ABSTRACT
As the editor of this volume, Vered Amit has taken on the formidable task of producing a current account of one of the classical concepts in the social sciences, ‘community’, formidable not only because the concept has changed substantially over the decades in which the literature has accumulated, but because much of the literature has been concerned with its slipperiness as a concept. Community has never been a term of lexical precision, though much tedious work has been dedicated to the fruitless effort to so render it. The literature, unsurprisingly, has tracked the paradigmatic shifts of sociocultural anthropology and sociology; and perhaps what makes our present editor’s task so difficult is that we are writing at a moment when no paradigm dominates, indeed when the very notion of a paradigm has come to seem rather unfashionable. The authors of this book have therefore completed an interesting and exemplary circle. Half a century ago, anthropologists and sociologists took the word ‘community’ (and so many others) from ordinary language and tried to transform it into an analytical category with scientific rigour. Our present authors are returning it whence it came, having decided (entirely justifiably, in my view) that there is no mileage in trying to define it, and are describing its ordinary popular use. It is an exercise entirely appropriate to the ethnographic and anthropological enterprise.
