Social Animation (promoting community participation or self help) mobilizes and organizes a community. This means that the social organization of the community is changed, however slightly or greatly. The mobilizer or animator, therefore, is a social change agent, or catalyst. Understanding the nature of social change, its social nature, in a community, should be in the mobilizer's tool box. The most important thing to learn was mentioned already, that a social organism such as a community has a life of its own that goes beyond the lives of the residents in it. Those individuals have their own changes while they develop as human individuals. They are born, they get older, they become adults, they marry, they get jobs, some become recognized
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It isn't. It is full offactions, struggles and conflicts, based upon differences in gender, religion, and access to wealth, ethnicity, class, educational level, income, ownership of capital, language and many other factors. In order to promote community participation and development, it is the task of the animator to bring these factions together, encourage tolerance and team spirit, and obtain consensus decisions. For you to promote social change in a community, it is necessary to know how that system operates, and therefore how it will respond to changes, and to your interventions. Just as an engineer (an applied physical scientist) must know how an engine operates, the community facilitator (an applied social scientist) must know how a community operates.
To know how a community operates one must not anthropomorphize (humanize) a community. To "anthropomorphize" means to assume and ascribe human characteristics to a non human thing (e.g. thinking that ducks and bears have "families" when "family" is a human institution). A community does not talk, does not think, can not feel, and does not act like a human being. It is a super organic entity, and therefore moves, responds, grows and behaves through different principles, forces and mechanisms than a human being
It isn't. It is full offactions, struggles and conflicts, based upon differences in gender, religion, and access to wealth, ethnicity, class, educational level, income, ownership of capital, language and many other factors. In order to promote community participation and development, it is the task of the animator to bring these factions together, encourage tolerance and team spirit, and obtain consensus decisions. For you to promote social change in a community, it is necessary to know how that system operates, and therefore how it will respond to changes, and to your interventions. Just as an engineer (an applied physical scientist) must know how an engine operates, the community facilitator (an applied social scientist) must know how a community operates.
To know how a community operates one must not anthropomorphize (humanize) a community. To "anthropomorphize" means to assume and ascribe human characteristics to a non human thing (e.g. thinking that ducks and bears have "families" when "family" is a human institution). A community does not talk, does not think, can not feel, and does not act like a human being. It is a super organic entity, and therefore moves, responds, grows and behaves through different principles, forces and mechanisms than a human being