What is Community?

Abstract

This paper takes a psychosocial view of what it means to be a community, and how a community is held together. Starting from the thought of Freud and Durkheim, representing the psychic and the social, respectively, and drawing on the thinking of Jonathan Lear, Giuseppe Civitarese, Ferdinand Tönnies, Randall Collins, Joseph Henrich, and others, I argue that a community is not simply a collection of individuals but something having its own distinctive psychosocial dynamics. Using Kai Erikson’s distinction between individual and collective trauma, I examine the cases of collective trauma in two communities—Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, and Dharamsala, India—and show how and why the two responded very differently, and how they illustrate the theoretical case I have made.