Structural Features of an Enacted Community

AN ENACTED COMMUNITY is a phrase of recent coinage.It has been applied to the project of establishing colonies in space.One might say such communities are "enacted" because there are no competing human societies (that we know of) in space.Even the "land" has to be created.An enacted community must be started from scratch, with nothing to build on, so to speak.Although acts of human will are involved these acts do not take place in a vacuum.A cardinal principle of the free-standing communities we are familiar with is that of the division of labor through which the survival of the human population depends.Men and women do not live alone; the illusion of living alone may appear within short runs of time, periods often substantially shorter than the life span.Thus, human community is based on three sociobiological factors: (1) the length of the life span; (2) the propensity to live in geographically delimited social aggregates; and (3) the presence of a system of interdependencies among social units within this aggregate (or population) that defines a survival-oriented division of labor.In addition to the above definition of the community from a sociological perspective, one can also distinguish between two ways in which communities arise: cresive and enacted.One may assert that by and large the enacted community-that is, one created, as it were, out of whole cloth-is a rarity.With regard to the form of a community one may even question (as Konig as put it)," whether in sociology there is really a specific structural 'community' form."