Communities often form after moments of great trauma, as a means of preserving cultural memory. Yet, as recent events have all too clearly shown, such communities can tend towards the violence they were established to prevent.

Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist researching science, technology and human rights. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is  an affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge. Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute and a professor of European Intellectual History at New York University. He specialises in concepts that weave together modern understandings of time, the human and the body.

Traditional sociology divides society into Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, society and community. Gesellschaft is associated with modern society and rational self-interest, which weakens the traditional bonds that typify Gemeinschaft. We continue to find ourselves torn between these two currents: a desire for communal belonging and the darker eddies of exclusion that these forms of coming together can entail. Communities, which can serve as a means of preserving collective memory, can just as easily tip over into collective violence. Alexa Hagerty and Stefanos Geroulanos discuss how these tensions can be resolved and whether there’s anything left to recover from the ruins of community.

Alexa Hagerty The concept of community in anthropology has undergone profound transformation. Early theorists like [Émile] Durkheim viewed communities as bounded groups anchored to  specific places, with clear borders and shared customs. This gave way to more nuanced perspectives, particularly through Clifford Geertz’s influential idea of communities as creators and inhabitants of “webs of meaning” – shared symbols and interpretations that give life its coherence. This symbolic approach evolved as scholars began to emphasise how communities are actively lived through shared practices and embodied experiences. Contemporary anthropology explores communities as dynamic and often contested spaces, where questions of power, belonging and exclusion are constantly negotiated. Communities emerge not as stable, harmonious units, but as something much more fluid, emergent and fraught. Your book The Invention of Prehistory ¹ powerfully shows how European powers used the idea of “primitive communities” as a weapon of empire, creating categories of “civilised” and “savage” to justify violence and subjugation. But then there’s this other dimension of community formation that you describe – groups that come together through shared experience, whether that’s the trauma of war or a common cause for advocacy. These are communities formed through mutual recognition and solidarity. I’m struck by how the very concept of community seems caught between these two poles: communities imposed from outside as categories of control and community as a source of resistance and form of belonging. I wonder if we can truly separate these histories or if they are always connected in some way.

1 Geroulanos’ book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence and Our Obsession with Human Origins (2024) traces the idea of prehistory and how it has been used to justify devastating violence across three hundred years. The book excavates the many myths and imaginings of human origin that became the basis and justification of imperialism.

Stefanos Geroulanos Isn’t there always a hope for a collective effervescence? Isn’t it always meaningful to a group from within? The exclusionist quality seems to follow. The rise of mass society around the early 20th century, a sense that society is too de differentiated, indifferent, and that family doesn’t quite offer solace. Meanwhile, knowledge gives us information about others, and we get a sense of who these others are, and who is this “we.” I tend to think that exclusion is axiomatic. Then community becomes something in the other – something “we” can “know” – whether far away, where anthropologists go, or in the fog of the past. So instead of community involving a direct reaction to mass society from within, where you have to build a space of togetherness, it’s saying, “Look, there’s a community.” “We” can locate them in relation to “ourselves” either by pushing them away or back in time, making them different, demanding a better intimacy for ourselves. For there to be some sense of belonging there has to be some sort of inside knowledge, some sort of special character, and that is not necessarily always some hateful gesture. You write about communities of care in the aftermath of violence and there is a way in which that too requires something, a sense of shared experience that cannot quite be conveyed, but which needs to be taken for granted, so that we can coexist with others because it is so difficult or so painful to start every conversation from scratch or communicate something, especially suffering.

AH  Your point about shared experience and suffering reminds me of how communities can emerge from collective trauma, though often in complex and unexpected ways. My research on mass graves has shown me how violence itself can become a perverse form of community-making.² When one group is targeted for violence in a society, it’s as if a line is drawn around them, and suddenly they are made into a politically meaningful and coherent entity, even if they might not have had anything in particular in common before. This is particularly evident in labels like “enemies of the state” or “subversives”, which are applied to enormously diverse groups, collapsing them into a single category. Yet, from that classification, from that forced grouping, genuine forms of solidarity can emerge. One example of this is the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina.³ They came from different backgrounds, but they were united by two crucial experiences: their children had been disappeared by a terrorist state and when they demanded accountability the state dismissed them as locas – “crazy women”. But these communities born of violence are not homogenous, stable units. People can come together for a time in a certain circumstance and then break apart, sometimes in violent ways. This was true even of the mothers of the disappeared who, in coming together, were an incredible political force, but ultimately split into factions.

