Community and Bees
Excerpt # 3 from
Beyond The Numbers: Inadequacies of Creative Placemaking Criteria
A fascinating example of a thriving community is that of a beehive. Honeybees are known to be social insects, and work together in a specific social order with thousands of other bees to create colonies and maintain hives. Within the colony the bees are divided into three different castes which each play a specific role within the hive. The worker bee caste has further divisions of groupings, each with specific jobs. The bees in these groups have individual characteristics and physical traits that enable them to efficiently accomplish their job to ensure the functionality of the overall hive. Each bee is dependent on the other bees and every aspect of the hive works together to serve the larger purpose.
Human examples of communities that are considered thriving are widespread and diverse. There are the obvious examples that have gained the attention of the general public. There are also many examples of communities that are considered to be thriving that go about their daily business without the attention and accolades given by the media. Ultimately, the determination is relative to which set of indicators is being considered.
From a cultural community development perspective, a few of the more prominent examples that have gained attention over the years in the United States include: Austin, San Antonio, Philadelphia and Seattle. There are also smaller communities, groupings and segments of larger cities that have been noticed due to more individualized projects that have added a sense of thriving to their communities. Each of them has a different story with unique attributes.
One of the best examples of a grouping that originally exemplified the concept of ecosystem as community is found within the Native American traditions. Their community is based completely on kinship. Among the North American Indians “kinship is primarily the relation subsisting between two or more persons whose blood is derived from common ancestors through lawful marriage.” Much like the honeybees, they have a system of organizing and dividing the generations into categories and degrees of kinship, therefore developing a very complex system of relationships. However, it is clarified, “These degrees of kinship may be called relationships, and they define more or less clearly the station, rights, and obligations of the several individuals of the kinship group specified. The distinction between relationship and kinship must not be confused, for there are persons who are related but who do not belong to the same kin.”
Both the honeybee hive and the original Native American communities illustrate the principles of the Gemeinschaft, the communal society. Their structure is developed from naturally occurring, original relations that are then built upon in an organic manner to create a fully functioning interdependent ecosystem. In this ecosystem it becomes harder to separate the individual parts apart from the whole due to the relationships between the parts.
Copyright 2013