World History I

Community: general discussion
Varieties of data representation

3: Wed, Sep 10, 2025

Please read the discussion of the individual and community. We will go over it in class.

Aristotle argued that human beings are political (by which he meant something like social) animals. We do not fare well, normally, as solitary creatures, and certainly human children require a suprisingly long time to become self-sufficient. In every society and culture, there have been different patterns of human association one with another and many different purposes for those associations — political, urban, social, religious, commercial, and so on — and often these different kinds of communities interact with one another in interesting and sometimes unpredictable ways.

We will begin to discuss how these things are related one to another. In the course of the year, we will also consider how they affect other aspects of civilization. How do communities of producers and consumers, for example, change the ways in which resources are created, distributed, and used? How do religious associations interact with political ones or with each other? The complexities of this dimension of human history continue to multiply as we find more and different ways of associating, but from the very beginning it was an important element of our collective natures.

For today, consider the following questions to lay the groundwork for our analysis of communities:

• What kinds of communities are there?
• How do types of communities differ in size?
• How do types of communities reveal the nature of the relationships that hold them together?
• How do the roles of individuals in each type of community differ?
• How might the same roles different in similar communities in different locations or periods?
• How do you as an individual identify with different communities?

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