Community and the Balkanization of social membership

Abstract

Although the idea of community opens up possibilities for thinking about agency, sociality and collectivity in the face of austerity, it also has significant limitations. It can reify and ossify collectives in ways that do not align particularly well with complex and fluid social realities. Where ideas of community are adopted popular and political levels, they can result in processes of social purification that demand either assimilation or exclusion. Furthermore, they can lead to moralizing assessments about responsibilities of marginal members of society to engage in 'good' community. Finally, they can also limit the scale of social membership and allow those with resources to abdicate responsibility towards those who do not. This commentary notes that the idea of community might be most productively deployed not to understand the resilience of homogenously defined groupings (such as poor/white/British) but rather the ways in which responses to injustice can bring people into redistributional and common cause relationships across demographic and class divides.The social is depicted as somehow lacking in these [hard-pressed] areas, as something that needs building up in them, as a regenerative tonic -if only people were more trusting, cohesive, and socially engaged, they would live long, prosper, and put something back into the community, so the argument goes. (Amin, 2005: 614) The term community, as Raymond Williams proposed, is a 'warmly persuasive word ' (1983 [1976]: 76). It is also, as he showed, promiscuous in its meaning and is taken up as a signifier for many different and sometimes contradictory things. Its appeal in the social sciences includes the way it seems to offer an antidote to top-down approaches, by locating powers to decide and act at the grassroots level. It also seems to offer an antidote for individualism by providing a vehicle for collective problem-solving and mutuality (see Herbert, 2005). For their part, Merry, Harris and Manley consider the ways in which the 'White British poor' are

A response to commentaries on Community, Virtue and the White British Poor

“…We therefore wholeheartedly agree with Richard Ballard (2016) when he writes that the challenge ‘is to find ways of recognizing laudable grassroots responses to poverty without letting the state or more affluent groups off the hook for needing to channel resources to the poor’. We were not disregarding structural causes but assessing whether it was possible for a uniquely disadvantaged community to locate and muster resources on their own terms in order to mobilize against the oppressive structures in which so many appear to be trapped.…”