What is community? Primary concept
Man has lived in
communities since the
The word 'community'
has been derived from two Latin words: namely, 'Com' and 'munis. In English,
'com means together and 'munis' means to serve. Thus, community means to serve
together. It means, the 'community is an organization of human beings framed
for the purposes of serving together. A community is a collection of interdependent
people with residential ties to a particular locality. The territorial
boundaries differentiate it from other groups, because most other groups are
not tied to specific localities.
Communities are
spatially specific but, otherwise, are unrestricted. They are unlike groups and
organizations that have special interests and touch only a narrow part of their
participants' levels. Communities encompass major portions of the lives and
roles of their members. The term 'community' denotes almost uniformly and
permanently shared lives of people over definite region. It may be considered
as a permanent local aggregation of people having
2.2 DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY
The term 'community'
has been defined in various ways. Some of the definitions are as follows:
According to MacIver :
According to Kingsley Davis :
According to Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess :
According to M.C. Manzer :
According to C.F. Childe:
According to Lumbi :
According to Dawson and Gettys:
According to Lundberg:
According to
Ferdinand Tonnies:
According to Talcott Parsons,
The definitions quoted above, emphasize the structural
and sociological aspects of the community. But it is no less important to note
that community is but a separated part of society viewed in its ecologically
permanent state wherein the impulses, precisely spoken of as community
sentiments play their diverse but at the same time unifying role.
The mark of a community is
that one's life may be lived wholly within it. One cannot live wholly within a
business organization or a church, but one can live wholly within a tribe or a
city. The basic criterion of community then is that all of one's social
relationships may be found within it.