THE CLOSED COMMUNITY AND ITS FRIENDS

Julian A. Pitt-Rivers

The concept of the open society and the ways in which it differs

from those forms of society which are not "open" present a problem which
is fundamental to any typology of social systems. The concept has also
been used by philosophers to examine the nature of political and moral
ideas (1). The distinction is obvious to anyone who has spent a few
days on the one hand in a Southern European village off the tourists'

circuit, and on the other (to take the two extremes furnished by Western
Civilization) in that vast suburbs sine urbs which stretches inland from
Santa Monica in Southern California. But to make a distinction one must
use criteria, and what criteria should one use for this one?

The Open Society is an area of social activity

(a) which is placed in an urban, or semi-urban, or "1exurban" environment,
shall we say?

(b) Where neighbors do not (expressing the criterion in degrees) borrow
-from each other, speak to each other, know each other's name, know each
other by sight.

(c) Where entertainment is a commodity, not an activity.

(d) Where purchases can be made, and a lot of other things done also,
anonymously.

(e) Where parents hand over to others the education of their children and
in their old age are cared for by others.

(f) Where an individual is free to choose the occupation, the friends,
the kind of life he wishes. It is this consideration which appears to
recommend the open society to the philosophers mentioned above.

On the other hand one might define the closed society as that in
which:

(g) people greet each other when they pass even if they are not acquainted.
(h)  Where everyone knows everyone whom everyone else knows.

(i) Where services are performed and even commodities sometimes ceded
upon a tacit understanding of reciprocity.

(j) Where the individual's role is dictated by the social system.
(k) Where gossip is more powerful than the law.

5

These random specificgtions are all in some way true, though none
of them entirely. They are descriptive of certain characteristics
found in types of society which we recognize to be either open or

closed. In order to put them into logical relation to one another we

require a different kind of criterion, an analytical concept which can

explain why some societies are open and some closed and why they should
possess the eharacteristics observed. We need to reduce, if you will,
a collection of empirical observations to the form 6f a logical propo-
sition.  The concept which has been much used in this connection is

Commnity, and this essay is therefore in the first place a sheaf of
notes for the definition of Co   ity.

In comaon usage the word conveys the idea of things held in common
by a defined group of people, and by extension, that group of people
themiselves. It is generally meant to indicate a local group (2);

indeed the expressions "closed" or "open" purvey the notion of terri-
torial exclusiveness or the contrary.

Robert Redfield examines this same concept of the closed society
in his magisterial essay, The Little Comunit:s and lays it down as a

premise that the little community is "a human whole." lie does not ana-
lyze this idea but rather presents it "to the view of common sense" as
one of the "integral entities,"1 one of the "prevailing and conspicuous
forms in which humanity obviously comes to our notice" (3). He puts

forward four qualities by which the little commnity can be recognized:

Distinctiveness, Smallness, Homogeneity, and Self-sufficiency (4).   Dis-
tinctiveness,is apparent to the outside observer and is expressed in

the group consciousness of the comnity. Homogeneity extends in time
so that it is also equivalent to stability. The quality of self-

sufficiency "provides for all or most of the activities and needs of
the people in it."  These qualities are present in different degrees

in different little communities. Redfield illustrates his contention
from a wide range of societies, but he is not concerned to discuss the
theoretical relation of the different criteria to one another. The
closed community remains for him essentially a descriptive category.

Another writer who has paid much attention to the notion of com-
munity is R. M . MacIver (5):

'It is the term we apply to a pioneer settlement, a village, a

city, a tribe, a nation. Wherever the members of any group, small or
large, live together in such a way that they share, not this or that
particular interest, but the basic conditions of a common life, we
call that group a comunityy  . . . A counity then 'is an area of
social living marked by some degree of social coherence. The bases
of community are locality and co mni'ty sentiment."  The latter is

defined as having three elements:  "We-feeling," "Role-feeling" and

"Dependency-feeling'."  MacIver later discusses the "solidarity" which
is founded upon these sentiments and which is essential to the exist-
ence of a comunity.

