Community Organization: Challenges and Novel Approaches

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 20^th 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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• community organization
• social change
• social structure