After the eclipse of “community” in the late 1960s anthropology, culminating with Geertz’ quip that “anthropologists do not villages study in villages, “community” came back when Lave, and particularly Wenger’s, summarized their work on learning in everyday settings as involving “‘community’ of practices.”

I have written elsewhere why I thought it was a bad idea for Lave and Wenger to have used the term. Generations of anthropologists (and many others) have been misled by this resuscitation of a way to approaching human organization that should have remained in the past. At various times, I suggested that “polity” would be a better word to capture the overall social processes involved in setting the positions (peripheral, full, etc.) and movement. The model can easily be expanded to deal with all the mechanisms that move someone into a “legitimate” peripheral position (e.g. admission committee), prevent someone from ever being acknowledged as “full” (e.g. failure at some examination), and including other matters that remain open to investigation: for example the processes that make someone aware that one might enter into some apprenticeship (move to a different country, etc.). I sometimes toy with the idea of a kind of “accretion” disk around the internal polity that might then be treated, metaphorically, as a “black hole” (e.g. “America” for many in the world).

Having been challenged by students insisting on the continuing usefulness of “community” (and perhaps for other reasons than those who let the early Chicago sociologists and anthropologists to write about “community studies”), I realized something that came even more salient because of a recent experience with a major personal loss and that classical “community of practice” research cannot quite handle. When she first wrote about it, Lave was responding (as I put it in my last post) to cognitive psychologists and their purely cerebral theories of learning. She wanted to establish that learning is always a social process that requires the one is put in the position of “learner” even before they know anything. She, and many others, did establish, empirically, that this is the case.

However, she may have downplayed another possibility somewhat implicit in the earlier theories of community. “Community” is not only about learning, it is about support and, what I would now want to investigate, the assembly of people who are doing the support. Or rather, and much more technically, about the people “affected” by something that happens to a particular person. They are the people who may then return something—in the sense that a personal tragedy is also a “gift” that requires a response by at least some. This response may involve, in the case of someone dying, bringing food, attending a wake, making a donation (in some traditions in the United States), or may other matters in other traditions (“culture”).

This opens a wide range of re-interpreted research questions. Most simply perhaps, who would be the “some” who must respond? And what should be the nature of the response? How far can an initial event resonate? As one student asked when I presented an earlier version of this: what is the place of institutions in these responses?

Possible lines of investigation: I have never read the social psychological literature that has used the phrase “significant others” but it has always allowed me to think more specifically about human relationships. First, I take “signification” here in the structural sense (see Bateson 1972: 381) where it refers to anything that makes a difference. In very brief then, a person’s significant others are those who, if something happens to the person, must respond personally in some ways that might make a difference in the future of the interaction. One should check here how this may be treated in the literature on family therapy.

A parent, a spouse, a child, are prime examples to the extent that anything that happens to anyone of them will impact on of them but not necessarily in the same way The response, and its extent within some assembly, are then a sign of who are these “others” and the weight of their significance.

That all of this is going to be observable (though perhaps difficult to do) is not problematic. What are the methods to use for the observations is the difficult thing since we need to escape imagining what is to be observed (I am here invoking Garfinkel). The danger is to define ahead of the research the boundaries of some units assumed to carry significance, of the roles and relationships that may be most significant. Much on the writing about “the family” (and the “community”) have fallen for this and must now be used with the greatest care unless we reproduce what earlier critics did successfully challenge.

The genius of ethnography is specifically that we do not have to do that. So, what do I suggest be done?

In this case I’d start with an individual at a moment of stress. For ethical reason, this stress may be minor (e.g. a tooth ache, college admission or graduation, etc.) but sufficient to trigger some response from some people. Tracing the network of the responders, and the intensity of their response becomes the ethnographic goal.

See also my post on the “end of a community”
For example, let’s say that husband has a tooth ache and mentions it to wife and they discuss what to do next. One can imagine that this will not lead to much of a response from, say, their small children. Whether it affects their adult children may depend on the their age and other matters. If the husband/wife are quite aged, a toothache might require one of the children to, for example, drive them to the dentist. At another extreme, if a president gets killed (as happened to Kennedy) then millions may be affected, but would probably lead to other responses than if this happens to a close relative.

Such an investigation might then lead to a kind of network map (à la Latour) with different weight for different linkages. Latour’s discussion of mediations, translations, etc. would probably help in tracing the tenor of the responses, particularly when the original speaker (to channel conversational analysis) is not present for correcting a response. In this interactional/conversational processes, institutions can enter as either dampeners of further transmission, or as enhancers (consider how FaceBook enhanced extended family ties that had weakened, sometimes to nothing, and then reappeared).