A Failure of Imagination

The Decline of Community in a Greek Village

Bibliographic Data

ID2476673
AuthorsDiane O''Rourke, Diane O'Rourke (Victoria School of Management, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume6
Issue2
Pages1-12
Publication date2006-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1535-5632 • E-ISSN: 1556-5823
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/jsae.2006.6.2.1
OpenAlexW2169068842
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

The moral and social unity of a community is not a natural association to place, but depends on the ways people frame their loyalties to place and other people, and what they imagine unites them. Benedict Anderson called the nation an imagined community. We might also call the community an imagined community. In this paper I use the case of the decline in sense of community among the inhabitants of Lehonia, Greece to illustrate how even face-to-face community must be imagined by its members and the way in which class divisions were able to contribute to shared local identity. Prosperity based on highly productive land and access to markets supported not only a local class system which bound together Lehonia's owners and workers, but also their sense of community. I argue that prosperity and progressiveness were integral to shared identity among those inhabitants who were members of the community. Declining returns from agriculture precipitated a decline in the salience of community in the lives of residents, and a failure of their ability to imagine themselves as a community

Aesthetics · Political economy · Political science · Prosperity · Sense of community · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Social and Cultural Dynamics

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub