Month: October 2010

Q: You are an expert on Native American history and culture, particularly the Lakotas of the Northern Plains.  Are there any correlations between the disintegration of Indigenous American communities and community at large? Reinhardt: Many of the Europeans who came to, conquered, and settled the Americas in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries brought with them some very heavy cultural baggage. as in they believed Indian religions to be the work of the Devil Himself.  And on more secular issues, they simply considered anything that Indians did differently to be a sign of savagery and inferiority.  No matter that in certain areas, such as agronomy and astronomy, Native Americans were light years ahead of Europeans.  For example, when Europeans were still arguing about whether the Sun circled the Earth or the Earth circled the Sun, Indians of Central America were intricately charting the movements of heavenly bodies, and they had developed a combination lunar/solar calendar that was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that Europeans developed and the rest of the world now uses.  For many Europeans, the ethnocentric bias was so strong that it was blinding. As Europeans and their descendants competed with Indians for control of the Western hemisphere, that competition reinforced such biases.  And so in many cases, and always in what was to become the United States, it wasn’t enough to take Indians’ lands and destroy their governments.  Beyond that, cultural genocide had also become a goal by the mid- to late-19th century, and it remained a central part of federal Indian policies until the 1930s. 

Molly writes:

Susan writes: I think of community in biological terms.  Ants have communities, bees have communities,

Here’s a nice piece by Paul Harris of The Guardian in which he updates readers on the positive fallout from his prior articles about a small group of people in Detroit who are working to turn a patch of urban desolation (which there is, sadly, far too much of  in that city) into a vegetable garden and playground. referring to the strengthening of relationships among the people working on this garden.  Their shared vision, labor, and dedication to a common goal is resulting in an increased sense of connectedness.  Together the participants are reaping benefits.  But they are also developing mutual obligations and responsibilities, and presumably rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not.  All of these are hallmarks of a real community. So here’s a question.  If big cities are an impediment to communities, can their otherwise tragedy of their ongoing dilapidation provide the opportunity for new, small communities to rise in their wake?  After decades of depopulation and economic collapse, can rust belt cities like Detroit witness the birth of new communities amid their ashes?  Is it possible to build a modern version of a historic community by developing small, close-knit, semi-rural  population centers in nearly abandoned urban neighborhoods?

Q&A with the Public Professor – 1.5 Reinhardt: Social media like Facebook, Twitter, and a number of others are of course book.  And through that, Facebook has a very real connection to the book.  But at the end of the day, it’s a very minor connection, and Facebook is not the book.  The book is the book.  Likewise, an actual community could use Facebook, or another online social media outlet as a tool for communication, and in that way Facebook would have a very real but, all things considered, very minor connection to the community.  But that doesn’t mean we should confuse Facebook with the actual community it might be connected to. My argument is that in America there are no more actual communities, and I end up defining social media like Facebook as surrogate communities: things that people now use to recreate in some ways the connectedness of an actual community, a replacement to fill in for missing communities.  But that doesn’t make it an actual community.  When used in that way, it’s a pale imitation.

This definition comes from Andrew:

Q&A with the Public Professor – 1.4 Reinhardt: Yes, community is relative to size.  Since a community demands a basic level of familiarity and interaction among its members, there are limits to just how big it can grow, though an actual number would be impossible to come up with.  And there are certainly many, many small towns all across America that are well within the size range of a community.  But size isn’t the only defining element.  Membership, proximity, mutual obligations and responsibilities, value systems, and a veritable raft of rules on proper and improper behavior and ideals are also defining elements of thriving, functional community.  And by and large, today’s small American town have lost quite a bit of those elements.

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.3 Reinhardt: People who live in communities, and they do exist in other parts of the world, have certain benefits that they often cherish.  A community can provide a sense of belonging and even help give purpose to life.  A community member is familiar with the people around them, as well as the expectations for how to behave and what to believe.  At the same time, however, Community rules and expectations can be restrictive.  Since a community demands a certain amount of loyalty and obedience, it tends to squelch assertive