Dancing Toward Democracy— communities and publics

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Social science, and, in particular, anthropology, has a long history of working with small communities, communities that were bound together by a shared “culture.” Cohen’s description of the relationship between culture and community, as this became the basis for anthropological study, shows the underlying tautology at work:

“Our emphasis upon culture focuses upon the diversity beneath the mask. It seeks interpretations, and the means by which they are made, rather than objective form. 'Community' can no longer be adequately described in terms of institutions and components, for now we recognize it as symbol to which its various adherents impute their own meanings. They can all use the word, all express their co-membership of the 'same' community, yet all assimilate it to the idiosyncrasies of their own experiences and personalities” (Cohen 1985, 73-74).

In the days (not so long ago) of symbolic anthropology, symbols were as communal as communities were symbolic. Fieldworkers went out in search of collective symbols and returned with symbolic collectives. Culture was something like “everything you needed to know to belong to the group,” and its transmission reproduced the group.

The fact that ideas were shared seemed enough to make these the glue that held together tribes, sects, castes, and classes. Language was the central feature of such systems of symbols (and also of such communities). Most of the small groups that anthropologists have studied show dialectal or linguistic boundaries that are central to the group’s self-definition.

Of course, what was under-theorized in all this was the amount of knowledge/power (and the differential access to this) at work in the process. Structuralism in particular was neutral to the instrumental outcomes of the symbols it described¹.

What remains useful in this notion that shared ideas constitute a community is that this opens up an interest in how ideas and imaginations are managed to inform life-style behaviors and social participation in modern nation-states. The formation of the “national” community resembles that of the formation of small-scale communities, but because of the novelty of its “national” scale it places an added burden on the imagination.

“...I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”
(Anderson1983, 5-6).

The move in scale from the local communal experience to the imagin(ed n)ation, Anderson would point out, did not replace an older, “true” community with a new, “false” one. Communities at the local level were just as imagined. But what Anderson did not explore was how this sharing of an imagined communion might interrupt the formation of a nation as a democracy that included people who were not (or did not care to be) included within its communal embrace.

The formation of the nation may have initially borrowed the metaphor of “community.” But this does not require nations in late modernity to reproduce this earlier borrowing. The idea of nations as imagined communities leads one to consider the public sphere as community property: an idea that positions the nation much too near to 1933. As we shall see, public spheres contain necessarily anti-communal notions.

¹This was mostly due to the linguistic underpinnings of structuralism. Language at its primary levels (syntax, phonology, semantics) was viewed as a power-neutral for two reasons: it was acquired in early childhood, presumably before political consciousness, and its mechanisms are not reflexively available to the user, and when they become available (through linguistic research) they are still not power-laden. It makes no difference if an English speaker knows that she aspirates word-initial unvoiced consonants but not word-initial voiced consonants. Post-structuralists, working from literary criticism, see rhetorical and other (e.g., psychological) potentials in language use that implicate this at all levels with power relationships, first between parents and children, and then in the public sphere.