An idea of community and its discontents: towards a more reflexive sense of belonging in multicultural Britain

Abstract The paper poses the question: what are the epistemological consequences of an unreflexive use of the concept of community as the privileged container of cultural difference? The argument is made that contemporary notions of ethnic minority communities as deployed in official and demotic discourse have a complex history which may usefully be traced through classical sociological and anthropological thinking on the idea of community as connoting the premodern and non-Western. This is supplemented by a discussion of the contribution of ideas from these disciplines to contemporary imaginings of ethnic difference in 'multicultural' Britain. Keywords: CommunityEthnicityRaceMigrationBritainClassical SociologySocial Anthropology