I am grateful to give my contribution to this publication many reasons. First, this is the country of Lester Ward, the author of Dynamic Sociology (1883), which was the first scientific treatise prior to those by Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim. This is also the country of Albion Small, first director of the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago as well as founder and promoter of The American Journal of Sociology, one of the leading journals in the world about the development of sociology.
This is the land where Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and many other researchers founded and developed the Chicago School and its human ecology approach; and, with a little bit of humor, I would add that it is here that Talcott Parsons gave a crucial impulse to the foundation of a great sociological tradition. As you may know, in his masterpiece The Structure of Social Action, he stated that three European authors—Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber—had been the most important authors of world sociology, and since then, excluding Pareto, they have become our “founding fathers”.
Second, my mentor in the field of sociology, was the late professor Gianni Giannotti, who, in the 1960s and 1970s, was one of the most passionate and rigorous scholars of American sociology in Italy. He improved his knowledge of sociology in the United States, visiting the country several times when he worked on international research projects for the Agnelli Foundation and he became a friend and co-worker of Prof. Norman Birnbaum. I think that, still today, his book Lo Sviluppo della Teoria Sociale negli Stati Uniti, and the earlier work, La Scienza della Cultura, are relevant as introductions to American social thought. Of course, my knowledge cannot be compared to his wide knowledge, but this article was written in memory of the man and his work.
The third reason is this opportunity to bring the theoretical work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and its topicality to your attention. Pasolini’s works include collected papers, films, leading articles, interviews, poems, correspondence, reviews, and theatrical plays. These rich and wide-ranging, as well as intertwined, works deserve an in-depth analysis. Strangely enough, for many and complex reasons, his work has not received due recognition even in Italy, with a few exceptions, but I believe that it will soon become topical again. Although I am truly grateful to Franco Cassano for his relevant and topical book Il Pensiero Meridiano (1996) which raised my curiosity for Pasolini’s thought, I think that he was too quick in stating that “the epistemological secret of Pasolini’s work as a whole” lay in the author’s biography, marked by the experience of feeling guilty about his “innocent” homosexuality. This is an existential oxymoron that Pasolini duplicated again and again in all aspects of his work as non-dialectic contradictions. I do not know if it is possible to take into consideration only one key point in Pasolini’s work, but I believe that his “presentation” of communities and their change is one of note and so it is the theme of my paper.

The Contribution of Albion Small
Let me begin with some lines by Albion W. Small, one of the founding fathers of American sociology, that appeared in the first pages of the first issue of The American Journal of Sociology (1895), as I think  that they may have some methodological relevance: 

... [N]o scholars in the world are more sagacious than those in the United States about the subordination of all special knowledge to larger relations. Nowhere are the representatives of special sciences less restricted by the contents of their particular material. Nowhere are scholars more anxious to generalize their special knowledge by coordinating it with knowledge of other portions or phases of reality. 

Nothing more sharply distinguishes the sociologists, as a class, from the specialists whose fragmentary programs promise nothing conclusive, than the explicit aim of sociology to reach knowledge which shall have a setting for all details of fact about human associations, in a complete view of human associations as a whole. 

No knowledge is trivial that helps to complete the whole system of knowledge, yet untold energies are wasted in the name of science upon minutiae that are morally certain to remain so unrelated to the developing organon of knowledge about society that they are, and will remain, in effect trifles. 

...[T]he aim of science should be to show the meaning of familiar things, not to construct a kingdom for itself in which, if familiar things are admitted, they are obscured under an impenetrable disguise of artificial expression. 

