ABSTRACT
There is wide acceptance that we live now in a complex society of highly diverse groupings and affiliations, and that this renders notions of primary allegiance to a single, undifferentiated, primordial community irrelevant. As Little (2002: 155) puts it, it is because each of us is a member of different communities and associations that society is made up of individuals who have separate identities. Our social identities are not given, but constructed out of the intersection of a variety of memberships and commitments. This is a view asserted most clearly among radicals and postmodernists, who derive from it their readiness to respect social diversity, and the claim to recognition and rightful existence of many different communities. Young (1990: 236) comments that ‘in our society most people have multiple group affiliations, and thus group differences cut across every social group’. The urban milieu she espouses consists of a vast array of networks, associations and small ‘communities’, which she believes can coexist and intermingle without being forced into a common identity. Frazer (1999: 151) notes that when questioned about their sense of belonging, people readily express multiple loyalties and identifications. As a result, in geographic terms, they construct highly individualized maps of social relations in different areas, with varying degrees of clarity, and make distinctions between their own subjective perceptions, and the public images and representations of space with which they are familiar. The validity of these claims is conceded by more conservative social theorists. Thus Etzioni depicts
society as comprising many ‘overlapping and interlaced communities’ (1997: 205), while Putnam’s concern for rebuilding levels of social capital leads him to advocate participation in and engagement with an expanding range of bodies and groups, from sports teams and choirs to grassroots social movements. Furthermore, all agree that these groupings take a number of different forms, and that many have no obvious spatial reference.
