Anthropology differs from its sister disciplines because it includes human biology. Thus we see all human individual as members of natural groups: living, breeding populations we call communities.
For anthropology, community is the minimum social field necessary for the survival of the group and the transmission of its culture. Community for us, then, is a set of human beings in contact with each other through “network.”
That is, each person does not necessarily know each other else, but each is linked to everyone else through others.
Communities share space, or territory, but community populations are usually dispersed over space and come together on regular schedules, either during the solar year or during a person’s typical lifetimes, especially for the crises of coming age, getting married, or death.
Indeed, one of our broadest general principles is that community, so defined, exists for all stages of human cultural and social transformations.
Anthropologists have classified many community “fields” and arranged them in a typology that ranges from simples to complex.
Each type is more densely populated and complexly organized. With a wider array of more fully specialized and full time institutions.
Starting with the hunting and gathering human band, human behaviors have differentiated themselves into successfully more distinct and specialized institutions. Human bands originated out of earlier groups, which in turn emerged out of the primate troop.
Study of Communities
