Community Organization: Challenges and Novel Approaches

A special issue of Humans (ISSN 2673-9461).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 6907

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Anthropology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB E3B 5G3, Canada
Interests: comparative social systems; theories of culture; contemporary and prehistoric hunter-gatherers; societies of Southeast Asia; Orang Asli; gender and age-structures; social learning; equality, and inequ

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Guest Editor
Department of Anthropology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB E3B 5G3, Canada
Interests: human ecology; historical ecology; native resource management; savanna and tropical forest adaptive systems; South American early hunter/gatherers; Agrarian societies past and present; complex societies; Latin American archaeology and ethnography

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue of Humans, we invite contributions representing novel approaches to the study of community structure and organization. While discredited and often having been thrust aside in anthropology in the past decades, global developments have shown that community is one of the most important and timely subjects for anthropologists to study. Without a doubt, as foreseen by Ferdinand Tönnies, the 20th century saw “natural” communities studied by anthropologists dissolving. Indigenous and kinship-based communities have been displaced, destroyed, and dismantled. Nonetheless, people everywhere have sought and found ways to organize themselves into communities. Community has also become a cornerstone of indigenous land claims and indigenous rights. Over the years, anthropologists and other social scientists have identified and studied various “types” of communities and acknowledged their own role in constructing and shaping them. Nonetheless, despite a more nuanced understanding of how communities are formed and how they change, this work raised more questions than it solved. Thus, instead of abandoning community as a subject of inquiry, we need to recognize it as problematic—not to explain with, but something to explain.

While vital for our social and psychological well-being, community also represents one of the most formidable challenges of our times. Communities are dissolving as fast as they are forming, and for this reason, it is urgent to understand how, why, and under what conditions they work when they do and, conversely, what constitutes obstacles to their success. However, beyond practical concerns of community organization, community is also of theoretical importance. For instance, the emergence of power as a key factor in the transformation of human societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian societies can only be understood through the study of community transformation. Finally, as a genuinely holistic problem requiring contributions from all branches of anthropology, community is a fitting subject for one of the first issues of Humans, a journal mandating a global and holistic point of view.

Prof. Dr. Csilla Dallos
Prof. Dr. Santiago Mora
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • community organization
  • social change
  • social structure

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 538 KiB  
Article
Newly Sedentary Lanoh and the Communal Challenge: A Critical Commentary on Anarchist Anthropology
by Csilla Dallos
Humans 2022, 2(1), 15-30; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2010002 - 11 Feb 2022
Viewed by 2802
Abstract
Discussions of anarchic solidarity in relation to rainforest foragers have resulted in important insights into the sociality of such groups. However, whether anarchic solidarity prevails under the circumstances of regroupment and resettlement resulting in unprecedented communal projects has not been adequately addressed. These [...] Read more.
Discussions of anarchic solidarity in relation to rainforest foragers have resulted in important insights into the sociality of such groups. However, whether anarchic solidarity prevails under the circumstances of regroupment and resettlement resulting in unprecedented communal projects has not been adequately addressed. These communal projects present new challenges to the social and community organization of previously mobile foragers. This article examines the extent to which newly sedentary Lanoh forager-traders of northern Perak, Malaysia, continue to display “cooperative autonomy”, a construct capturing both anarchist aspirations and key aspects of the sociality of egalitarian hunter-gatherers. This study suggests that though foragers such as Lanoh may superficially share attributes associated with anarchic solidarity, they profoundly differ from anarchists in their attitudes toward authority and cooperation. While ideological anarchism is clearly counter-dominant, the same cannot always be said about egalitarian foragers. We may conclude from this research that “cooperative autonomy” is still insufficiently understood and does not grant an assumptive blanket application across contexts. To promote our understanding of the sociality of small-scale societies, this construct requires further scrutiny and development. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Community Organization: Challenges and Novel Approaches)
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14 pages, 836 KiB  
Article
Community’s House and Symbolic Dwelling: A Perspective on Power
by Santiago Mora
Humans 2022, 2(1), 1-14; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2010001 - 28 Jan 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3130
Abstract
For anthropologists and archaeologists, the study of cultural change is the greatest challenge. Initially, the subject was considered from perspectives that included too few variables, resulting in an approximation that proved to be incomplete and inadequate. Since the end of the last century, [...] Read more.
For anthropologists and archaeologists, the study of cultural change is the greatest challenge. Initially, the subject was considered from perspectives that included too few variables, resulting in an approximation that proved to be incomplete and inadequate. Since the end of the last century, important efforts have been made to document cultural change in a broader context, revealing the variability of the processes involved. These new studies highlight social relations and their changeability as key components to understanding the dynamic of any community or cultural system. This article explorers social and spatial organization based on one such approach, Lévi-Strauss’ “house society”. This analysis results in a view where multiple dwellings may constitute one conceptual “house”. This perspective should facilitate the archaeological investigation of contexts that nurture the power relationships that structure society. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Community Organization: Challenges and Novel Approaches)
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