Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality

By Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport

Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?

This volume explores the nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organisational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilising and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects.

Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport present an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of fluid fellowship, culturally normative claims to identity, and opportunities for realising a universal humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849647106

Vered Amit

Vered Amit is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her recent publications include, as co-author with Nigel Rapport, Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality (Pluto, 2012), and as editor Thinking through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts (2015).

Book preview

Prologue:

The Book’s Structure

Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit

In The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Collectivity, Movement and Identity (2002), Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport entered into a dialogue that concerned the ideology, the practice and the conceptualization of community at the millennial turn. ‘The trouble with community’ concerned the tension between attempts to fix social and political relations in communal frames and the drives toward individuation and fragmentation that regularly undid these efforts but that also could be constrained by them. This volume assumes the same dialogic form and revisits the themes of the first volume. Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality continues Amit’s and Rapport’s efforts to offer an ethnographically grounded and conceptually nuanced exploration of contemporary forms of sociality. This volume engages multiple vantage points in order to explore the ethical, organizational and emotional claims as well as opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilizing and evading social collectivities in contemporary circumstances.

In particular, the dialogue is organized around two key themes: cosmopolitanism and community. There is a momentum surrounding the concept of cosmopolitanism, in politics and academia equally. Anthropology has witnessed a flurry of research, writing and conferring on this topic. According to Rapport, these are significant developments. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ offers something distinct from ‘multiculturalism’, ‘globalism’, ‘diaspora’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘pluralism’ and ‘civil society’; ‘cosmopolitanism’ usefully identifies a certain anthropological agenda, a particular history of inscribing the human, and a future project. A ‘cosmopolitan’, for Immanuel Kant, was a citizen of two worlds: polis and cosmos. Here is the global figure of the individual human being who exercises universal capacities in the negotiation of local social relations and the construction of particular cultural worlds.

Vered Amit is more concerned with elaborating a conceptual framework that would shine an analytical spotlight on the pragmatic and improvisational labours involved in mobilizing processes of sociation and dissociation. Drawing on anthropology’s traditional strengths as a grounded discipline, she is concerned to keep general concepts of community and disjuncture close to the complex and uncertain logistical challenges of day-to-day social relations. How might we productively use the ambiguities entailed in a concept such as ‘community’ in order to pose strategic questions about the organizational challenges that attend bringing people together in joint social projects? And how might we give equally serious consideration to the variety of ways in which people may seek to win space and time for themselves by working out some measure of disjuncture, temporary or more enduring, in their everyday relationships? From this perspective on the everyday in social life, cosmopolitanism may be as much a pragmatic ‘making do’ as an ethical stance. At the same time, even the most deliberate and enthusiastic pursuit of alterity can be undermined by the organizational configurations of transience and mobility. Amit is thus concerned to probe the opportunities as well as the limitations thrown up by consociation, movement and disjuncture.

While Rapport cautions against taking political claims of communitarianism literally and culture as an ontological reality, Amit argues that much of the everyday work of mobilizing and modulating social relations is less driven by categorical identity claims than by issues of coordination and deflection.

ACCORDING TO VERED AMIT

Part I of the book is entitled ‘Community and Disjuncture: The Creativity and Uncertainty of Everyday Engagement’. In it, Amit argues that rather than bemoaning the variety of ways in which the notion of ‘community’ is often invoked, using community as a polythetic concept to ‘think with’ can allow us to productively probe questions around intersecting issues of joint commitment, affect and associational forms. In other words, instead of trying to provide a definition of community, working with, rather than against the ambiguity of this notion provides us an opportunity to pose some useful questions about a variety of conditions for, and conceptions of social mobilization.

Amit reprises a critique – first posed in The Trouble with Community – of the tendency among some influential theorists of community to locate this sense of collective connection outside everyday life and relations. But in this volume, she focuses her attention on Victor Turner’s conception of communitas and takes issue with the extent of his emphasis on the anti-structural, liminal qualities of this form of communion. Amit argues that with this emphasis Turner set up an implicit hierarchy of sociality that both overestimates the transformative impact of liminality and underestimates the creativity, improvisations and reflexivity involved in everyday life. As an alternative, Amit suggests giving more attention to the concept of consociate relationships, which are constructed over time, through growing familiarity and the exchange of stories about shared events.

