Citizen Values and Community Social Work
Item 3: Citizen Values and Community Social Work: Empowering People from Community Experience
1. Introduction
Community social work demands a specific approach to values, to what we mean by being, by happiness, by a decent life. Its aim is precisely to enhance our ability to do through community experience. It is through interaction with others—dialogue, agreement, discussion, joint evaluation, and participation—that we strengthen our capabilities. Our personality is balanced and forged in social interaction with others, and relationship skills do not only serve us to achieve our material goals. They constitute the substrate upon which our life projects, our idea of happiness, and our well-being stand. Various studies show that social relationships, including relationships with family and friends, are usually the most important factor for happiness.
We recognize ourselves in the face of others, and we become persons in the interaction and coexistence with others. In democratic societies, we experience the need to consolidate to defend collective interests, which otherwise cannot be resolved. Therefore, community experience is not just an area in which to develop our personality; it is also a formidable tool to address structural challenges.
2. Culture, Values, and Well-being: Towards Democratic Citizenship
2.1. Components of Culture
Human communities are not so different from each other. Despite a marked predisposition to highlight the differences, anthropologists, studying the diverse cultures developed over time, have found common elements among the various societies. When these components are found in all or almost all cultures, they are called cultural universals.
- a) The existence of a grammatically complex language, a family system, and religious rituals.
- b) The prohibition of incest.
- c) The rules of hygiene.
- d) Art, dance, and body ornamentation.
- e) Games.
- f) Gifts.
- g) Systems of production and distribution of goods and services.
(Typology proposed by Murdock)
2.2. Culture and Values: Is it Possible to Overcome the Debate Between Optimism, Cultural Relativism, and Materialism?
Historical Optimism and the Idea of Indefinite Progress
During the eighteenth century, in the historical period we call the Enlightenment, several systematic attempts were developed to explain the idea of cultural progress. The different theories usually dominate the variations, so that the differences between one culture and others were explained according to the supposed phases in which they were, within a common upward movement linked to reliance on scientific reasoning and technological progress.
The most radical formulation of this trust is in technological determinism, which posits a progressive sequence of innovation and discoveries that will necessarily end in solving the problems of mankind.
Faith in progress characterized the work of writers as diverse as Auguste Comte, Denis Diderot, and Adam Smith.
Cultural Relativism
Historical particularism, developed by F. Boas and his disciples in the early decades of the twentieth century, opposes the concept of cultural history as an evolutionary process that can differentiate between higher, more evolved cultures and lower, less evolved cultures.
For Boas, each culture has a history and a set of specific features that make it incomparable to any other. Therefore, there cannot be a science of culture that seeks to reach a universal, globalizing knowledge about all cultures. There is no unique process in which all populations are evolving into a superior culture and language. If each culture is unique and has its own history, it is not possible to differentiate between superior and inferior cultures. Each has its own particularity. This theory is called cultural relativism.
Cultural Materialism
Cultural materialism analyzes the differences and similarities in the thinking and behavior of human groups based on the following principle: Causal explanations of such similarities and differences are found in different material limitations to which human experience is subject.
For this, we must study the environment from material constraints to explain diversity. Material constraints of all types, imposed by biology and the environment, create an environment where people fit in very different ways.