Community

CommunityA community is a (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as , set of , culture, , , , or . Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, , town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable good relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social such as family, home, work, government, TV network, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, “community” may also refer to large group affiliations such as , , and .
The English-language word “community” derives from the comuneté (: communauté), which comes from the “community”, “public spirit” (from Latin , “common”).
communities may have , , , , , and in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.
of social communities use the term “community” in two ways, paralleling usage in other areas. The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient —whether a , , , or . The second meaning resembles the usage of the term in other : a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities. typically use similarities in —from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This classification method relies on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.