COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

Community:

Community is an aggregation of people or a group of people or group families confined to a geographical area or a locality, for a common purpose having commonness, interdependence, a shared way of life and relationship on a continuous basis or permanently.

Community is the combination of two Latin words i.e. ‘cam’ means together and ‘munis’ means serve i.e. serve together is called community.

Definitions:

According to Tolcott Parsons “Community as collectivity the members of which share a common territorial area as their base of operation for daily activities”

According to Hawley “The structure of relationship through which a localized population provides its daily requirements. Participation in a daily rhythm of collective life is the factor, which distinguishes and gives unity to the population of a locality”.

According to Maclver “ Community is an aggregation of families and individuals, settled in a fairly compact and contiguous geographical area, with significant elements of common life, as show by manners, customs, traditions and modes of speech”.

And his further says “Community as an area of Social living marked by some degree of social coherence”.

According to Bogardas “Community is a Social Group with same degree of we-feeling and living in a given area”

·         A group of individual who may be living together on a temporary basis and some time they may not even live together they would have gathered for the time being for a common purpose.

Components:

In order to use the community intervention social work one has to have a clear understanding of the community. There are various components in a community like social, political, economic, cultural, legal, religious, values. It would be better to know all the components depending up on nature of the work.

·         Social:  The social component includes Family, Marriage, Kinship, Caste, Occupation, Religion, Education, and Population.

·         Political: The political components are Legislatives, Government, Parties, Parliamentarians, Local Self Government and Elections.

·         Economic: The economic component involves the wealth possessed by the people. The income of an individual is in terms of monetary value, which is gained from the occupation, employment, assets, trade, business, industries, savings, debts, and investments.

·         Cultural: The cultural component consists of customs, traditions, dressing pattern, food habits and consumerism.

·         Legal: This component following the major activities that are Legislations, Law makers, Law Breakers, Accessibility, utility, under trials.

·         Religious: India is a religious country. Religion plays an important role in the community. Indians are bound by religion from birth to death. The religion and the related institutions also provide services in the form of education, health, community development, social action etc. The religious includes the rituals, beliefs, ceremonies, festivals, worship, religious practices.

·         Value: There are various value components both traditional and modern values to mention few i.e. Honesty, Sincerity, Punctuality, Morality, Patriotism, Competition, Truthfulness, Obedience, Respect for Elders.

·         Social Problems: Some of the social problems are part in the community i.e. Poverty, Illiteracy, Ignorance, alcoholism, Drug addiction, Crime, Juvenile Delinquency, Dowry, Corruption, Prostitution, Beggary, Drop out, Unemployment.

Characteristics:

The following are the features on the basis of which we can decide whether a particular group is a community.

·         Group or People: Whenever the individuals live together in such a way that they share the basic conditions of common life, we call them a community.

·         Locality or Territory: The group of people forms a community when they begin to reside in a definite locality or territory.

·         Community Sentiment: Community sentiment means feeling of belonging together.

·         Permanency: A community is not transitory like a crowd. It essentially includes a permanent life in a definite place.

·         Naturality: Communities are not made or created by an act of will but are natural.

·         Likeness or Beliefs and Common Value: In a community there is a likeness in language, customs, moral values and follow own tradition.

·         Wider ends: The ends of the community are wider and they are natural.

·         Particular Name: Every community has some particular name.

·         Strong group feeling

·         Cultural similarity

Community Types:

Tribal Community: A tribe can be defined as a community living in hilly forest or well demarcated areas having its own culture, religion, language, and strong ethnic identity.

Anthropologists have explained tribe as a social group with territorial affiliation, endogamous in nature, with no specialization of functions, ruled by tribal chiefs, hereditary or otherwise, united in language or dialect, recognizing social distance with other tribes or casters, following tribal traditions, beliefs and customs, conscious of their ethnic and territorial homogeneity.

Features of Tribal Community:

From the above definition, we may list the following features of Tribal Community.

·         They have usually a well-demarcated geographical territory.

·         Generally they live in forests or hilly areas.

·         Their territory is relatively isolated or semi-isolated compared to other social group.

·         They have their own culture, folklore, cosmology and belief system

·         Economically they are self-sufficient, i.e. their economy is based on subsistence level where there is no concept of surplus. They cling to primitive technology. They lack monetary economy. Their economy is dependent on barter exchange.

·         They are more interested in earning their todays need and do not bother about their future requirements.

·         They have their own language; generally do not have any script.

·         They have their own political system, i.e. both stateless and state. Earlier they had stateless system, i.e. without any tribal chief. They manage their law and order system through family and kinship ties. Later on came the state system, when tribal nominated or elected their own chiefs. Today, of course this autonomy has been lost and they have become part of the local administration.

·         Tribal communities are known as simple societies because their social relationships are primarily based on family and kinship ties. Besides they do not have any rigid social stratification.

·         They have their own religion, i.e. having their own deities (gods and goddess) and belief system. Their forms of religion are known as:

Animism: worshipping the soul or ancestors.