6

Certain difficulties arise in using this definition.  It assumes
that members of large groups like the city or the nation share the

basic conditions of common life. It also assumes that the community
of the nation and the community of the village are bound together by
solidarity of the same kind, by the same kind of feelings. I do not
think that this is so, nor does Redfield who discusses the little

community in relation to larger integral entities in a chapter entit-
led "A community within communities":  "We seem to need a recognition
of a series or range of kinds of counities according to their

degree of independence from city, manor, national state, or other
center of a different or more developed mode of li'ving" (6).

This recognition complicates the problem of definition for it
implies that, if we are to use the word analytically, it must be

broken up into a number of variants which, while containing an essen-
tial common element, nevertheless include significant and regular
differences. Here we are concerned only with that variant which
Redfield calls 'the little community."

The essential element of this concept was elaborated by Ferdinand
Tonnies under the term Gemeinsechaft, generally translated as "com-

munity." Tonnies, precisely because his sociology arose from a psych-
ological basis (a rather quaint psychology of "wills"), made no attempt
to analyze social relations systematically (7), but tried rather to
understand the nature of their content. Contrasting the comunity-
type of social relation with its opposite, which he described as

Gesellschaft or "society," he observed that different categories of
people tend to enjoy more of one type of social relation than the
other. Thus women, children and the plebs tend to have "communal"

relations while men, older people and the educated, particularly those
engaged in commerce or science, have "societal"f relations.  These peo-
ple are the wielders of authority while the natural goodpess of the
former fits them for submission to authority. For Tonnies, social

life is a battle between the forces of the head and those of the heart,
between the warm-blooded organ and the cold-blooded mechanism. The
law and specialized economic systems typify "societal " relations,

since they are intellectual, heartless and impersonal. The intellec-
tual function of abstraction is associated with them (8). Family

life and personal relations typify community because they depend upon
instinct and feeling rather than calculated purpose. It is not sur-
prising then that Tonnies regards the village community as the heart
of Gemeinschaft. Full of vivld and significant observations as the
illustration of his theory is, the concept itself is not easy to

handle because the many terms of its definition lead to ambiguities.
Every social institution seems to have an aspect of Gemeinschaft and
also an aspect of Gesellechaft, and such propositions which one might
deduce from the theory cannot be verified by reference to any field
of data within the social sphere but only to the elusive concepts of
"ghatural" or "rational .will."  Does the family really stand for con-
cord? Are women and peasants lacking in calculation and greed for

mbney? Intellectuals in valor and passioan? The anthropologist asks

himself and possibly also his wife. But if these propositions are not
true then how can the connections of Tonnies be demonstrated?

Yet we cannot complain if Tonnies' work does not help us to estab-
lish a typology of social systems; he does not employ the notion of

social system at all but remains content to expose the characteristics
of social relations treated by themselves. Indeed, it is possible to
take a number of his observations and give them an explanation which
has nothing to do with natural will but derives from the concept of

social structure. Thus, for example, in examining the social structure
of a closed community in Andalusia (9) I found the characteristics of
women, of plebs, of people in authority, of the educated, and of the

State to be such as Tonnies describes, but I showed them to be so, not
, nature, but on account of their relations to one another and of the
values which govern those relations. For me, the concept of Gemein-
schaft expressed the essence of the spirit of the community, but the

township of Alcala was a closed community because all its members lived
in more or less permanent contact with and knowledge of one another and
gave particular value to this fact.

