Community. A community is a group of individuals of one or more species that live together in a certain place; it is also a type of social organization whose members come together to achieve common goals. The individuals in a community are related because they have the same needs.
The community constitutes an ideal setting for sociocultural work and can be defined from different geographical, architectural, legal, economic, political or sociological points of view. The German philosopher Karl Marx referred to the primitive community as the oldest form of social organization.
Summary
[ hide ]
- 1 Types of communities
- 2 Community as an economic cell of the primitive community
- 3 Biological community
- 4 Sources
Types of communities
There are basically three types of communities: blood communities (the most natural and primitive, of biological origin, such as tribe , family or clan), local communities (whose origin is the neighborhood, such as villages and rural settlements), and communities of spirit (their origin is friendship, tradition and cohesion of spirit or ideology).
Community as an economic cell of the primitive community
Main economic cell of the regime of the primitive community, which constituted a closed formation, which rested on the social ownership of the means of production, on collective labor in the natural form of its division between men and women, adults and children, and on the joint distribution and consumption of the product obtained. The development of the community was accompanied by the complexity and growth of the types of work activity that the members of the community constantly carried out and the increase in the interconnection of these types of activity (especially, when passing in the Neolithic era to the agriculture and livestock), and the increasing independence of the families that were part of the community.
Ordinarily, economic life, Family and ritual-religious of the communities was determined by the consolidation of a group of blood relatives from a common ancestor and bearing a common gentilicio name. For this reason, the most widespread form of primitive community was the gentile community. By virtue of the exogamy of marriage, a part of the nucleus of the same blood of the gentile community was provisional and, when contracting marriage, it left it. Instead, the constant part of the community found their husbands in other gens. On the basis of kinship ties and matrimonial ties, intercommunal relationships develop in the different spheres of material and spiritual life, relationships that formed the basis of gentile society, which gave life to the tribal organization. a part of the nucleus of the same blood of the gentile community was provisional and, when contracting marriage, it left it. Instead, the constant part of the community found their husbands in other gens.
On the basis of kinship ties and matrimonial ties, intercommunal relationships develop in the different spheres of material and spiritual life, relationships that formed the basis of gentile society, which gave life to the tribal organization. a part of the nucleus of the same blood of the gentile community was provisional and, when contracting marriage, it left it. Instead, the constant part of the community found their husbands in other gens. On the basis of kinship ties and matrimonial ties, intercommunal relationships develop in the different spheres of material and spiritual life, relationships that formed the basis of gentile society, which gave life to the tribal organization.
With the appearance of metal instruments, the social division of labor and constant commerce between the communities, the latter began to differentiate both among themselves (families of the rich and noble, on the one hand, and of the poor and undermined, on the other) as in the interior (powerful and dispossessed, exploited), gradually becoming a rural community .
Biological community
For biologists the community is the set of living beings in an ecosystem ; more precisely, it could be said that it is the set of biological populations that share a certain area and coincide in time.
For example, the fossils that appear in an ecosystem would not be part of its community but would be inhabitants of a past community, a paleocommunity . One can speak of the community of microorganisms of the intestine of a herbivore , of the community of marine mammals of the Atlantic Ocean , or that of the insects of the savannas of East Africa ; freshwater communities; communities in the intertidal zone; marine communities, and so on.
The scientists in charge of knowing the composition of a community and its structure are ecologists. While sociologists study communities of human beings.
To characterize a biological community, both the composition of species and the number of individuals of each of them must be considered. Not all species are equally important within a community; the dominant ones, for example, are those that if they disappeared would cause great alterations in it.
Sometimes it is difficult to delimit, in nature , the border that separates different communities. The transitional areas that appear between two totally different communities are called ecotones and are especially rich in species.