ABSTRACT
We grow up and live in communities and it is community that both structures our learning experiences and teaches us about life and how to live it. Not as close to each one of us as our immediate family or the various small groups to which we belong, nor as distant as the general rules and codes of practice that govern and structure the larger societies in which we live, community is an intermediate space that offers both the symbolic and material resources within which the dialectics between individual subjects and the social world is lived and played out. It is as members of a community that we become ourselves, grow into competent social actors and learn how to speak a language. It is because we belong to a community that we know how to interpret and make sense of the ways people around us behave and relate to us; our communities give us the framework within which and against which our unique sense of self arises. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to become a person without community.