Classical Approaches to the Study of Community
Sociologists know that the concept of community has always been one of the main issues in the sociological tradition. In an interesting and stimulating overview on community studies, Steven Brint (2001) discussed two relevant but different traditions in the history of sociology: the work by Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), and the work by Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In spite of  the influential view of Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), I agree with both Werner Cahnman (1973) and Brint in thinking that deep differences exist between the two approaches, although Brint thinks that Durkheim’s tradition is more important than that of Tönnies, and Cahnman thought just the opposite. On the other hand, I disagree with Brint as to the relevance of Tönnies’ theory and its fortune in sociological research. Stating that “only Durkheim’s disaggregated approach has led to a solid record of scientific accomplishment” and by contrast, stating that “the aggregated approach of Tönnies became bogged down in a conflict of and debunking portraits of communities and has largely failed to yield valuable scientific generalizations” is simply too dichotomous (2001). His prejudicial romanticizing of community against society is an extremely trivial misinterpretation of Tönnies’ seminal work. 
Even in his preface Tönnies rejected any identification with romantic thought. He wrote: 

My opinion has never been the same as that of Romantic authors; before them the past shines, lit up by poetry” (1963). 

As Edward A. Shils has pointed out, early American sociology has deeply been influenced by Tönnies’ important dichotomy between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft); so that, the American sociology is still today influenced by it in its most significant paradigms. (…) After the success of Parsons’ work, Durkheim’s influence on American sociology has been overemphasized; anyway, at the University of Chicago during the twenties, Tönnies was more known than Durkheim, and the circulation of Durkheim’s books among American social scientists of that epoch could be undoubtedly considered negligible (1976). 

The Rules became a must-read classic, for the first time, half a century after it was published.

Platt’s (1995) important study of the American reception of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method ... shows, by a detailed examination of both textbook references and specialist studies, that Durkheim had only a modest presence in early American sociological thought. He was known as a contemporary, but the Rules served mainly as a punching bag for arguments about the importance of the individual. 

It is easy to see that Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft is identical with what Durkheim later styled a group with mechanical solidarity (Cahnman 1973).

Sorokin—to mention only one author for many—is wrong when he asserts that Gemeinschaft is identical with “mechanical solidarity” and that merely the terms are reversed (1973). 

Although this kind of community is more fully realized in the village than elsewhere, one nevertheless can find it also in the city.

Memory is a central, if not the central medium through which identities are constituted. Inquiries into identity and memory are … related.

Communities...have a history—in an important sense are constituted by their past—and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a “community of memory” [italics added], one that does not forget its past.” Olick and Robbins quote an important scholar like Immanuel Wallerstein , that asserts, “The temporal dimension of pastness is central and inherent in the concept of peoplehood.” Zerubavel   analyzes “mnemonic socialization” within “mnemonic communities,” with regard to the way “we acquire personal and social identities.” Memory is the inward tie of community in Tönnies’ conceptual system; hence, the “essential will”, on which community is based, reveals itself as memory (1963: 139-142).  He also writes that memory is a synonym for “association of ideas,” but in my opinion this is a partial definition. What is more topical, in the same part of the chapter, is the fact that Tönnies argues that memory includes and develops from habit. Indeed, Paolo Jedlowski concludes his book Memoria, Esperienza, Modernità (2002: 125-126) by remarking that new research in the sociology of memory focuses on “practices as memory, that is, as forms of permanence of the past within the present of a group.” “These practices,” he explains, “are a system of operational, cognitive, relational habits which constitutes the fabric for continuity of each social group.” 

