Sustaining Growth: The Significance of the Community in the Selected Works of Milton Murayama, Marie Hara, and Sylvia Watanabe

Abstract

The definition of community, according to Webster's Tenth Collegiate Dictionary, is, first, "a unified body of individuals" and, second a, "people with common interests sharing living in a particular area" (233). These two interpretations of community have been explored by many sociologists, beginning with German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies (1855-1936), whose concepts "have become an established part of sociology's terminology" (Maciones 606). Toennies used the term Gemeinschaft, a German word that can roughly be translated into the English word community, to refer to a social organization in which people are bound closely together by strong ties of tradition and kinship. Rural villagers especially, Toennies believed, sustain enduring ties of friendship, kinship, brotherhood and neighborhood. In essence, Gemeinschaft describes any social setting in which people form what amounts to a single communal primary group (606). According to sociologist George Mead, what goes into the creation of the individual self in a community are the overall attitudes common to the group. When a person assimilates the beliefs of that community into his or her own conduct, that person becomes a personality. The structure of the self is built in response to the stimuli that are common to all; therefore, a person has to be a member of a community to be a self, an individual. The community, then, constitutes a person's character and gives that person the principles and the acknowledged attitudes of that community (Mead 53-54)