But people’s efforts at working through their embeddedness in networks and spaces of relationships need not only involve efforts at mobilizing social connections. They can equally revolve around efforts at winning a temporary or more enduring separation from particular roles, relationships, institutions, routines or places. While disjuncture has often been associated with theoretical interrogations of broad fin de siècle cultural and social shifts, such an orientation does not necessarily tell us enough about the ways in which more mundane quotidian breaches of relationships and commitments are negotiated. Like ‘community’, ‘disjuncture’ is a polythetic concept that is good to think with, and Amit uses it to probe three strategic nodes of ambiguity around degrees of separation, techniques of separation and the intentions that may more or less deliberately shape the ruptures that puncture everyday lives and relationships.

At various points in Part I, Amit turns to the terrain of mobility, the focus of her own research, as the grounds for assessing various conceptualizations of community and disjuncture. But in the closing chapter of this section, she focuses more fully on mobility and her studies of three different forms of travel as a vehicle for considering the limitations which can be imposed by different circumstances of transience for realizing even the most self-conscious cosmopolitan aspirations. In this sense, like more sedentary pursuits, the experiences of movement are constrained by differential circumstances, resources and institutions that shape and demarcate different circuits of travel. If these circuits are not insuperable prisons, the limitations they impose suggest that mobility is unlikely to serve as a short cut towards cosmopolitanism.

ACCORDING TO NIGEL RAPPORT

In Part II of the book, entitled ‘Cosmopolitanism: Actors, Relations and Institutions beyond the Communitarian’, Rapport sets out to define the space of cosmopolitanism, and the cosmopolitan subject.

The discipline of anthropology, according to George Stocking (1992: 347), has been dialectically torn between ‘the universalism of anthropos and the diversitarianism of ethnos’ throughout its modern history. Do we become human only within culture or does our humanity (consciousness, creativity, individuality, dignity) transcend cultural particularities? Are human beings to be regarded as the same only insofar as all inhabit different cultural worlds, or in spite of their inhabiting such worlds? In this section of the book, Rapport argues that cosmopolitanism encourages a ‘Kantian’ anthropology which considers ‘the human’ to be a phenomenon over and above proximal categorizations and identifications such as nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and locale.

To an extent, a cosmopolitan turn to anthropology can be viewed as a return to its Enlightenment origins (Rapport and Stade, 2007). When Kant first formulated ‘anthropology’ as a modern project – a science of humankind – he had in mind the ‘cosmopolitan’ enterprise of the linking up of human being in its everyday diversity (polis) and its global commonality (cosmos). Humankind comprised a complex singularity which might be better known, whose lot might be improved, and whose existence was the guarantor of that very cultural diversity which could obscure the human from surface view. Ethically, ‘humankind’ embodied an opposition to the ideology of an ancien régime which insisted on essential differences of nature and of worth between patrician and plebeian, man and woman, French and German, Christian and Jew: the liberal vision was of individual equivalence. Scientifically, ‘humankind’ embodied a premise and a promise that a knowledge which transcended the despotism of the merely communitarian, customary, commonsensical and revelatory was an appropriate goal.

A Kantian anthropology, Rapport argues, comprises an ontological project of defining the human, its capacities and liabilities as universalities beyond the idioms of social, cultural and historical difference. It is also a methodological project of finding ways to approach the human in its material irreducibility: to apprehend individuality and the objectivity of the subjective point of view. And again, it is a moral-cum-political project of aiming to secure the human: to nurture the opportunities of human-individual expression above and beyond the contingencies of social, cultural and historical circumstance. These three aspects give rise to the structure of this part of the book: ‘Cosmopolitan living’, ‘Cosmopolitan learning’ and ‘Cosmopolitan planning’. What is to be figured and respected is Anyone: the universal, individual human being.

IN DIALOGUE

Having set out their individual responses to the key themes of cosmopolitanism and community, the authors come together in the book’s final section to compare and contrast their views. Amit argues that an emphasis on rights, voluntarism and adjudicative procedures as the basis for cosmopolitan living leaves significant gaps in accounting for the fuller range of issues bedevilling many pragmatic efforts at coexistence. The emphasis on cosmopolitan rights seems to be intended to ensure that individuals are not trapped or defined by classificatory associations they do not choose. But this seems to over-privilege a very particular kind of often noisily claimed, ascribed association at the expense of thoroughly considering the panoply of collective social activity that is not being driven by these general classifications. Amit turns to the example of an intensively used park in her own urban neighbourhood to illustrate the quotidian dialectic between determined efforts at social mobilization on the one hand and equally determined efforts to sidestep fellow city dwellers on the other. Such a dialectic frames conditions for coexistence that are nonetheless regularly being pressed and disrupted.