The idea that a community is limited in size, if it is to retain
the nature of a closed community, by the necessity that its members
should be personally acquainted is general within the Mediterranean

and also ancient. Many writers on Spain have commented on it and the
word personalismo has been used by some in order to express it, gt

least as far as the insistence on the importance of personal acquaint-
anceship goes. Similar values are found both in Italy and in Greece.
Moreover this argment, that is, that the members of a comaunity must

know each other personally if it is to retain the characteristics of a
community, was used by Aristotle in the Politics to limit the size of

the ideal polis, for he maintained that, `as it belongs to the    gover-
nors3 to direct the inferior magistrates and to act as judges, it
follows that they can neither determine causes with justice, nor

issue their orders with propriety without they know the characters of
their fellow-citizens. . . ." (10). In fact as Aristotle viewed it,
justice, so far froma being bound to abstract principles by rules of
evidence, required a network of local gossip in order to function

properly. It is worth noting that the opposition which Tonnies and

many other writers have visualized between the Community and the State
was not evident to the Greek philosophers; for them the polis was and

ought to be both. It is also perhaps significant that Aristotle should
devote so much space (in the Ethics) to the discussion of friendship,
that pillar of Tonnies   Gemeinschaft.

Finally the idea of personal acquaintanceship as a anecesaity to the
closed comaunity can be seen as logical in that human relations must,
in a community, be conducted by people who know one another and who

react to one another as total personalities (as Aristotle's ideal judges
viewed their litigants), not as abstractions.   This circumstance gives
the closed community mnuy of its characteristics: the many-sidedness
of relations; its preference for private sanctions rather than legal

8

ones, and the power of private sanctions; the lack of a single simple
purpose in social actions and the consequent illogicality of its

economic values. (Even where money is required it never fulfills

more than a part of the supposed equivalence in any given tranaaction,
the other part being fulfilled by the non-economic aspect of the

relationship of those concerned. Thus in an Andalusian town some

articles and services cost the rich twice as much as the poor, and
others cost the poor twice as much as the rich.)

On the other hand, the open society presupposes not only a lack
of personal knowledge among its members but also a large and power-
ful state since, where the sanctions of private contact and public

opinion are no longer effective, the state must take over the func-
tions which were otherwise performed on a local and informal, not
upon an abstract and impersonal level.

Nevertheles, the criterion of smallness is not in itself ade-

quate, eren if one qualifies it with the stipulation that it consists
of a group who all have habitual personal contacts with each other.
In many closed rural communities there live families of superior

social standing who are in habitual personal contact but are very
far from "sharing the basic conditions of common life." In others
are to be found collections of outcasts, the sedentary- gypsies of
Andalusia who are outcasts in some ways and in others not, or

formerly those untouchables of the Pyrenees, the agotes and the

cagots (11). Caste cuts across the little communities of India, and
in Mediaeval Europe before the building of the cities status cut

across the local community. We may well jettison the criterion of
the "sharing of the basic conditions of common life," in the sense

of living on terms of equality, but even so it is clear that one can
find examples of people who live cheek by jowl and yet are not rela-
ted by that kind of sociation which is meant by comumnity.

Must we allow MacIver's criteria of feelings, feelings of

attachment, identification of solidarity? Leaving aprioristic con-
siderations on one side, feelings are a most unsatisfactory form of
data for the anthropologist, or rather they are not data at all but

only what is inferred from data:   from the assertion of their exist-
ence, often false as anyone who has worked in an Hispanic area can
testify, or alternatively from the behavior which, to the observer,
implies their existence.  Secondly, if they are to be introduced

into a definition of community they must be assumed to be, if not as
eonstant as the community, at least habitual and unequivocal.   The
concept of ambivalence, introduced by the psychologists, makes it

very difficult to know whether a feeling is what it appears to be or
whether it is really a cloak to hide its opposite. In any case,

which feelings are to be regarded as significant?   The cafe-k6eper

of Santa Monica proudly asserts his "we-feeling" with the film stars
of Hollywood; the widow who keeps a grocery store in an isolated

village of the Auvergne gives vent to uncontrollable hostility toward
her rival at the other end-of the street, then goes on to discuss the
solidarity of the small shop-keepers of France: "Nous, les petits

9

comer9ants . . . ". How then can one recognize the presence of that
solidarity which is, we are told, an essential characteristic of the
closed coumuity?

