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The
Focus of Our Interest and Affection on this Site
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Module
Introduction
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Documents
Included in the Community
Module
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The
community is both an object to be strengthened and a subject to be studied
in this site.
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While the community
is the main focus of the practical or applied sociology of this site (how
to strengthen it), it is also a social institution which is studied as
part of the sociological investigation of culture and social organization
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| This
module looks at some of the sociological questions and topics related to
community. |
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Unlike
the applied modules where there are different documents for different purposes
and different readers, this module is composed of lecture notes for the
beginning student of society. |
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| As
well as looking at various definitions and descriptions of community, it
also looks at community characteristics of community. |
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Ferdinand
Tönnies used the two words gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft
(society) to distinguish between elements of informal, warm and fuzzy,
spontaneous social organization and elements of formal, cold, codified
and ordered social organization. |
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Following his approach,
we use the two German words in English to identify elements of either as
degrees of one or the other, not merely as absolute categories.
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| An
important discovery is that there is a very thin line between communities
and families. |
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Among
many non western groups (such as the First Nations peoples in Canada),
the kin group often is the community. |
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As we recognize a
wide variety of family arrangements, many of them increasingly appear to
be the same as communities.
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| Another
important discovery is that our psychological makeup, which has not changed
much in the past 50,000 years, makes us more comfortable in small face
to face groups where we know everybody, in contrast to the anonymity of
urban settlements. |
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This
appears to be the energy behind our creating new gemeinschaft arrangements,
where we form associations, including those on the internet, and learn
first names of service personnel (eg bus drivers and deli clerks) to create
the illusion that we continue to live in a gemeinschaft environment,
in spite of the rapid pace of urbanization and growth of gesellschaft. |
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