual expectations that are no longer based on personal contact or experience.
All types of communities also have people or group of people who control decision-making functions. These people can be called as a community leader or key leaders of power action (NRCS, 2005:3). Power is the ability to affect the decision-making process and the use of resources, both public and private, within a community. Power is simply the capacity to bring about change. There are various types of social relations that show the structure of power both based on structural (authority) and cultural (influence) power. According to Foucault (1982:739), “power relations are rooted in the system of social networks.” A complex social relations and power relations embodied within or between communities is then establish our society.
Membership in the community will not automatically be ongoing. Membership is the feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness (McMillan & Chavis, 1986:9). Membership is the feeling that members’ needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group. Just as the American Society upholds the freedom values and democracy system (Puddington, 2015), so that individuals in this society would have the freedom for everyone to choose to be a part or not being part of a community. Religion given by parents to their children, for instance, not then bind forever. It could be in the process towards adulthood that these children choose to leave the religion given by his parents and choose their religion. Even membership in a small community like the family is not necessarily lasting as a result of divorce or separation. In contrast, despite living far apart, the relationship between parents and children or someone with their homelands, may still do have a sense of belonging as a community forever. Remember that a sense of belonging does not just happen, but it takes time and effort to grow up.
A person’s involvement will have an impact on the degree of responsibility of the individual to the community. While an individual enters a new community, they may feel like an outsider at first. Until later the interaction more intense and deeper and then the feeling as an outsider would turn out to be an insider, especially when they begin to have an important role or position in this community. The more important role of someone in the community, then the stronger their sense of community. Building relationships and roles that desired by us and can be accepted by the values, norms, and trust within the community are the things can be done to be a part of the community. In conclusion, community has been an important basis of modern social relationship as an imaginary order that always unique, and hence socially transient (Delanty, 2010:32).
Work Cited
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