The word "solidarity' presents difficulties.  In current usage it
mgeans "sticking together."  For MacIver it is a feeling which causes
members of a group to stick together.  It was used by Dareckheim (12)
in the classical French sense of mutual dependency, a meaning closer
to its legal sense than in English, and he divided it into ties based

upon similarity, "la solidarit mecaani    " and ties based upon cooper-
ation, "la solidarit  orniue."     (The words mechanical and organic
are used in almost diametrically the opposite sense to that which,

six years earlier, Tonnies had given them.)  Dnrckheim was only con-

cerned with instances where it could be safely assumed that similarity
or cooperation did in themselves constitute ties, for he was writing
about the effects of the specialization of function in socie-ty. Yet,
though usages differ in detail they are all in a sense attempts to
answer the question: what keeps a group of people together?

I believe that the studies of segmentary political systems in

primitive society enable us to see with more clarity what is the soc-
lological nature of solidarity. It is not a quality which a group

possesses through the characteristics of its individual members, by
means of which they might be classified, but one which it possesses

only in a dynamic social situation, in response to a specific stimu-
lus  It might be expressed as a logical connection, in "pure soci-
ology," by pointing out that two persons (or social elements) while
they are alone or conceptually alone cannot possess it. They can

only acquire it, i.e., form a group, in relation to a third element
which is excluded. The segmentary system is constructed upon this
truth. Each segment at whatever level in the system it may occur,

possesses solidarity only in relation to other segments at the same

level, so that it is possible to break down the concept of solidarity
into two elements:

(a) Identification of members of the internal group through a
comon allegiance.

(b) Differentiation from non-members in response to an external
stimulus.

The feelings between individuals, hostile or solidary, at any
given moment will depend upon their relation to the other elements

involved and upon the categories which are relevant to the situation.
There is however one important observation to be made and that is

that whereas in primitive society the categories upon which grouping
is based appear to be in the main categories determined by nature, '
i.e., sex, kinship, descent age and so forth, in the open society
they are mainly dependent upon the will or the wealth of the indiv-

idual.  It those co muities within communities which are represented
by the smal1 towns of Southern Europe place of birth provides the

category which is the basis of much solidarity.  The local group is
in every sense a corporate-gr    .  ever-the-las it is not the only

10

group which is liable to show solidarity when the occasion demands.
The conflicts of the wider society find their reflection in the

local comunity where, needless to say, they tend to take on a quite
different significance in accordance with local interests and the

local balance of power. It seems to me therefore that the solidar-
ity which the closed community exhibits is not a necessary nor even
a useful term of its definition but only a characteristic which,

given its structure, it manifests under certain circumstances. It

possesses solidarity in Southern Europe in relation to other similar
local communities but it is interesting to observe that this is not
the case, in general, with Northern Europe. The reason is not far

to seek. In Latin countries the local group includes both the town
where the people live and the territory where they work which is

administered by the town and regarded as belonging to it, as part
of it. In England, on the other hand, the country is not part of
the town at all but rather is juxtaposed to it within the local

structure, hence the distinction between Borough and Rural District
in English administrative law, between rural and urban interests in

English political history, the concept of the middle class (the word

*bourgeoisie" is meaningless in its literal sense in Southern Europe),
the absence of what Redfield calls "nucleation" (13) and consequently
the absence of the possibility of exhibiting solidarity as an exclu-
sive local community.

