Sylvia Rivera
Urban Issues in a Global Context
October 9, 2010
Extra Credit Assignment
Anomic Communities

An anomic community has no/ or does not take advantage of outside linkages, there is no sense of belonging to the community, and there is no tie to people within it. Rather, they are within the community for personal reasons and are independent of the community or people within it and the linkages outside of it.

According to (Kirst-Ashman) “…an anomic neighborhood is dysfunctional and provides little social support. Anomie is a sociological that means “ social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values often involving “personal unrest, alienations, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals. Despite residence geographical proximity, the feeling of being in a neighborhood does not exist. An example of such a neighborhood is a huge urban public housing project. Many residents may feel little identification with other residents yet have nowhere else to go. They may live in fear and the larger community may provide little support.” “Human Behavior Communities Organizations, and Groups in the Marco Social Environment, An Empowerment Approach” Kirst-Ashman, Karen K.: (2nd Edition, 2008) p293

The following is part of an article that details Jakarta, Indonesia is an example of an international Anomic community:
“In Indonesia, the state under Suharto functioned as the patrimonial center of a patron-client network, distributing patronage to clients in return for their political support. Access to resources thus depended significantly upon personalized relationships, extending “from village to palace”, through which clients could hope to “buy” resources in return for their loyalty to individual patrons linked to the various arms and levels of the state, who could then employ this loyalty to advantage in their elite rivalries. The fact that this personalistic and patrimonial system relied upon corruption and nepotism meant that the resultant distribution of resources was never effectively institutionalized, and left various sections of society exploited or marginalized. It thus did not provide a very effective basis for Indonesia’s political integration. Nevertheless, it retained some stability and predictability so long as Suharto’s New Order regime functioned as the focal source of patronage.

The fall of Suharto, the weak governments that followed, and the chaotic implementation of administrative decentralization measures, all contributed to the disruption of patron–client linkages, and thence to increased unpredictability in the contention for resources. Marginalized groups sought new patronage openings from the “fiefdoms” which emerged at various levels of the bureaucracy. When resource deprivations were intensified by Indonesia’s post-1997 economic slump, and when economic disparities were further exacerbated by neo-liberal policies, various groups in Indonesia began to experience downward social mobility and material deprivation. Contention for patronage thus became increasingly predatory, unpredictable and violent. Those patronage networks that had hitherto relied on access to state resources, but now found themselves marginalized or excluded, began to seek new means to access resources. Those who had recourse to egoistic criminality in order to access scarce resources sometimes found it advantageous to organize into ethnic gangs, so as to generate resources through theft, or through “protection racket” violence. Such ethnic gangs were essentially instrumentalist groupings whose shared cultural norms and territorial contiguity facilitated their development as interactive socio-economic networks. Ethnicized violence could thus be seen as a rational response by those suffering material deprivation, where the state had weakened in the sense of failing to provide effective channels of access to patronage resources.

Violence is sometimes depicted as arising from an upsurge of anger or aggression that has its origin, not in material deprivation but in a feeling of powerlessness, alienation or humiliation. Such feelings might in some cases accompany material deprivation, but might arise independently, and are analytically distinct. This can provide a basis for explaining ethnicized violence when the feelings of powerlessness are seen to derive from the type of social conditions denoted by Durkheim as “anomic”—situations in which social dislocation coincides with the development of a dissonance between the moral norms of equal citizenship embodied in public discourse, and the barriers to social mobility embodied in day-to-day experience.”

Brown D, Wilson I. Ethnicized Violence in Indonesia: Where Criminals and Fanatics Meet. Nationalism & Ethnic Politics [serial online]. Fall2007 2007;13(3):367-403. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed October 9, 2010.