For Nigel Rapport, cosmopolitanism is ‘good to think with’ because it gives the lie to the supposed ontological primacy of communities seen as the necessary or original or overriding source of human identity. Cosmopolitanism stands against cultural fundamentalism. Cosmopolitanism locates Anyone outside cultures seen as essential, homogeneous classes or categories of people, traditions, discourses and materials. At best one says, following Alain Finkielkraut (2001: 80), that ‘together men form a community of exceptions in the world’: ‘all the same – that is, human; each one different – that is, in themselves’. The true community is our common humanity, and our belonging within this is on the basis of our individual exceptionalism: we are the same insofar as we are different. Cosmopolitanism is a substantiation of the human condition understood as an arc: from humanity to individuality; humanity that manifests itself in individuality. The ‘category thinking’ that would distinguish human beings further – into members of this or that cultural, religious, ethnic, national, class or caste community – is to be overcome, so that our global humanity and our global individuality may be ascertained.

References

Amit, V. and N. Rapport (2002) The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity. London: Pluto.

Finkielkraut, A. (2001) In the Name of Humanity: Reflections on the Twentieth Century. London: Pimlico.

Rapport, N. and R. Stade (2007) ‘A Cosmopolitan Turn – or Return?’, Social Anthropology, 15(2): 223–235.

Stocking, G. (1992) The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Part 1

Community and Disjuncture:

The Creativity and Uncertainty of Everyday Engagement

Vered Amit

1

Community as ‘Good to Think With’:

The Productiveness of Strategic Ambiguities

You might not be surprised to learn that when I picked up my daily newspaper the other day (The Globe and Mail, 25 April 2009) and tried to locate references to ‘community’, I was quickly able to identify dozens of them. These references ranged over a wide variety of contexts and applications: ‘local community leader’, ‘arts community’, ‘farming community’, ‘small community’, ‘utopian communities’, ‘outlying community’, ‘technology community’, ‘building communities’, ‘mining community’, ‘religious community’, along with ‘excluded and marginalized community’ were but some of the citations that appeared, including many that were not specified. ‘The community will not stand for this indiscriminate violence’ was one of these unspecified references, proclaimed by a police officer outside a courtroom in which a judge had just rendered a decision on the sentencing of a man convicted of participation in a shoot-out on a Toronto street that had resulted in a number of injuries and the death of a young woman bystander (Appleby, 2009: 9).

The ubiquity of vague references to community is a familiar story to most of us. The range of these everyday invocations has been repeatedly noted by scholars who have in turn produced their own repertoire of proliferating references to and multiple definitions of community. A common scholarly response to this proliferation of unspecified invocations of community has been to suggest that this ambiguity fatally undermines the analytical utility of this concept.

But I want to suggest a small contrarian exercise: what if instead of viewing this proliferation of everyday references to community as an indication of its banality, we chose to take this propagation as important in its own right. If people continue to insist on using community to refer to many different forms of association, perhaps we need to probe how they might do so rather than bemoan the lack of precision in this terminology. So, rather than viewing the familiar ambiguity of allusions to community as the most problematic aspect of its conceptualization, what if we considered instead the possibility of developing a mode of investigation that recognized this ambiguity as a useful analytical resource rather than a handicap. The wide range of commonplace references scattered throughout my daily newspaper suggest that we are dealing with a veritable family of concepts¹ of sociation. That is to say we are not dealing with one concept in various references to community but a genus of concepts. If so, our mandate in this contrarian exercise will be not to define community but to establish a broad working model for investigating a class of related concepts. We need a framework that allows for that kind of breadth and that is, moreover, ‘good to think with’. So rather than providing a definition, I want to suggest a working model of community that may lead us to a variety of situations and concepts. In employing this model, we may well conclude that some of these circumstances are not most effectively grouped together, but such a conclusion is as useful an insight as the possibility that they might well be conceptually linked. In short, I am suggesting that the ambiguity linked with the ubiquity of references to community might just prove to be a useful vehicle for thinking about certain classes of sociation.