It seems to me that a better criterion to adopt is cultural
homogeneity and within that I include common values. For common
values are necessary to any form of collaboration and where rela-

tionships are mamy-sided it follows that the whole value system must
be shared. Howrever this does not imply equality (MacIver stresses

the egalitarian nature of community relations) but only common accept-
ance of the inequalities which exist. Within a homogeneous culture,

the inequalities of status did not prevent the local community of the
Middle Ages from being a closed comnity, while today equality in

relation to the law does not suffice to bring the weekending business-
man into the closed community of the English village even though he

way run a farm there (for income-tax purposes), and his wife may give
a Christmas party for the school children0   He belongs to another

world and he speaks, culturally. another language. For the same rea-
son the Andalusian gypsy is differentiated from the community in

which he lives for he is known to have his own customs (and literally
his own language) and he is known not to accept the sanctions of the
COmmunity's opinion. "We Castillank" or "We Christians" people say
in order to distinguish themselves from those who are gypsies.

To sum up, the closed community can be defined as the group
having two necessary conditions:

(1) Members who have habitual personal contact and this implies living
in. the same place.

(2) Homogeneity of culture and values. It follows that people who

have habitual personal contact must elther conform to the customs of
the majority or must mark themselves out from the community by not

11

conforming so that this is a point which quickly becomes evident to
an observer.  Putting it more succinctly, close habitual contact
imposes the alternatives of conformity or differentiation.

Given these two, the other characteristics of community which

have been discussed can be seen to derive from them: the solidarity,
the feelings, the egalitarian tendencies, the distinctiveness, the
conscious mutual dependency and, within a subsistence economy, the
self-sufficiency.  Outside a subsistence economy one can observe

other closed groups who are not self-sufficient but who possess more
or less the two terms of our definitien and most of the character-
istics; communities of fishermen, railwaymen or thieves.

I have discussed the closed community so far as an abstract
concept, referring to examples only in order to make my meaning

clear. But there is, as Redfield points out, a progression of com-
munities which are more or less closed according to their size and

the amount of contact which they have with the outside world. More-
over this progression has been frequently illustrated as a progres-

sion in time, leading historically from the closed to the less closed,
from the smaller to the larger. Bertrand Russell comments of -

Aristotle's ideal E?ggQg which was both State and Community, that it
was already obsolete in the writer's lifetime because the polis was
required by Aristotle's specification to be large enough to defend

itself against invasion, and this it could not do against Macedonia

(14)o  The present age sees a similar progression developing all over
the world. Societies which were formerly autonomous cease to be so.

Communities which were isolated become incorporated within larger com-
munities. The closed communities of Southern Europe are rapidly

changing. The small towns of the Sierra de Cadiz, though they are
still well defined corporate groups, no longer exhibit hostility

towards one another as they once did (15). This is general not only
throughout Spain but also in France. About one hundred years ago

the small towns of Vayrac and Betaille in the valley of the Dordogne
fought each other with such violence that the military were called

out to intervene, yet today that hostility has almost vanished. They
are no longer corporate groups in any sense other than in municipal

administration.  The environment is changing and the closed community
is opening up.

I propose therefore to take a brief look at these changes in

order to see how they affect the terms of my definition. They seem
to be technological, econotic and political.  Explicitly, they are

changes in the means and cost of transport and communication, result-
ing in more effective communication, more knowledge of the outside

world and more knowledge, or the possibility of more knowledge of the

local community by the outside world; change in the methods of produc-
tion, greater specialization and increase in the size of the productive
unit.  In a word, powered transport in the place of animal and the

factory in place of the craftsman. and accompanying these changes goes
the change in the rural community from subsistence f4rming to money

12

crops. Simultaneously with the development of industrial cities
which is implied in this, goes the development of the State, in
terms of the numbers of its employees and the functions which it

fulfills; also the degree to which, thanks to improved communica-
tions it is able to centralize its activities.

These changes result in: (a) a widened and less well defined
group of persons in habitual personal contact. Members of the com-
munity travel more and maintain relations far outside both for
business and also for holidays. On the other hand an increased

number of people come into the community. The artisan in the small
commity is replaced by the specialist in the larger town serving
a whole number of small communities. With this go changes in demo-
graphic structure, very noticeable in many areas.. While the larger
agglomerations have increased in size the smaller ones have been

depopulated, to the point that in several areas of southern France
they have been abandoned altogether.