Pasolini’s Approach to the Study of Community
Of the thousands of pages, let me draw from just a few of the more relevant passages and begin, first, with how the question of community is more than just a local question.  “The peasant universe (which comprises urban sub-proletarian cultures, and just until a few years ago, also the working class as a minority) … is a transnational universe: that does not recognize even nations” (Pasolini 1975: 66).   Currently, half of the world’s population lives in rural settlements. We may therefore assume that, in many cases, the social ties are community-based in villages and towns of a small or medium size.
Second, Pasolini notes that the scale of time is wider than that of civilization and monotheism.  “It is the remainder of a previous society (or of an overlapping of previous societies, all very similar to each other)...” (Pasolini 1975: 66).  It is important to note that all peasant societies are not, in fact, only Catholic.   “There is a continuum among Roman Catholicism, Christianity, Paganism, and primitive religions” (Pasolini 1975: 267).  Community is based on a perception of sacredness, which is different from what Catholic dogma asserts about the divine: nature itself and its elements are “divine.” As Sapelli (2005: 33) asserts, “The current rediscovery of localism is a different matter from the conservation of localism about which Pasolini spoke. Today traditions are invented.” 
Third, we must debunk the myth of a lost paradise (Bauman 2007c) in order to experience and understand community.  “People in this universe did not live a golden age, and they were not even involved, if not formally, with Italietta. They lived what Chilanti called the bread age. That is, they were consumers of extremely essential goods” (Pasolini 1975: 66-67).  The principles of economic organization within community, that Karl Polanyi, influenced by Tönnies, has elaborated, are: reciprocity, redistribution and house -holding . On these bases, the rural population lives frugally and often suffers hunger and inequalities in struggling to secure the actual necessities of life. In this social context, the development of a market society is impossible (Polanyi 1974: 57-72).  In Pasolini’s reflection, according to Cassano, we find an anticipation (maybe the roots) of contemporary Italian culture against an unlimited economic growth (Osti 2006). Rethinking the community ties, without building myths on them, is a possible way to participate in the “new war” that the market fights against the community’s moral economy (Bauman 2007a: 103-107).
Fourth, the identity of community, that is, its pattern, lives first of all within the bodies, behaviors and “things” of its members. Bodies, behaviors, mother-tongues and things have a form that returns, because that form is the “visible side” of the pattern, and pattern is the foundation of community. So the shift of pattern produces the change in the form.
I have said, and I repeat, that acculturation of the “consumer center,” has destroyed the various cultures of the Third World (I mean again on a world scale, therefore, I refer also to cultures of the Third World, to which the Italian peasant cultures are profoundly similar): there is only one single cultural model offered to Italians (as well as to all people of the world, after all). Conforming to such a model takes place first of all in the lived, existential experience of people: therefore, in their bodies and in their behaviours. It is here that values of the new culture of the consumer society are lived, not yet expressed (Pasolini 1975: 67).
The growing power of the consumer model is the subject of Bauman’s narratives of liquid modernity. Bauman quotes, for example, such titles as I Shop Therefore I Know That I Am and The Commercialization of Intimate Life to remind us of the relevant topic of the mcdonaldization of the world (Bauman 2007b: 27-33). 
Adopting an anthropological point of view, Pasolini uses the comprehensive term “culture” to refer to patterns:
The culture of a nation is the sum of all [its] (class) cultures: it is the average of them. Hence, it would be abstract if it were not recognizable–or, rather, visible— in the lived and existential experience, and if it had not consequently a practical dimension (1975: 57).

… culture produces codes… codes produce behaviour … behaviour produces a language (1975: 59).

Pasolini (1972) examines the language of bodies and things in an essay entitled “Res sunt nomina” (Things are words). This is an ontological theme; its sociological interest lies in the possibility of searching the meaning of social life and social change not primarily in the conscience of social actors, or in their conscious interactions. Brint (2001) stresses the key point, “My definition [of community] requires only that these [community] relations be based primarily on affect, loyalty, shared values, or personal involvement with the lives of others.”  I would subscribe to Brint’s definition of community ties except for his use of the conception of “shared values.”  Indeed, the notion of shared values as a sociological topic has too many theoretical implications to be dealt with in the narrow space of my paper.
Why do sociologists often have difficulties in recognizing these processes? Perhaps, because they often have not a real existential experience of community life and do not recognize community force, even inertia. This is not a simplistic standpoint. A profound difference exists between a long, unprejudiced experience and its elaboration within the social dynamics of the community (as Pasolini experienced them) and a formal theoretical model based on indirect or partial involvement in the community. Knowledge as experience (to propose a clumsy translation of Jedlowski’s 1994 work, Il Sapere dell’Esperienza) makes the difference. In the former case (community as a reflexive experience), one may recognize the persistence of community even if it is not a socially dominant form; in the latter (community as a theoretical model), one may not perceive its “presence” and persistence even if its effects are still pervasive. If one takes into consideration what has been stated above, we may understand Pasolini’s point of view regarding the possible limits of the sociological approach. 
I lived in Turin for a dozen days. Turin is that city which, for the sociologists, should be like a “Civitas Dei” for the theologists. As in the perfectly utopian “Civitas Dei” all theological hypotheses are realized, so in Turin all sociological hypotheses regarding, in this particular instance, the “quality of life” of people living and operating in a big neo-capitalist city should be realized (Pasolini 1992: 540-541). 