STRATEGIC ‘SPOTS’ OF AMBIGUITY

In his introduction to A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke chastises writers who scorn one philosophical term or other as being too ambiguous (1955: xiii). Burke notes that: ‘[s]ince no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity’, and all the more so when dealing with key or what he calls ‘titular’ philosophical concepts (1995: xiii).² Rather than avoiding ambiguity, Burke calls for ‘terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise’ (1995: xiii, emphasis in the original) because it is at these strategic points of ambiguity that conceptual transformations can occur. Thus in trying to develop a theory of dramatism that can be used to investigate the forms of thought involved in the attribution of motives, Burke identifies five terms that he regards as ‘generating principles’: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose (1955: x). He is not troubled by potential overlaps between these general terms, since these intersections arise because these concepts are interrelated as ‘attributes of a common ground or substance’, in this case the attribution of motives (1955: xiii). Indeed, Burke regards the overlaps between these terms as theoretically productive because they allow the analyst to combine and recombine distinctions and hence anticipate or generate different classes of theory.

Community, I will argue, is just such a ‘titular’ concept, and in investigating it we can productively draw on concepts that are general enough that they can encompass a wide range of situations and are therefore concomitantly – and productively – ambiguous. At the same time, since these terms are all being used as attributes of the common ground of community, we should not be surprised by overlaps between them; indeed, it is these interrelations that allow us to work and rework a variety of combinations and distinctions as we examine different cases. But in demarcating concepts that may prove useful to think with we would be well advised to avoid recourse to the criteria that have usually predominated in academic reflections on this subject. As Marietta Baba notes, the Latin root of community is communis or common (2005: 135). Working from this notion, scholarly definitions of community have therefore often focused on listing what they consider to be the most important elements that must be held ‘in common’ by members of a community: values, meanings, norms or symbols being the most familiar items included in these inventories. But in and of themselves these are essentially criteria of classification. They do not necessarily pose questions about how and whether these are mobilized in sociation. In a globalizing world, in which ideas, materials and images are circulated across ever larger expanses, one would not be hard pressed to imagine situations in which people hold similar expectations, meanings or symbols without necessarily being socially linked.

This classificatory dimension is particularly prominent in that broad swathe of contemporary scholarship that, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined community’ (1991/1983), has treated community as first and foremost a form of categorical identity rather than actual interaction. But this emphasis does little, in and of itself, to focus our attention on the modalities of sociation that might be encompassed in a working model of community. As I have argued elsewhere:

If we hold that the effort to construct communities is fundamentally an effort, whether successful, partial or failed, to mobilize social relations, then as Fredrik Barth has noted, communities cannot be created simply through the ‘mere act of imagining’ (1994: 13) or, one could add, the act of attributing. (Amit, 2002b: 20)

Developing definitions that train our attention primarily on the categorical dimension of community is thus analogous to one hand clapping. A more effective working model of community must therefore focus on the uncertainties arising in the intersection between the idea and actualization of sociation. Thus, inspired by Burke’s notion of strategic ambiguities, in my own effort to develop some concepts that will allow us to productively investigate the ground of community I want to identify three strategic, intersecting points at which such ambiguities necessarily arise: (1) joint commitment; (2) affect or belonging and (3) forms of association.

JOINT COMMITMENT

In delineating an emphasis on joint commitment as a key generative principle of community, I am drawing on a concept of plural subjecthood developed by Margaret Gilbert (1994) as part of her wider-ranging consideration of the philosophical status of sociality. Specifically, Gilbert is concerned with illustrating that, in their ongoing ‘search for an elucidation of categories that are in some sense fundamental’, philosophers would be well advised to add sociality to a list of better recognized categories such as ‘time, space, materiality, and mentality’ (1994: 5).

To establish a notion of sociality that could constitute it as a philosophically significant category, Gilbert suggests that we might respond to the sheer variety of things social by thinking in terms of degrees of sociality (1994: 9). This in turn begs the question of whether there are certain phenomena that can ‘have a claim to the highest degree of sociality’ (1994: 10). To pursue this question, Gilbert distinguishes several situations of sociality: common knowledge, mutual expectations and plural subject concepts.

