Whose Village Is This, Anyway?

Surely, Hillary Rodham Clinton was confident when she titled her book, “It Takes a Village,” that readers would know she was referring to the well-worn proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” They would probably also understand that by “village,” she was conjuring up a shared commitment to promoting everything from psychological bonding between parents and children to quality day care, health insurance and family leave.

But among the many who yearn for community, there is little consensus about what villages are, whether or how to restore them, or even if we ever had them in the first place.

By today’s definitions, a village can be anyplace where everybody knows your name--a pub, a church or a web page. It could be a radio talk show. Or it could be, literally, one of the new small towns designed to foster a sense of community. Clinton’s title recalls a proverb said to have sprung from West Africa.

Some anthropologists contend Americans haven’t experienced any real villages since the Iroquois lived in long houses and automatically shared their food and supplies.

Nevertheless, what most people mean when they envision village life derives from the early Colonists’ English heritage, said sociologist Christine Wright-Isak, who works for advertisers Young & Rubicam in New York. It’s a comforting Currier and Ives image of a close-knit town where mutually supportive neighbors form their own social safety net, she said. “We pull it out when we feel threatened,” she said. “We use it as a reminder of what nonbureaucratic mutual helping can be like.”

Advertisers also use such reassuring images to sell drive-through fried chicken and ranch dressing, she noted.

The idea of a village is enormously appealing now after four decades in which Main Streets, stable neighbors, locally owned hospitals and services have vanished along with a generally accepted notion that youth represent our cultural survival, said UC Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader.

But rather than what she called the “dumbed-down” prescriptions contained in the first lady’s book, “We have to understand how we got this way in order to understand how to get out of it,” she said.

“How we got this way is a certain type of industrialization and a certain type of commercialism that is very destructive to the important units in our society, family and communities.

“Everywhere parents feel powerless. Companies are feeding their kids. Companies are dressing their kids, telling kids what shape their bodies should be. We’ve got to advocate for a kind of civilization that has more than commercial values,” she said.

Obviously, people who live in villages also can be oppressively interested in other villagers’ personal business. As enamored as many people are with the Norman Rockwell / Huckleberry Finn / Bill Cosby idea of villages, many also feel the tug of the Lone Ranger /Lew Archer / Bruce Willis tradition of rugged individualism.

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In the 1920s, villages were portrayed as anti-progress and cities were seen as the source of new ideas and sophistication in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street.” Sociologists were elated that people were free to shuck the dullards next door, move to the city and choose friends from a more diverse population. Many people still abhor the cronyism and reactionary nature of some small towns. “There are those who find it threatening and equate it with provincialism, small narrow-mindedness and bigotry,” Wright-Isak said.

Despite flare-ups of small-town fever, community is “not a big sell in American culture at this time,” said West Florida University urbanologist Ray Oldenburg. “That notion that it takes a whole village came from a situation where public life was filled with people you knew. To apply that in a context of society where public life is full of strangers is a far, far different thing.”

For instance, can you really trust the cop who pulls you over? The man who coaches your teenage daughter? Your day-care provider? Your congressional representative? Your minister?

Oldenburg does not believe it is possible to raise children well in a virtual, global village. Rather, he promotes informal, physical gathering places made possible by small towns with locally owned shops.

“The idea is it’s important for you to know who you’re living with. A lot of them you want to avoid. They’re anti-models for children. [Villages] will be restored when people know one another well enough to have a reputation as they used to.”

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Over the past decade, many people have shown interest in new communities deliberately planned to be small and old-fashioned. The highly praised model, Seaside, a Florida resort planned by Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, features cozy Victorian-type homes with picket fences on interconnecting streets. Small stores, offices, restaurants and shops are within walking distance. The designers are currently planning a new community in Playa del Rey.

The villages not only attempt to restore community and public life, but also solve urban sprawl and crime. “If we make smaller entities, things may be more safe,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a UCLA urban planner.

But, she said, “I question the appropriateness of such a model for contemporary cities. A number of people, recent immigrants, say some of these elements are totally foreign to their tastes. They say, ‘Why should we have a picket fence?’ It has a strong appeal to white people. . . .”

While the communities are commercially successful, she said, “As a paradigm, I don’t think it has proven anything. It is just a place where high-income people have second homes.”

But Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the communitarian movement (an informal group of academics dedicated to curbing “radical” individualism through public policies, moral norms and regulatory guidelines), said “It Takes a Village” is just the latest sign that the movement continues to pick up steam.

“We started this notion of community building,” he said. “It caught on like crazy in the U.S. and Europe.” Now, he said, “The Brits are copying us on this issue.”