Animatism: Worshipping any non-living body like stone or wood.

Totemism: Worshipping a tree or any animal as the founding ancestor.

Naturism: Worshipping objects of nature like River, Stream, Sun, moon forest, etc.   

·         They have a sense of belongingness to their own community, they feel that they are the sons of the soil and hence they have a strong ethnic identity.

·         Tribe in India region wise i.e.

Rural Community:

 Rural community means community that lives in village, and is dependent on natural environment. Rural economy rests predominantly on agriculture and allied activities. These societies have a low density of population, intimate group relationship and have oral traditions. Rural societies are rich in culture and tradition. However, from the contemporary point of view, they are considered to be socio-economically less developed. Therefore, several development activities have been undertaken in our country to improve their socio-economic conditions.

Feature of Rural Community:  

  The village community has the following characteristics.

·      Agriculture is the predominant occupation among them. It is not the only source of income but also the way of life for the villagers.

·      The village community is small in size. It means they live in small geographical areas with lower density of population as compared to the towns.

·      They have primary group behavior, i.e. face to face relationship is found among the members of the village.

·      Their social structure is based on kinship and family relationships. Here the role of lineage (Vansh) is very important.

·      Mostly they live in joint family. A joint family is a group of people who live under one roof, eat food cooked at one hearth, have joint property, participate in common worship and are linked to each other through kinship ties. The joint family has greater generation bondage than the nuclear family.

·      They are more conservative and tradition oriented towards the performance of rituals as well as belief in deities.

·      Group feeling and mutual cooperation is more evident among them. They have a brotherhood feeling. They co-operate with each other in times of exigencies.

·      Their culture is also known as folk culture i.e. consisting of customs, rituals and norms, etc. which are unwritten, but orally transmitted and learned. Since they have a common socio-economic background, they do not have differences in ideology towards life. Hence they are homogenous in nature.

·      Traditionally, their economy is based on agriculture having primitive technology and mono-cropping pattern. It was less productive. Lack of proper marketing facilities and introduction of monetary economy has resulted in poverty. Further, decline in cottage industries has pushed them to migrate to neighbouring towns.

·      Village India is largely based on caste system, which has a hierarchical (castes are ranked according to their purity and pollution, their religious customs and practices and the nature of their occupation) base. For example, Brahmis are raked as highest one because they do the purest occupation of performing rituals and teaching, whereas, shudras is ranked lowest because of his impure occupation of working as scavengers. They follow the above hierarchical system intensely.

·      Modern way of living and thinking (based on achievement of the individuals and their rational thinking) is lacking in rural community. They still follow the ascriptive model of life, hence their mobility is restricted.

·      Any deviant behavior is dealt with strictness in the rural areas.

·      Since modern technology has not gained firm ground in rural areas, people are still following the age old methods of cultivation as well as solving the related day-to-day problems. It involves hard work throughout the day as it is a labour intensive occupation.

·      They have a relatively self-sufficient economy particularly in terms of production and consumption.

·      They have a static economy, since they lack modern technology, modes of investment and a market economy.

·      They cling to conservative and traditional style of living. They have a strong tradition and is known as the little tradition. Their attachment to the past is strong.

Urban Community:

Urban Community includes the towns, cities and metros with a specific way of life. An urban community can be defined as an area having higher density of population, people engaging mostly in occupations other than agriculture and domestication of animals, having a distinct ecology and culture different from that of the large society’s culture.

Feature of Urban Community: 

·   The cities and towns have a higher density of population than the rural areas.

·   Cultural heterogeneity is found in the urban areas because people from various areas having different cultures migrate to the towns in search of employment, education and medical and health care.

·   Cities have a distinct environment that is not natural but a man made environment.

·   The occupation of the urban areas is mainly non-agricultural, i.e. based on manufacturing, trade & commerce, professional and governance, etc.

·   In urban areas more social mobility is found in the sense people gradually adapt to class structure (lower, middle or upper class based on economic criteria).

·   Formal social control is found in the urban area in the form of courts, police and other administrative bodies.

·   In urban areas interaction among people is based on secondary contact and not primary contact. It means face-to-face and individual to individual interaction is not possible in the urban areas.

·   People in the cities have an urban way of life. Which means they have formal interaction, impersonal behavior, non-kinship relationships, cultural exhibitionism, passing leisure time in clubs, parks, restaurants, cinema halls or markets

·   The urban economic organization is based on market and monetary economy.

·   Civic facilities like roads, electricity, water, communication, parks, hotels and cinemas, etc. are found in urban areas.

·   Anonymity is a feature of urban societies. It means people do not know each other in the city as in the villages.

In India the urban area has the following features:

·   An area having some urban administrative unit like a Municipality, Metropolitan Council, Notified Area Council or Cantonment Board, etc.

·   An area having more than 10000 populations.

·   75% of population engaging in non-agricultural occupation.

·   Should have a density of 1000 persons per sq. mile.

·   Having some urban amenities like an industrial area, a large housing settlement, having centre of entrainment and tourist importance or having some civic amenities.