2 In Still Life With Bones: Field Notes on Forensics and Loss (2023), Hagerty gives her account of working alongside forensic anthropologists in their investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in both Guatemala and Argentina. The survivors’ search for justice relies on the recovered remains of some of the 200,000 killed in Guatemala and the 30,000 disappeared in Argentina – each bone inscribed with meaning, serving as evidence of a person‘s life and death.

3 Over 30,000 people were disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1974-1983. The mothers of the disappeared became known as Madres de Plaza de Mayo for their demonstrations in the public square facing the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. Hundreds gathered weekly in defiance of the law against mass assemblies, walking in pairs around the square. Several of the founding women were subsequently disappeared themselves, murdered for their perceived political subversiveness.

SG  I lit up a little bit when you said “for a time” because time is so important in this scenario. In the aftermath of violence, for example, for a community to emerge, a certain feeling of time needs to be shared. Society involves such fragmentation and conflict over the kind of time in which we live. We usually don’t sense most of these temporalities – legal time, economic and consumption rhythms, our own occupational temporalities, metabolism, speed of information and communication and transport, and so on. But in moments of crisis the difference between these becomes really pronounced, a real conflict in the everyday. I suppose communities sense a shared time that needs to be regulated and which gets separated from those who don’t find themselves determined by the same events. That’s what comes to distinguish particular groups. It’s not simply a vague sense of belonging; it’s a sense of existing in the same temporal structure as your comrades, sharing origins, sharing a future. There are particular ways of weaving the narratives that put us together. In The Invention of Prehistory, I was fascinated by the way in which ideas that were once rejected as scientifically plainly false would then be recovered by an alternative group, and that group would generate a kind of community specifically around that idea and create a kind of co-belonging. I write a bit about how “Fortress Europe” dates to beliefs about “indigenous” Germans and panics over primitive “Asiatic hordes”. The best example of this was “African Genesis”¹, which begins as a very colonial idea, out of Germany, England, and separately, out of South Africa. It is about the creation of an us-moderns-versus-them-the-primitives scenario. We the moderns and they, who are so close to what we were, just a little bit different than they would have been long ago. Then “African Genesis” gets taken up by Pan-Africanist thinkers who say these people may be horrible, but they have provided us with a tool for saying we are the origin of civilisation. A hostile idea once usurped helps create a co-belonging that would refuse “those who would attack us”. These modes of reappropriation then help create great cosmologies that are needed for a shared time. Something that expands massively outward to a history of everything helps create a community’s own “time”.

1 While the idea that humanity emerged in Africa was often used to distinguish the supposed European and South African superiority over Black Africa, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop pointedly advanced the same idea to argue for the originality and authenticity of African culture, and to present other cultures as derivative.

AH These shared temporalities and modes of reappropriation help us think about the porosity and stickiness that we’re seeing with social movements, like what happened with vaccine resistance and other forms of medical scepticism during the pandemic. Groups that initially appeared to have quite different beliefs and agendas – from wellness influencers to alternative-medicine advocates to political libertarians – gradually cohered into communities sharing not just positions on vaccination but wider worldviews.² The role of crisis is important in this – a shared perception that we’re living in a moment of unprecedented emergency appears to override previous differences and create new forms of belonging.

SG There’s a lot about the last 15 years that has to do with this obsession with crisis. The Obama election involved this whole rhetoric of hope, a dream of the future – but it died on arrival thanks to the financial crisis of 2008. In Europe, you have similar crises all the way from 2009 to 2015 with the debt crises in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, which hit different social groups so differently. At the tail end of that period you also have the refugee crisis. So all of these feelings of proximity, care for those who suffer with you, and separation are then replicated both onto a belief that one should care and a sense that one no longer knows what one’s group is. You get a clear sense of this from the refugee crisis in Lesbos for example, this shift from “We must take care of Syrian refugees” to a sense of exhaustion and embattledness. That’s of course also the period of Brexit, the rise of the far right in Germany and Hungary, and the spread of the “great replacement” theory. By the time you get to Covid, there’s already been a massive social fragmentation, which is then radicalised by lockdown – but also new communities form out of all that, with fury too as a motivating factor.

AH That evolution from crisis response to hardened community boundaries is crucial to understand. In crisis, there are often beautiful moments of spontaneous solidarity – we’ve seen that recently with the LA fires – but that solidarity can calcify into something more rigid and exclusionary over time. In the first moments of war, natural disaster or economic crisis, there’s often the perception that everyone is being affected in the same way. Of course, that’s not true – people have very different levels of vulnerability. If we could see it in a time-lapse animation we’d watch that initial wave fragment. Some people have resources to rebuild quickly, others remain underwater for years.

