Institutions, Leadership, and Community

Abstract

In the two preceding chapters where I presented the various social categories meaningful to Shandon residents in 1990, the word community appears with some frequency. Community has dual meanings of place and social group that are not easily distinguished by the scholar, because our ethnographic subjects often do not distinguish between them. In his study of Shandon in the 1960s, Elvin Hatch (1979) was concerned with what made a community—in the social sense—out of the assemblage of households comprising the town and its surrounding settlements. Hatch found a web of social relations and shared knowledge that tied these households into a community. Residents had created a body of local affairs, comprised of shared interests, goals, concerns, and controversies, and around which much information and activity revolved. This formed a major part of a local culture, much of which was carried out through local institutions and the practice of leadership.¹