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Dancing Toward Democracy— New, reflexive communities
A public community is a group that has reflexively acquired its own dialogic democracy, and that is engaged in the active public sphere. Such groups usually do the former in order to do the latter. Other groups (including most religious, and many ethnic groups) have little interest in the former, and so they have limited success in the latter. Unmonitored lists on the internet are a weak example of a public community (weak because identification with the group is, and should only be, weak, although the internet may also serve and one of many information media for public communities). Activist movements for the environment and for human or animal rights may acquire public community status. But this is also available to more “traditional” groups, providing they acquire the (above) reflexive “post-traditional” membership and decision-making practices1. This is the real question facing many communities today: what are the consequences of internal democratic reform? Fundamentalism is a negative response to this potential change, and so groups may split on this issue into a fundamentalist revitalization movement that seeks to undo whatever reforms had led the group to question its traditional authorities and a reform community that seeks to complete the transformation of the community into something more or less like a public community, although vestiges of traditional authority may prove recalcitrant against these reforms.
The lessons that a community internalizes from the wider public sphere also show the penetration of the community's own logic by that of the public sphere. One could argue that this penetration—this recoding of the traditional order—is an illegitimate intrusion into the community's traditional culture. And here is where cultural essentialists and critical social theorists are bound to have some disagreement.
For example, those who look at this process as leading to the loss of unique cultural traditions might be forced to overlook (equally unique) critiques of cultural groups as sites of social inequality. The preservation of practices that promote inequality (such as female genital mutilation) as a right of some tradition further silences those voices that have already been silenced within the community. To say that these so-called traditional practices cannot be critiqued because such critiques are not, themselves, traditional, means that those subject to this are silenced in the face of their own domination.
1Granted, such groups are rare today. The Higashi-Kujo Madang community is, in this way, quite remarkable. And one might ask why would a traditionalist group would care to do so. What is more likely than an established group transforming itself in this manner is for a new group to be formed that competes with the old group for membership. Change will come about when the older group fails to reproduce its membership, and so loses its ability to maintain its “traditional” authority.
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