(b) The historical depth of the transformation of the culture of the
local community from a homogeneous whole to a mixture of elements,
culturally distinct, can be seen most clearly where the indigenous
language is not that of the state, and this is the case in the

southern half of France. There was never, it should be pointed out,
an inherent reason for regarding the Langue d90e as inferior to the
Langue d'Oil, for the former was the language of the great literary
renaissance of the twelfth century. (The troubadours came mostl
from the part of France upon which these observations are based.)

But France was governed from the North and in French so that the use
of the language serves as a measure of the penetration of the State
and the culture of the governing elements into the local community.

At one time only government and the law were conducted in French and
only persons of standing knew it. Today only agriculture is conduc-
ted in patois and only those who have to deal with peasants know it.
Only the old-fashioned peasants speak it to their children. Those
who speak it feel inferior for doing so. Unaware of the nobility
of their linguistic heritage they explain that they speak badly

because they are rough. The significant groupings all spread across
the frontiers of the Comunes dividing them into factions which are
no longer, like the factions of a segmentary system, in rivalry for

the attainment of accepted goals. but rather are split by the diver-
sity of their values and their culture; Church faction against

laiolex, traditionalists against modernists, patois-speakers against
non-patois-speakers, that is to say farmers against non-farmers,

young against old. The social structure has changed and the closed
community is coming to an end and with it the distinctiveness of its
culture. The national culture takes its place.

These changes, roughly outlined as they have been, appear to be
going on all over Europe whether the peasants have a patois or not,
for a common language disguises but does not obliterate profound
differences between peasant and urban culture.

13

It is not for the anthropologist to give vent to his own preju-
dices, applauding the increase in freedom for the individual, now
liberated from the closed community and the dead hand of the past,

nor yet to deplore the loss of tradition and the cultural uniformity

which, once he is free to choose, he chooses, but to study while there
yet remain some to be studied, the closed communities of Europe where
lie embedded still the values which gave birth to Western Civiliza-
tion.

14

NOTES

(1) Notably K. Popper: The Open Society and its Enemies, London,

1945. Also Henri Bergson: The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion. London, 1935.

(2)  viz:  Ogburn and Nimkoff: A Handbook of Sociology, London,

1947, p. 269.

(3) Robert Redfield:   The Little Community, Chicago, 1955, p. 1.
(4) Redfield:   op. cit., p. 4.

(5)  The quotations are all from: R. M. MacIver and Charles H.

Page: Society, London, 1949, which has been preferred to an
earlier edition of the work and also to an earlier work by
MacIver, entitled  Community.
(6) Redfield, op. cit., p. 124.

(7)  F. T'onnies: Fundamental Concepts of Sociology, New York, 1940.

Cf. "Sociology is the study of man, not of his bodily nor of
his physical, but of his social nature."

(8)  cf. J. Leif: La Sociologie de Tonnies, Paris, 1946, po 67.

"Les rapports societaires ne concernent que les choses et les
biens considre's d'aprbs leur valeur abstraite et generale:

llargent. .    .  Abstraction et rationalisation constitue bien,
en effet llessence meme de la soci4te."

(9) J. A. Pitt-Rivers: The People of the Sierra, London, 1954.

(10)  Aristotle:  Politics, London, Everyman Library, 1912, p. 210.
(11) viz: Francisque Michel: Histoire des Races Maudites de la

France et de lEspagne, Paris, 1847.

(12)  Emile Durkheim'. "De la Division du Travail Social, Paris, 1902.
(13) Redfield, op. cit, g po 7.

(14) Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Phllosophy, New York,

1945, p. 215.

(15)  Pitt-Rive"s  op. cit.. po 12.

15