But something seems to be wrong in the theoretical framework: 

In the real world, everything is infinitely less stiff and adamant than in sociological typologies. There is a point where confusion arises, always. Sociologists have some perfect models on hand. …. but no perfect model is ever carried out perfectly. Sociologists may be too projected into the future, and are very little interested in “survivals”. Such survivals cause confusion. Therefore, there are existential, immediate, concrete data of “behaviour in behaviour”, which are seemingly not “spoken” by sociology (Ibid). 

If we take as conceptual background what Paul Connerton (1989) called “mnemonics of the bodies,” to which we may add the “mnemonics of things,” we may subscribe to what Edward Shils (quoted in Olick and Robbins)  affirms about community persistence, “Traditional patterns of belief and conduct...are very insistent; they will not wholly release their grip on those who would suspend or abolish them.” (1998: 129) Pasolini defined as “survivals” what (several years later) Connerton marked as “memory ‘incorporated’ in bodily practices (as opposed to that ‘inscribed’ in print, encyclopedias, indexes, etc.).” This aspect of social memory “could be termed inertia.” (Ibid) 
As an exemplification of what Pasolini anticipated and Connerton reaffirmed, one might consider the socioeconomic development in southern Italy. To understand the difficulty of such development, one has to take into account the confusion caused by the survival of community patterns, incorporated in bodily practices and emotional ties.
If we assume as Small did that sociology is the science of “societary wholeness,” the relevance of Pasolini to our understanding of the theme of community becomes apparent. 
By adopting literature as a source of sociological knowledge, we may both renovate theoretical concepts and understand social reality in its empirical aspects. That is not a post-modernist argumentation.  Indeed, Lester Ward wrote, back in 1902, about the apparent novelty of what we say as contemporary sociologists: 
I have sometimes thought that more could be extracted from literature than is commonly supposed [italics added]. If sociologists would go about it in some such way…, important results could be attained. If the early literature, like that of Greece and Rome, of India, Egypt, Persia, Syria, and China, could be thoroughly sifted for social facts, the labor, though great, would be well repaid. Such writers did not intentionally inform the world as to the industrial, economic, and social condition of the ages and countries in which they lived and wrote, but on every page occur words that are full of meaning for the sociologist who will carefully weigh them and learn what they imply” (1902: 641) 

I know that our shared vision of the world is based on functionalism; it is marked by an economical and “materialistic” approach to social processes but, without sounding religious, I think that social life is also conditioned by immaterial needs and forces.  The social transformation of community depends on the change of the “cultural-bodily” pattern, and not merely on the size of community or on the process of urbanization. As long as the pattern is stable, a community may grow into a city but its social memory, its identity, remains the same. This last assumption makes clear what Pasolini, in a review of the brief stories of the Italian poet Sandro Penna, strikingly writes about social change in Italy (a country “formed” by hundreds of small/medium towns-communities) during fascism and after the Second World War: 
What a wonderful country Italy was during fascism and soon after it! Life was just as we had known it as children, and for twenty or thirty years it would not change. I don’t mean in its values—the word value is a bit high and ideological to express what I want to say very simply here—but appearances seemed to possess the gift of eternity: one could passionately believe in rebellion or revolution, because that wonderful thing which was the form of life, would not change. One could feel himself a hero of change and novelty because he was encouraged and strengthened by his confidence that the city and its people, in their deepest and finest aspect, would not change: only their economic and cultural condition would rightly improve, but this was nothing compared to the pre-existing truth, which ruled, wonderfully unchangeable, the gestures, glances and body attitudes of a man or a youth [italics added]. The cities ended in broad avenues, surrounded by houses, small villas or working-class buildings with their “dear awful colours”, in the thick countryside: soon beyond the bus or tram terminals there lay stretches of wheat, channels lined by poplars or elders, or those useless wonderful scrubs of robinias and blackberries (1975: 179-180) .

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