One of the best known theoretic contrapositions found today in Sociology, the one between Community and Society (Tönnies), is becoming the subject of a deep reflection, for two main reasons. The first one, in the era of economic and mediatic globalization, is due to the ‘desire for Community’ (Bauman), the Community of belongings, exclusions, identities, and localism. The second one is due to the need to re-create new ethic bonds, shared responsibilities, and democratic participation to solve the ‘common’ problems troubling the World. These are problems from which the ancient system of sovereign states trapped in the grip of imperialistic, ideological or nationalistic hegemonies offers no way out. In this perspective the Community, and first of all the International one, does not represent a nostalgia, but a utopia. It is something not existing, but which has to be built, and that is being built through manifold contributions of theories, analysis, experiences, actions. The ‘fabric’ of the global village, which is today the Hearth, is developing through complicated ‘social wefts’, in which the dramaturgy and narration of the community seem to offer promising processes and results.

In the course of the 1990s, the academic reflection on the communication mediated by the computer has substantially set the theme of sociability and of the relations in the network in terms of community: it is the theme of virtual community, a theme which is strongly marked by a techno-utopic ideology. In the first place, this article covers the history of Internet Studies, in an attempt to identify the detailed rules and guidelines which determined the centrality of the subject of virtual community, indicating among these, in particular, the implicit space metaphor with which the researchers thought about the network in the course of the 1990s. Secondly, it shows how, despite the crisis of the paradigm centered on this metaphor, and despite several attempts, the Community approach has not been entirely abandoned. The virtual community continues to build, often in an implicit way, a model in the light of which we can read – and assess – the forms of social life, and the relations taking life, even through the network, with the risk of not to seizing the specificity and the complexity of new emerging events.

Lebanon has gone across 15 years of civil war, which have redesigned its anthropological, economic and social structure. The country has come out of this dramatic experience divided in tight confessional communities , without ever ritualize the events and the end of the conflict. In 2006, the Israeli attacks, brought to the whole country, but direct to and counter-attacked only by Shiite militants, which ended with the ‘divine victory’ of that part, have re-heightened the inter-confessional political tensions, and highlighted the fragility of the Lebanese Community and the pact of silence which followed the civil war. Through the description of two psycho-social projects conducted in response to the needs emerged during the last war: the Master In Psychosocial Activities In Post-War Societies, and DARI Recreational and Counseling Centre for Families at Baalbeck, the article sets out some possible modality of intervention and highlights the complexities and difficulties of building a community, in a confessionally organized society, who has not yet re-elaborated its mourning.

The social cohesion happens when both citizens and the institutions are committed to the construction of a community based on justice, solidarity, inclusion and on equal opportunities. Its ideal dimension is the local one, where a greater interaction between Government and Civil Society is possible. The text describes the theoretical bases, actions and results of an education program which is meant to promote it in Bogotá (Colombia), by the diffusion of the culture of cohabitation, which enhances the sense of responsibility, of pacific solution of conflicts and of respect for life, rules and public spaces. The structural changes were backed by playful and creative street shows, to encourage positive values and behavior by strengthening the individual and social disapproval. They demonstrated that the artistic experimentation may be used instead of humiliations and punishments to influence daily actions and contribute to the development of public spirit.

The Bonecos de Santo Aleixo are small puppets, made of wood, wire and cloth, and represent an exemplary case of conservation, restoration and production of a specific genre of Portuguese popular theatre. This is a very important cultural heritage in the Alentejo region, in the South of Portugal, destined to disappear as a result of the crisis in the context of the community that those puppets had generated. Then began a path leading to the recovery of this tradition in which professional actors learned the repertoire, texts were published, research projects were started at the University. A first step to go back to the traces of their identity, through the current memory of the show.

The flows of symbolic material circulating on the cultural horizon of contemporary Great Britain are shaped as constant and continuous exchanges that go beyond the borders of the nation state. The role of mass media is crucial in the definition of the relationship between local and global dimension and contributes to the construction of individual experiences. The study of Popular Music production and consumption habits allows us to draw a map of the routes of such translocal flows. This article looks into the flow of sounds that characterize the experience of Muslim BrAsian youth in post-7/7 Great Britain. What is the role of music, and in particular of rap music, in the experiences of young Muslim of Asian background living in the suburbs of the former capital of the Colonial Empire? What are the poetics defining the paradigms of production and consumption of a contested music genre such as Islamic conscious rap? What kind of politics does it put forward? This article tries to listen to a syncretic and transdiasporic form of communication and cultural representation such as Islamic conscious rap, analyzing the new BrAsian identities characterizing post-colonial Great Britain.

From the second half of the century, the history of theatre in Italy has been built around the concept of Theater as a public service. Through the foundation of the Teatri Stabili, the Italian society has put the focus of attention on the value of theatre as a cultural public service, addressed to the greatest possible number of citizens. This concept was criticized, from the end of the 1960s, by an entire political and social movement, claiming for the possibility of a self-managed culture, as an enhancement not only of fruition of these instruments, but also of production. The 1970s became in this sense the years of the greater experimentation of a new political and social value of theatre. They are the years of theatrical animation, decentralization, basic groups, theatrical cooperatives, group theatre, avant-garde Theatre, and of both aesthetic and ethical communities. The text reconstructs this development trying to highlight the problems which determined the failure of a revolutionary vision of theatre, trying to identify which of its lines survived in the following decades. It also highlights which experiences could be meaningful today, in an historical moment in which it is urgent to think of culture and art as occasions of social cohesion and communitarian reinvention.

The experience of cure and dying today is almost entirely delegated to the medical approach to health. Hospitals are exclusive and dedicated locations, islands in the city. Can the theatre enter them and be vehicle of human and social participation? Is it possible to re-establish an overall dramaturgy of dying? Does the condition of the people who live the disease as patients, nurses or doctors, contain a view of life which interests all of us? The project Cantiere Teatrale San Giovanni Antica Sede originates from a research by the Teatro Sociale e di Comunità which was started in 2006 by Alessandra Rossi Ghiglione and the Teatro Popolare Europeo at the Oncologic Hospital San Giovanni Antica Sede of Turin. The social theatre organized dramas acted by communities, laboratories with patients and hospital operators, readings in the Day Hospital lounge, scenographies, shows, big ritual events open to citizenship and organized by a wide network of people. It’s been an anthropological reflection and a commitment to artistic work for a theatre of the health, at a level of psycho-physical well-being and at a symbolic level of health-gaining for the community and of its civilization.

The community may only be remembered or announced, its immanence can only be archaeological/eschatological. The announcement of the Community, as a relational form exceeding the self-referentiality of the contemporary self and the instrumentality of the exchange logics, and as a recognition of the original relationality of the human being, becomes tangible in some meeting experiences. These experiences contribute to weave a canvas of meanings, of gifts and bonds in which participants take their place, permanently, and which they bring with them as part of their identity. This are not aesthetic-Communities, linked to the glare of contingency and, even if generating emotional intensity, intended to dissolve, leaving everything as it was before. They are, on the contrary, experience-community, which, starting from the (Relational) event, keep a track that they can give back and spread, a track lasting in memory. Memory can be made in the community, or community can be made through memory, as it happens with the narration. Telling is a way to share our experience, creating a ‘us’: a ‘us’ made of time, listening, attention, interest, of giving and receiving, of munus as a gift– the story received – and as an obligation to tell, to witness what we heard to whom that could not be present, because far away in space, but also in time.