2 Primarily founded in 2020 to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19, the self-published, monthly paper The Light has since been criticised for Holocaust denial, climate-change denial, conspiratorial claims about world leaders, and regularly publishing far-right ideologies. The paper relies on private groups on social media, as well as on-the-ground volunteers, to distribute copies in public spaces.

SG I love your idea of a time-lapse animation, a way for us to slow down and understand shared belief in loss. I’m curious about what you’re seeing in the work that you’re doing around AI and ethics. What happens at this point in terms of community? What is your sense in terms of shared realities now?

AH Your question about shared realities is particularly timely. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the concept of “community” gets deployed – both online and offline – as a kind of solution to social problems. Take Meta’s recent announcement about replacing fact-checkers with “Community Notes”.³ There’s something deeply cynical about how community is being invoked here – as if it’s this natural, democratic force that can regulate itself. It reflects this persistent belief, this myth of community, that if we just let people organise themselves, they’ll naturally create harmonious, egalitarian spaces. But communities have always been sites of power struggles and exclusion, as much as of solidarity and belonging. Online spaces are engineered for division – it’s built into their business model. The algorithms that drive engagement through controversy and conflict aren’t a bug, they’re a feature. Yet by wrapping their policies in the language of “community”, tech companies can present their abdication of responsibility as a form of democratic empowerment. If you stopped someone on the street and asked, “Do you want more community?”, who wouldn’t say yes? It’s such an appealing concept. But that’s precisely what makes it so useful as a rhetorical shield. This dynamic isn’t unique to tech companies. As your work on prehistory shows, appeals to “natural” or “primitive” community have long been used to justify various forms of social control. What’s new is how algorithmic systems automate and obscure this process. These platforms create invisible divisions – putting users into ideological silos, while marketing the illusion of a single, unified “community”. When Meta talks about letting the “community” decide what’s true, they’re not creating space for genuine collective deliberation – they’re concealing how their algorithms actively fragment and polarise the very communities they claim to empower. The technology creates these divisions at unprecedented scale and speed, while making the mechanisms of division nearly impossible to see or resist.

3 Community Notes is a feature on X that aims to empower users to “collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts”. Formerly known as Birdwatch on Twitter, the tool was introduced in 2021 in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol attack and was not intended to replace the content-moderation team. The tool follows a complicated algorithm that requires notes to be rated by a diverse range of users before they are made public.

SG I don’t think that corporations and the far right are the only ones at fault for this. In a way, the Democrats have abused “community” in the US. You might say something similar around the failure of social-democratic governments – from Labour in the UK to Germany’s Social Democratic Party – to establish new relationships between society and the state, or the public and government as a functioning impartial enabler. Obama’s 2008 campaign was very much an argument about a national community, rooted in his having been a community organiser, and bringing people who are authentically together into having a hope in democracy. But then there was a thinning out or desiccation of that dream. At the end of his presidency he was dreaming aloud of a career in venture capital. Kamala Harris lost after insisting that “we’re in this together” and “I got you and you got me”. This was the full-on craterisation or sloganeering of community, precisely at a moment where the right was investing – because of real or imagined losses – in nationalism and expulsion.

AH To be provocative: is community dangerous for democracy? My research on mass graves and forensic investigations reveals a profound paradox about community. On one hand, some of the most powerful human rights movements have emerged from communities formed through shared trauma – like the mothers of the disappeared or the widows of genocide victims in Guatemala who transformed their collective grief into political action.¹ These communities can accomplish extraordinary things that individuals alone cannot. But there’s a more ominous side to this process of community formation. In my work at mass graves, I’ve confronted the material reality of how abstract ideas about protecting or purifying a community can manifest as physical violence, as unmitigated horror. So I’m deeply troubled by how easily the language of community can shift from fostering solidarity to enabling violence.

1 Of the estimated 200,000 people killed and 45,000 disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War, over 80% were Indigenous Maya. The military viewed the Indigenous population as siding with the insurgency, and carried out massacres, disappearances and a systematic terror campaign against these civilians, particularly in rural areas.

We can’t assume community automatically means care or that care and violence don’t travel together in strange ways. These formations are deeply context dependent, and power operates through them in ways that resist simple categorisation. I find myself deeply ambivalent about community. I have an almost visceral reaction that community is dangerous, but I also have to confess that there is something magnetic, even seductive, about its promise. It touches on a yearning for forms of belonging that go beyond the individual atom, beyond the heteronormative family, beyond the productive worker, beyond the segmented consumer, beyond the citizen of the state – it speaks to something profound. Part of me still wants to find a redemptive narrative here. Perhaps we’re trying to make one word do too much work. When we say “community”, what do we actually mean? Groups of people? Shared values? A form of belonging? Maybe what we need is a more nuanced vocabulary – one that can capture both the generative and destructive potentials that exist whenever people come together. The challenge is how to nurture the positive aspects of community – the mutual aid, the shared care – while remaining vigilant about its capacity to turn toward aggression or exclusion. Our language seems to trap us in these binaries of inclusion-exclusion, care-violence.

