How do you define community?
Posted on February 4th, 2008 by MAC staff
There are many ways to define community. It can refer to a group of people who practice the same occupation, come from the same ethnic background, or live in the same town There are lots of overlapping elements to the concept of community and that means all of us are members of multiple communities. The arts can be used to strengthen community, but what do we mean when we say that? How do you define community?
Filed under: Community Arts and
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Here is a definition of community to get the conversation started:
Community: A group of persons interconnected by any combination of geography, history, heritge, common interest or concerns in such a way that a dynamic body of common understandings and knowledge are created; and the members of the community interact with each other, based on that common ground.
Anybody else want to take a stab at it?
Good luck with this effort.
One such community this beginning to come together is the Saco Biddeford group of artists. Electronic meeting places such as this blog and a new forum posted at http://www.sacobiddefordart.com are the future. Hopefully both will find the audience.
The …difficulty with the dictionary definition of community offered by Keith Ludden is that slippery “common ground.”
As artists, we certainly face common challenges — how to make time for our art, how to promote our art, how to get paid for our art. Unfortunately, it seems to me — and I’d be pleased to be proven wrong — that the dissimilarities between, say, visual artists and writers, are at least as broad as our common ground.
If community meant that thereare no dissimilarities, then community would require conformity. I don’t think that was implied in Keith’s definition. A community is a group of people with shared interests.