Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan

1. Introduction: The Persistence of Community

1 Chapter One Introduction The Persistence of Community COMMUNITY: A dream. Sometimes we do not know that we had it until we wake up from it. William T. Vollman, Poor People (2007) Thinking clearly about the notion of “community” in today’s world is difficult . Politicians, marketers, and civic groups use the term to unite people within social groups that promise intimacy and egalitarianism. The call for community evokes nostalgia for presumably utopian pasts that existed apart from impersonal state institutions, a mode of “being together” that is barely recognizable in today’s cities and suburbs. Yet when it is possible to see through the ideologies that laden such commentaries, one finds that communities are, in fact, fascinatingly complex entities that form around shared resources and issues. Far from utopias, they are often rife with conflict over priorities, led by covert hierarchies, and have blurry membership rosters. Fortunately, the community’s complexity has not escaped the attention of recent philosophers and social scientists,1 who express a range of sentiments, from skepticism about the community’s function, to anxiety and optimism about its future. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy speculates that “the thought of the community or the desire for it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience” (Nancy 1991:10) and argues that “society was not built on the ruins of a community” (Nancy 1991:11). Yet when looking deep into the historical and archaeological record, it is difficult to agree with Nancy and others who believe the community is only a recent response to the alienating conditions of modernity. Historically remote groups have often crafted their own versions of community, resulting in an enormous diversity of the form over time. How these past communities 2 · Introduction: The Persistence of Community developed, sometimes in the interstices of civilizations, mattered for the subsequent rise of more complex forms of human organization. Archaeologists , with their abilities to recover physical evidence of social life in past societies, have much to contribute to this conversation. And yet the limited research archaeologists have done on communities has not appeared in broader interdisciplinary discussions. One reason why archaeologists may not be participating is that unlike other forms of human organization such as chiefdoms and archaic states, they did not help to “discover” the community. Rather, they inherited the concept from an intellectual tradition that first identified the community as it was responding to the rise of nineteenth-century European industrial capitalism. As agricultural production was mechanized and unemployment in the countryside increased, families abandoned their rural towns in search of employment in growing industrialized urban centers. In the neighborhoods and in the workplace, individuals and families found themselves in living arrangements fundamentally different from the villages they had left. Newly arrived workers lived among strangers, working for foremen and owners rather than cooperatively for a group or individually for their own households. Observing these changes in arrangements at the turn of the twentieth century were scholars who believed the community on the wane, and, for some writers, in need of rescue.2 German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies explained this transformation as a process through which individuals moved from social collectives based on a shared will (Gemeinschaft) to collectives based on the will of individuals (Gesellschaft) (Tönnies 1887). Tönnies writes at the beginning of his book, “All intimate, private, and exclusive living together . . . is understood as life in Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft is public life—it is the world itself” (1887:33). For Tönnies, Gesellschaft was “transitory and artificial,” “a mechanical aggregate and artifact,” whereas Gemeinschaft was a “lasting and genuine form of living together” and a “living organism” (1887:35). As Europe’s agricultural villages disbanded and as business and markets became organized for individual gain, Gemeinschaft unraveled and in its place the “mechanical aggregate” of Gesellschaft arose. Tönnies’s dualism had a lasting effect on interpretations that followed his scholarship, such as in Émile Durkheim ’s The Division of Labour in Society (1893). Durkheim assigned his own labels, “mechanical and organic solidarity,” to explain how the division of labor differed in traditional and modern societies. Interested in those features that maintain solidarity in a society, Durkheim argued that members of traditional societies “are not only individually attracted to Introduction: The Persistence of Community · 3 one another because they resemble one another, but they are also linked to...