The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Hardcover

Amit, Vered; Rapport, Nigel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745317472 ISBN 13: 9780745317472

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2002

Synopsis

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.

The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.

In this book, the authors draw on their ethnographic experiences to reappraise the concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalisation, religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms. How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the ongoing construction and the rightful expression of such migrant identities?

About this title

About the Authors

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).

Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is author of Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality (Pluto, 2012) and The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity (Pluto, 2002).

Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745317472
• ISBN 13: 9780745317472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192