ABSTRACT
An ‘exhausted community’ (Jahoda 1991), the sociological concept that I employ in this essay, is characterized above all by social apathy.1 Social apathy in such communities coexists with three contesting factors: resignation, despair and, to a lesser degree, the attitudes of those who have not yet become apathetic; it is related to the growing pressure from regional political forces and their dominant doctrines and to insurmountable economic processes supported by them. On the local level, it is accompanied by a series of related indicators, including an increasingly restricted margin within which local actors still try to apply alternative strategies and to participate in deviant discourses; the growing influence of local institutions loyal to the dominant regional doctrine; and a parallel, gradual abandonment of local ties to previously coexisting, alternative institutions and cosmologies. Such indicators take their toll on an individual level as well. Among the long-term unemployed in European societies, for instance, indicators of social apathy include a lowering of individual expectations and activities, disturbances in personal perceptions of time and space, and a rise in violence against oneself or family members. In view of a certain spectrum of current anthropological debates concerning domination and resistance, I consider the exhausted community concept a differentiating and useful one. Analyses of social hierarchies too often end up in the trap of exclusive dichotomies. One group of authors tends to analyse processes of social hierarchies mainly in terms of the maintenance and reproduction of an existing order, in which the dominated are seen as contributing, in one way or another, to
their own subordination. Another prefers to analyse such processes in terms of creative interaction, emphasizing the ways in which individual actors deal with domination’s effects and giving its overall social impacts less consideration.
