“Many sociologists since Durkheim and Moss,” writes Baer, “have been have noticed that institutions reveal themselves under the pressure of circumstances, in a situation of crisis. Communities of destiny are arranged differently: they owe their birth to this kind of pressure, establishing a way of life that previously existed only in embryo.”
Communities of destiny are ephemeral, always “essentially local,” symbolically and materially connected, and capable of collective action. There is another important conceptual feature: the rupture of the everyday, the kairos, the moment that divides life into “before” and “after. It is not difficult to see that for Baer, fate is synonymous with threat, emergency, “a challenge to existence. Community, on the other hand, is a form of collective response to this challenge: “Where there is no hope left, resources are exhausted, and all measures seem futile, communities of destiny are impossible. As examples of such communities, Baer cites ravaged settlements, besieged cities, and quarantined territories.
The SARS epidemic of spring 2003 turned Hong Kong into a community of destiny. Baer lists seven conditions for the possibility of such a transformation.
Recognizing a common threat
Residents of Jakarta, the survivors of the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami, also had a few days to realize the impending disaster. Nevertheless, reassured by the authorities, they did not recognize the threat, and the community of destiny was not formed. Hong Kong, however, had a well-developed communications system and a legacy of independent media from the British. After the first cases of SARS and a discreet statement from the authorities, the head of the University of Hong Kong Medical School sounded the alarm, disputing the official explanations. The alarming news spread immediately, from March 19 the media began to regularly publish statistics on deaths, and on March 25 the government was forced to recognize what was happening as an epidemic. The World Health Organization declared Hong Kong and Guangdong quarantine zones, and the city remained isolated until June.
Moral density
This Durkheimian concept does not seem quite appropriate here. The presence of dense social ties, admits Baer, would be much better suited to explain how people who came out of quarantine fell into social isolation (even their relatives were afraid to communicate with them), becoming, in effect, “pariahs among pariahs. But Baer neatly changes the meaning of Durkheim’s concept: “In my definition, moral density merely indicates people’s belief in a destructive community with others, and the phenomenon of emotional contagion, where feelings-in this case feelings of fear and anxiety-permeate collective life.”
Test duration
A single shock is not enough to form a community of destiny. What is needed is a series of events that condense the everyday, that form, as Simmel would say, the “exclave of life. Now every report of new outbreaks of disease, the spread of the epidemic to new areas of the city, and so on, takes on an existential tone.
Insulation
By isolation Baer is referring not only to formal restrictions, but also to the social ostracism to which the inhabitants of Hong Kong were subjected. Forty-three percent of Hong Kongers have relatives abroad. But during the epidemic most of them refused to take in dangerous refugees. Since April, major American universities (UCLA, Berkeley, Rochester, Washington, Cleveland, and so on) have suspended Hong Kong students from attending away schools and graduation ceremonies. Organizers of international exhibitions, forums, and special Olympics in Dublin cross Hong Kong off their lists of participants.
Material and organizational resources that citizen groups can use to resist the threat.
Convergence axes
Here we have in mind the cultural foundations of collective mobilization: common language and group identity. Comparing the Hong Kong epidemic to the Montreal smallpox epidemic (1885), Bair notes: “Like Hong Kong, Montreal was the commercial ‘hub’ of its region. But unlike Hong Kong, the epidemic in Montreal only exacerbated pre-existing tensions. The city was immediately divided along the lines of ethnicity (English and Irish vs. French), religion (Protestants vs. Catholics), language (Anglophones vs. Francophones), and territory (East End vs. West End). Hong Kong, on the other hand, only six years after becoming part of China, had a strong urban identity: 69 percent of residents identified themselves as either “Hong Kong Chinese” or “Hong Kongers” and only 25.7 percent identified themselves as simply “Chinese.
Finally, the last condition is the emergence of special social rituals, mechanisms for maintaining the solidarization of the emerged community of destiny. Among these, Baer singles out one in particular: the wearing of medical masks in public places.
“The community of destiny,” Baer sums up his conceptualization, ” is like a string of pearls; it consists of people bound together by the seven attributes I have mentioned.
(From the article: Vakhshtayn V. С. Community of Destiny: Toward a Military History of Ideas // Sociology of Power. 2019. № 4.)
Source : https://postnauka.ru/longreads/154824