There can be common knowledge of many things, about the non-human world, and about people. And there is surely a great deal of something like common knowledge among humans. The question arises: are common knowledge phenomena social phenomena to the highest degree? (1994: 11)

But, drawing on an argument put forth by Charles Taylor, Gilbert notes that people may share common knowledge of some fact without necessarily sharing an important social link. In other words, common knowledge can be shared in a ‘detached, external way’ without necessarily implicating a genuine social bond between the holders of this knowledge (1994: 13). Similarly, we could expect that other people will act in particular ways and that they and we might even coordinate our own actions on the basis of these mutual expectations without this form of coordination necessarily requiring or generating a particularly strong linkage between persons. Hence, as noted earlier, one could argue that the increasingly expansive reach of modern communication technologies can extend this kind of repertoire of common knowledge and mutual expectations without this necessarily or automatically being associated with the generation of strong social bonds. To identify situations that involve a stronger form of sociation, Gilbert looks to the concept of plural subjects.

Plural subjects are common phenomena that can range over a wide range of different forms of sociation. What articulates these different phenomena is their reliance on a ‘special unifying principle or mechanism, which I have labeled joint commitment’ (Gilbert, 1994: 14).

If we have a joint commitment, each of us is committed, but we are committed independently. Somewhat artificially, we might put this in terms of our ‘individual commitments.’ If we are jointly committed, each one’s ‘individual commitment’ stands or falls with the ‘individual commitment’ of the other. They cannot exist apart. (Gilbert, 1994: 16)

‘Somewhat artificially’, for Gilbert, because the joint commitment may not be greater than but is also not simply the sum of two or more individual commitments, as it creates a ‘new motivational force’ in terms of which the interlocutors act. ‘It is neither mine, nor yours, nor a simple conjunction of mine and yours. It is rather, our commitment’ (1994: 16, emphasis in the original). While Gilbert’s mission is philosophical rather than sociological, her rendering of ‘joint commitment’ strongly resonates with key elements of Simmel’s seminal notion of sociation, particularly his emphasis on the dialectic of interdependence between sociates (Simmel, 1950). More generally, both Gilbert and Simmel emphasize the wide variety of different forms that sociation can assume, yet both locate it as first and foremost arising through the relations and interdependence between individuals.

However, while Gilbert views ‘joint commitment’ as the highest degree of sociality because it sets up a ‘true unity’, a kind of ‘pooling of wills’ (1994: 20), I would be inclined to emphasize that this kind of interdependence is just as likely to engender tensions, conflict and anxiety. When you depend on other people to effect an enterprise, whether an organization, campaign, activity and so on, the disagreements or divergences among you become all the more crucial and unavoidable because they need to be taken into account and dealt with in some way in order to effect or sustain the joint commitment. You can politely ignore disagreements over issues or with people on whom you do not depend, but it is much harder to be equally blasé about such differences with collaborators. That’s when you are more likely to see people seeking to persuade, exhort, cajole or pressure each other to accept divergent versions of how to go about effecting joint commitments. That’s why ethnic or neighbourhood associations, university departments, political parties, recreational groups or religious congregations so often give rise to more or less heated organizational politics, factions and even ruptures. In short, joint commitments do not necessarily, or even often, generate consensus or even collegiality. Nor, for that very reason, can they always be successfully mobilized or sustained.

Placing the emphasis on joint commitment shifts the emphasis away from sameness, whether actual or imagined, as the basis for community and puts the onus more squarely on interdependence as the basis for this class of sociation. Interdependence is first and foremost a matter of coordination. Or, put in colloquial terms: ‘I need you to do this, I can’t do it alone, but can we do this together?’ Shifting attention away from sameness or ‘in common’ kinds of attributes towards issues of coordination and interdependence allows us to acknowledge the connections between a wide variety of different sorts of possible commitments. A joint commitment can range from Suttles’ (1972) notion of the ‘defended neighbourhood’, an instrumental community of necessity set up as a mode of protection in uncertain and troubled environments, to the coordination of work-related practices (Baba, 2005), to more ‘pastoral’ or romantic versions of solidarity (Creed, 2006), to moral enterprises as varied as social movements, religious congregations, charities and self-help organizations. A joint commitment may be ephemeral or enduring, partial or comprehensive. In other words, joint commitment is not intrinsically associated with one form of association or another and, as such, it highlights the areas of ambiguity attending which forms of sociation enable or require interdependent coordination and which do not or not as much.

AFFECT/BELONGING

More than anything else, perhaps, discussions of community actually revolve around this aspect, that is, a sense of belonging to a collectivity. So when people talk about a ‘sense of community’, they usually appear to be assuming and/or implying that this sense of connection is affectively charged. But this presumption obviously begs more questions than it answers. What kind of affect? How is it distributed? How is it expressed?