SG Language is perhaps a bigger problem in thinking about the inside-outside of communities. It plays all these sorts of tricks in separating or bringing people together. Everyday language creates all these repetitions, things that people just say, which are not really meaningful on their own, but which at times cross between different groups, and at other times are specifically community building, essential to sharing something and also essential because they can impose or cascade on outsiders. That seemed really important to me in the prehistory book with phrases like “the savage between the thin veneer of civilisation” or the use of words like “Neanderthal”.² Because very often it’s the things that we say jovially and that we wouldn’t really stake anything on – a joke, a little reference to a proverb – that suddenly allow speaker and audience to “understand each other”. That’s a kind of uniting structure, a kind of language trick that participates in designing togetherness and in improving a group’s appeal to outsiders.

2 As Geroulanos writes: “Pliable, unsettling, endlessly recyclable, Neanderthals offer the most startling of mirrors – an image of what ‘we’ might have been and yet are not. Even today, as we learn more about their way of life, as our scientific methods improve, what they mean is still decided in advance by the concepts and biases they are made to embody.”

AH What I find most unsettling in your analysis is how the very tools we use to create belonging – shared references, inside jokes, common understanding – are also bound up with processes of differentiation and exclusion. Our everyday language is saturated with historical patterns of thinking. I’ve seen this dynamic at work in forensic science, particularly in methods like “ancestry estimation” from skeletal remains. Even though the field has largely replaced explicit language of “race”, the underlying categories reflect violent histories of colonial classification. These methods may be used to identify victims of state terror and genocide, but in doing so they subtly reinforce the very forms of classification and hierarchy that enable violence in the first place.

SG What you said about potentials, though, has another possibility. I am thinking of the hibakusha ³ [survivors of the 1945 atomic bombs] now that [nuclear-weapon abolitionist group] Nihon Hidankyo has received the Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a very clear sense that this is a sensitive group with a limited lifespan and the entire process of Nihon Hidankyo has been to pursue the permanent end of nuclear threats, to gather witness testimony so that certain lessons remain; this is what the Nobel Peace Prize praised. This is a community born of the greatest of destructions, a kind of memory that ends up surviving beyond the lifetimes of the people who constituted the original group. So what happens at that point, once a community breaks?

3 Hibakusha is a Japanese term to designate the victims of nuclear disaster, including the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the later accident at Fukushima. Certain hibakusha are allocated legal status by the Japanese government, and are entitled to access medical and financial allowances. Around 650,000 people have been recognised as hibakusha by the Japanese government. Nihon Hidankyo lobbies for improved support of hibakusha and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

AH I’m increasingly unsure if we truly learn anything from violence. The hibakusha have done everything possible to make their testimony permanent – documenting, preserving, teaching – and their Nobel Peace Prize recognises this monumental effort to transmit truth across generations. Yet we still live under nuclear threat. There’s this devastating possibility that each generation has to learn these lessons anew, through its own catastrophes. Except that that’s not learning, is it? That’s just repetition.

SG And the shocking way in which groups that conceive of themselves as communities are fully capable of playing out exactly the same logic that they were ostensibly formed to avoid or to repair.

AH  It’s deeply disconcerting. Part of what enables this contradiction is how communities create and sustain their own narratives, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This connects to your point about “shared reality” again. We’re watching reality become less shared and more fragmented. AI accelerates this process through echo chambers and disinformation, but it’s part of a broader erosion of how societies establish and maintain truth. Historical events that seemed settled are being rewritten. At mass graves, forensic teams meticulously gather evidence, yet we’re entering an era where evidence itself seems to be losing its power. Even physical evidence, like bones, doesn’t seem to offer the certain proof it once did. When deepfakes are indistinguishable from genuine footage, what happens to witness testimony? To shared understanding of what happened and why? Yet still, there’s this magnetic sense that through community we might still learn and we don’t have to continue these patterns of violence. That the desire for belonging can be fulfilled.

SG And in which horror does not need to be inscribed. If there was supposed to be something about all of these fantasies of civilisation, it was precisely that you could end up with some sort of stop to a slide into violence. .