Community Spirit And Mental Community

The unique community spirit, mainly as shared memories of ancestor, religiousbeliefs, customs, views about relatives of endogamy, is what the Hui mainly relied on intoday’s multicultural society. It is also the long-term mechanism for maintaining theethnic boundary, enhancing national cohesion and keeping traditional norms. Thecommunity spirit restricts individual behavior with ethics and customs, and builds thegroup atmosphere of neighborhood watch and mutual trust with collective conscienceand spiritual care. The community spirit is also an important source for continuing thecommunity vitality. However, the intrusion of modernity has been gradually weakeningthe community spirit. The developing of city, lifestyle changes, population movements,changing of way of living and transition of values has been dissolving the traditionalcommunity connections. And many hui communities were facing collapse crisis. Thisresearch has selected three communities from the same regional cultural background butBelong to different administrative levels as the inspection object. Through a period offieldwork, this work has researched the historic process of the change of Huicommunity spirit, and the thread of the development of the city Hui community spirit incentral China. This thesis consists of three parts in specific:Part Ⅰ: the introductionand the first chapter reviewed the related researches oncommunity spirit which had done by Chinese and foreign scholars, clarified the conceptof community spirit, developed the6dimensions of community spirit measuring asmaterial base, social network, politics, social practice, value and symbol. All of theseworks is the base of micro analysis of community spirit. In addition, this research hasnoticed the special significance of city Hui community which is different from thegeneral community in cultural customs and ethnicity, and discussed the mainconnotation of Hui community spirit, developed a personality analysis model of Huicommunity, evaluated the district difference of Hui community spirit and the choice offield area.Part Ⅱ: As the main partof this thesis, there are three independent chaptersdescribed the collective spirit status of three chosen city Hui communities. Using thepersonality analysis model of Hui community, research has determined the dominantpersonality in three communities, and deduced the trends of the three communities’spirit in future. Based on the field facts and careful analysis, this research has drew a general conclusion that comparing with the spirit in traditional Hui community, it wasstarted to dissipate in county town, and was ambiguous in a medium-size city, andlopsided in a metropolis.Part Ⅲ: This part is the summary and discussion of the full text, combined with thepreviously, this part discussed the trajectories of change and the final destination ofcommunity spirit, and made a point of that the spiritual community is the continuationof core of the community spirit.