Wispy Communities

Abstract

Building on Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” we apply the term to a class of social locations that we term wispy communities. By wispy communities, we refer to social ties that exist within evanescent, limited micro-publics—worlds of action that are temporary, limited in time and space, and have the potential of being displaced by more insistent identities. We divide occasions into events and gatherings, and then divide gatherings into macro-groups (“nations,” such as Woodstock or Burning Man) and micro-groups (“fests,” including focused groups, such as the Lebowski Fest). A wispy community is a distinctive form of local affiliation that underscores both the communal features of occasions and their evanescent quality. In such communities relations are frequently intense, but after their conclusion relations slip into latent memory, available to be retrieved under proper circumstances.

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