Originally I dove straight into theories of social capital without exploring the field of relations that social capital is activated in. I was forced to back track. Without a conceptualization of the 'structuration' (to borrow Anthony Giddens term) of Rave.ca social relations, that is the play "between structure and agency (and agency and power)" (Giddens 1984: 169), social capital becomes a hollow concept; devoid of significance.
Rave.ca is a self-proclaimed "Nightlife Community", at the outset of my research I simply took this label at face value and began my work from there. It took several comments from others for me to finally clue-in to the completely absence of critical thinking on my part. Community? What does that even mean in our postmodern world of transnationalism, diasporas, and fragmentation? I was pretty familiar with the concept of imagined communities, during my studies I have read both Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai's work on this concept and in retrospect, I had internalized these ideas without any critical questioning. Vered Amit's (2002) "The Trouble with Community" provided me with an intelligent and articulate problematization of imagined communities, as well as offering me directions for a more apt classification of Rave.ca social relations. Social networks, social groups, cultural categories, and communities are all compared and contrasted in the opening chapters of this volume. I spent many days walking around with all these concepts in my head, trying to find my experiences on Rave in them, trying to understand what is actual and what is imagined...
Imagining a community suggests that members of such a community "would not stress simply the possession of certain attributes (material, linguistic,or territorial) but the consciousness of these attributes and their naturalization as essential to group identity" (Amit 2002: 20). However, such an essentialized view of consciousness hides the multiplicity of experiences, identities, and social networks that anyone Rave.ca member may hold. In many ways the idea of cyber "communities" fit nicely with the postmodern notion of diasporas; which, by their very fragmented nature, entail heterogeneity and hybridization. So the question that follows is; how do heterogeneous and diasporic individuals possess a naturalized and essential consciousness?
The answer is, "they probably don't".
The "ideal" and the "actual" seem to be at odds in conceptualizations of imagined communities, and this rupture distances social analysis from uncovering the real impact of social relations in lived worlds. For Amit, community requires the "mobilization of social action" (2002: 18), and cannot, therefore, be found in imaginings alone. This idea of social action as a measure of community, is an important dimension in my exploration of social capital on Rave.ca precisely because I am examining profile activity. Social action on Rave.ca is guided by fairly "sociocentric" norms of cultural capital, yet social capital seems to be enacted in "ego-centric" ways.... I don't dare go further in this vein because my ideas are not fully developed.
I'm thinking that the concept of "cultural category" is a fairly accurate description of underground electronic music; this might explain the sociocentric nature of cultural capital.
Rave.ca is looking less like a community and more like a social network as I continue to break down activity and meaning.
Amit writes that "social network analysis tended to take the individual, rather than the social group, as its point of departure, and so with it came a focus on strategic action, on the cumulative construction of ephemeral webs of social relations which were not likely to outlast their chief protagonist" (2002: 15). This has been particularly troubling for me. I can't determine to what extent, if at all, social relations are institutionalized on Rave.ca. I feel like I'm having trouble seeing past my own preconceived ideas. That I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, naively believing in a world a live in... I feel stuck right here!
Works Cited:
Amit, Vered and Nigel Rapport. 2002. The Problem With Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity. London; Sterling,VA : Pluto.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
One issue that pops up here is the difference between anthropological and popular definitions.
ReplyDeleteCommunity can also refer to a group of people with common interests... Hence Amit's point that it's a troublesome term to center ones analysis, in that its loaded with taken-for-granted assumptions.
At the same time, the term community is used frequently online, and it refers to the kinds of community you might find on rave.ca, or in the open source software development, or on anthropology blogs...
I think the most important thing to do is to be explicit about the definition you are using.