For the Shona of Zimbabwe, a community includes its ancestral spirits
Most definitions of community stop at the living: neighbours, congregations, online forums. The Shona people of Zimbabwe count the ancestral spirits, midzimu, as members too. Across disciplines, the word stretches remarkably far, covering buried villages for archaeologists, interacting species for ecologists and a measurable feeling of belonging for psychologists.
A community is a group sharing something socially meaningful, whether a place, customs, beliefs or identity, and bound by lasting ties beyond kinship. The English word came through Old French from the Latin communitas, public spirit, rooted in communis, common. It can describe a village, a nation or a virtual network. Archaeologists, lacking direct evidence of who talked to whom, assume that physical closeness shaped social contact, so they reconstruct past communities from shared house designs and pottery styles.
Ecologists use the term for populations of different species living together. Their interactions fall into three types: competition, where both sides lose; predation, where one wins at the other's expense; and mutualism, where both gain. A forest or lake counts as a major community because it sustains itself, while fungi breaking down a log form a minor one that depends on others.
In 1887 the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies contrasted Gemeinschaft, ties built on personal interaction, with Gesellschaft, impersonal and formal association, stressing that real groups mix both. A century later, in 1986, McMillan and Chavis broke the sense of community into elements including membership, influence and the meeting of needs, and Chavis later helped build an index to measure it in neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces. American Psychological Association research links a sense of belonging, especially in small communities, with fewer depressive disorders among young adults. Tocqueville called tolerance, reciprocity and trust habits of the heart.
The word is not neutral. Advertisers and populist politicians lean on its warm glow, while public health speaks of community transmission and criminals form an underworld rather than a community. European philosophers, starting with Jean-Luc Nancy, questioned closed, exclusionary models of belonging and tried to imagine open ones. Psychiatrist Scott Peck argued in 1987 that the solidarity people feel during a crisis can be built deliberately, passing through stages that begin with polite pretence and move into chaos before anything deeper forms.
Source: Community
