thursday, with the help of a friend, i began to get over my 'ethnographic shyness' which generally cripples at least a week or so of anytime i spend 'doing fieldwork.' and the question which immediately confronted me was 'what was i looking for?'
in a class which was to help me write my dissertation proposal last quarter, our group was often struck by certain words and phrases which multiple people used in their proposal drafts. 'everyday life' was one which recurred in our class, an idea that is both recently en vogue and which we spent some time critiquing. another is the ever-elusive concept of community. 'community' has been used, abused, reused, and consistently denigrated in the literature. i'm not convinced myself of the work it is supposed to do, but in early versions of my proposal, i claimed that i would be looking at 'the armenian community of istanbul.' last night i was confronted ethnographically with what that might mean.
[a quick aside: as i don't have 'irb approval,' which is ostensibly necessary for publishing about one's fieldwork, and more importantly because i myself am not yet morally sure of what i do and don't want to make public and in what way, a lot of my descriptions of my fieldwork will be cryptic and vague. thus if you're interested in what i was up to thursday, i'll be happy to chat. but this is part of why the blog is and will continue to be based largely on newspapers.]
so this post is going to be a little more theoretical and less historical than the last post.
in addition to my own ethnographic attempts, the newsworthy event that for me raises the question of community comes from england: riots. one question which people pose about the riots is, "why hurt the local shop owners? why hurt your own community?"
so, community...
since i don't have my whole library in front of me, and as i'm not going to claim to be a theorist of 'community,' there will be a lot of gaps. as always, i look forward to comments from people more knowledgeable than myself.
in my opinion, much of the discontent with the concept 'community' comes from the variety of ways in which it has been used and the claim that it is a sort of lowest-common-denominator. that is to say, the only part of the definition of community on which people agree is that it is a group of humans (and with much 'post-human' literature, even this could be contested). further definition immediately leads to debate and often relies on equally vague and problematic terms. for instance, let's try it in the case of istanbul armenians: i get to circumscribe first with geography, 'those armenians living in istanbul.' but then, the next question is, "who is an armenian?" a common answer is to revise our object of study as 'those people living in istanbul who (self) identify as armenian.' but now we've introduced a term which is in recent years has come under heavy critique: identity. so we're left with a still-vague sense of our object of study.
another criticism of the term 'community' follows closely: it obscures the things at which we are actually looking. again, let's use the armenian case. when i said in my proposal that i was going to study the 'armenian community,' what i actually meant was "i'm going to spend time at the patriarchate and at the newspaper agos." so, talking with people thursday, i was often asked "where was i going to go?" "what was i going to do?" to put it concretely, using the term community evades the actual institutions (churches, newspapers), hierarchies of power (most explicitly that of church ranks), practices (worship and otherwise), and modes of representation (given my new focus on this concept, we're not even going there right now...). so to say that one's object of study is a community can be taken both as disingenuous and to lack the specificity of what one is actually studying.
finally, another major criticism of the use of 'community' is its capacity to depoliticize. to talk about a 'class' of people necessarily carries with it a certain political connotation and valence. talking about the 'community of poor people' takes the edge off and almost is certainly an attempt to back away from political ramifications of a situation. now, one can read this stepping back from an immediate political analysis through the use of a more 'neutral' term as a good thing. in fact, many do, and i'd like to turn to some of the potential advantages of the term community. like this depoliticization, the advantages are often mirrors of the criticisms.
thus, to talk about the 'armenian community' would allow me to avoid suggesting from the outset that the church is the defining or even binding element among the armenians of istanbul. likewise, 'the neighborhood community' allows one to ask different questions about the events in england than if we called the same group of people 'the urban proletariat.' for some, this is a virtue which will allow new analyses. one of my favorite writers about community, partha chatterjee (here i am thinking mostly explicitly about politics of the governed) certainly is imaging something of the sort in his use of community. if i remembering the book correctly (it has been a few years), then the use of the term was an attempt to think about different kinds of practices which could still very much be political, but which did not fit into marxist or religious models. so we can say that the use of community allows for the ability to ask different kinds of questions about groups of people.
the response to the first two criticisms would look similar. what we want is that lowest-common-denominator which community applies. we don't want to ask about any subset any specific institution etc. in this, i see the use of 'community' as part of a general trend i see in anthropology which privileges a certain 'bracketing' of theory. the most famous example of this is kathleen steward's ordinary affect. while i think a careful consideration of our terms and a certain unwillingness to apply analytical categories which do all the work before we actually talk about our object is an important point, i don't believe in a 'non-theoretical' starting point.
for me, then, if a writer gives a good sense of what they want community to mean, and consistently makes the term do the same work throughout a piece, it can in fact be a theoretical statement of some nuance. at the same time, i think it does very easily evade the actual object of study. perhaps more importantly, community can be an important aspect of a 'meta' analysis. in other words, the project i am putting together asks about the ways in which a group of people is made into a community. benedict anderson's famous imagined communities was an important if flawed attempt to think about this. john kelly and martha kaplan's represented communities, a response to anderson, is a particularly interesting attempt to think through the actual political moments: treaties, congresses, etc where a community is enacted.
which leads me to the final point. as with, say, 'culture,' anthropologists have to be aware that the term community, whether we find it analytically persuasive or not, has entered common speech. so in my mind, looking for the ways in which various institutions such as the widely read agos newspaper represent and in a sense bring into existence the armenian community seems a much different operation than 'looking for the armenian community.' no such thing exists as an actual object in the world until it is circumscribed in some way. the way in which people and institutions try to circumscribe it is, most certainly, worth our attention.
so this turned into a completely theoretical post. not quite what i had in mind. but... thoughts appreciated. and, since it was probably boring, let me end with some music. concerning the events in london, i haven't seen a lot of great analysis, and as an anthropologist not a journalist, i'm willing to wait awhile before i make any kind of definitive statement on the 'meaning' of the riots. but i am willing to leave you with some music which i thought about while reading news stories about london:
Harlem Streets, Immortal Technique
Can't Blame the Youth, Peter Tosh
April 29 1992, Sublime
A lot to think about here my friend, thanks for the post. And, as someone whose also really struggling with "community" as an analytical rubric, I especially appreciated your run down of what some of the appeal of the term could be.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as you might imagine, I've also been ruminating on riots. After the Vancouver hockey riot (our second in two decades, go Canada), the immediate response from my extended social world on facebook was to say "no, these aren't REAL Vancouverites." Instead, they were from "out of town," the "suburbs," or, most tellingly perhaps, "just criminals," as if being a criminal means one is no longer a city resident. But in this I do see hints to what we're trying to think through, since it is precisely one of those moments where people mark off the boundaries of what does and does not belong in what they attempt to constitute as Vancouver as such, a space which is simultaneously geographic, moral, and legal.
And I think that's part of the appeal of the term, actually. Like "identity," which makes both of us leery precisely because it conflates so much together (say, legal status, felt selfhood, and "ethnic membership), community appeals because it seems to indicate at once the most simple possible unit of social groupness and yet also can include virtually any possible modifier you could name (moral community, imagined community, represented community, political community, religious community, or perhaps moral-imagino-politico-jural-religico community) I'm not sure what this really means for us analytically right now, especially since I'm explicitly someone trying to see if new forms of groupness are developing that challenge prevailing modernist understandings of communities as being defined jural-politically, but yet am having such resistance to getting to work on that section of the proposal.
In any case, though, I think ultimately you're right that as we struggle with our terms and concepts people continue to construct, transform, and take down their social spaces, marking their insides and outsides in all sorts of ways, often cross-cutting and conflicting. So we're left with open questions and the strong need to listen. So is what we do, I suppose.