Longing for community

Western Folklore, Spring 2001 by Feintuch, Burt

Longing for Community1

The word "community" seems to have joined a set of other terms, such as "authenticity" and "tradition," that perplex us. Paging through the program for a recent American Folklore Society annual meeting, I see panels on community scholars, community-based self-representation, creating community, building community, text and community, communities of memory, and emergent community. I think of "community" as a word contemporary folklorists tend to use easily and comfortably, but I'm not convinced that we've thought very critically about what we mean by it. Like many of our other touchstones, it's a word that figures broadly in public discourses, and that, of course, complicates our use of it.

A few years ago, in a panel devoted to discussions of North American fiddle music at the American Folklore Society conference, I heard the word "community" used in ways that made me shake my head, especially when the conversation was about revivalist music sessions. I thought then that it was too facile to talk about revivalists' sessions as forms of community. There's a superficial resemblance to community, it seemed to me, but what's missing is the combination of continuity and obligation that are vital elements of community. I understand community as more than what happens in one, occasional sphere of interaction. To be in community is to participate in a web of connectedness to others that continues beyond special events. And it's easy, I thought, to believe in community when everyone's having fun, when the music occasions a kind of generous consciousness and a sense of connection. So, I worried about our alltoo-easy use of the word "community" some times when we talk about musicians and dancers. We're not alone in this, of course. In fact, it seems to me that we folklorists are very much like the musicians in the music sessions. We all seem to want the sessions to stand for community.

Surely, I thought, community is a multifaceted, complicated thing, whereas the talk I heard claimed that on the basis of occasional musical get-togethers people of varied backgrounds could be considered a community. Community, it seemed to me then, ought to involve a set of relationships that go beyond a single commonality. In community there is responsibility, integration, and obligation. Presumably, there is more than one thing in common. Community, I thought, must be a kind of relationship that allows for varied social roles and relationships. I recalled then how rural people in south central Kentucky whom I'd interviewed twenty years ago about dance traditions told me that they used to think of their rural districts as neighborhoods, despite considerable distance between them, and how there no longer was a sense of community-people didn't gather together as they once had. "Everyone is somewhere else," as one person told me. Those neighborhood gatherings, sometimes for dancing, were, in a sense, peak events in which local people enacted or affirmed community or some sort of social order. But they stood for something deeper than the pleasure of the moment. They stood for neighbors who would lend a hand when you needed to raise your barn, who would be there when you needed help, who monitored your children and shared your religion. My experience as a musician for contemporary contra dances, and my research in various revival settings, tell me that it's more the pleasure of the moment that counts in these events and that the social relationships are largely one-dimensional.

Anyway, my confusion-maybe uneasiness is a better word-about community was heightened when I began putting together a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. Called Common Ground, it set out to present defining essays about key words for the study of expressive culture. After considerable thought and discussion, I came up with a list of eight fundamental terms. "Community" was one of them. I invited Dorothy Noyes to write that essay. But Dorry argued convincingly that "community" wasn't the right choice; we settled on group, and I think she was right in going for a word that's less value-laden.

"Community" is value-laden. One could argue that it's an overused, underconceptualized word in a society-both the larger society and the

American Folklore Society-that often laments its demise, whatever it is. We all seem to want what we do to stand for community. Thinking about this for a paper as part of a session on music and community a couple of years ago, I read some of the literature of community, mostly in social philosophy. A number of ideas stood out in that literature. First, there's the notion that to be in a community is to have a concern both for one's own integrity and for the well-being of others. The second notion is that in communities social relations are dense. A limited number of people are bound together, sharing beliefs and values, in a set of ties that, to quote Markate Daley, "encompass the whole of their lives rather than only one or a few aspects." At least in social philosophy, community is moral and deep. I would add, too, thanks to a little bit of experience in watching town meetings in New England, that the integrity of social relations does not rule out difference, but it provides a means-at least in an idealized sense-to work out or accommodate those differences without destroying the social compact.