I argue in this article that our understanding of community is enhanced by examining the formation of collective aspirations for a shared future. Using examples from my fieldwork on long-term community recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 in the town of Yamamoto, I illustrate the potential of using the social process of collective aspiring as an analytical tool in theorizing and studying community. Instead of treating community as a particular grouping or identity, I approach the concept of community as a processual analytical frame for understanding various forms of sociality constituted by continuous and mutually constitutive enacting and envisioning within social practices. This practice approach not only overcomes the tensions between the agency, structure, actualization, and abstraction characteristic of conceptualizations of community, but also enables us to explore the significance of the future dimension of social life. The concept of future orientation of collective aspiring allows us to ethnographically grasp the contingent formation of community in the dynamic process of striving toward the desired futures in contrast to anticipation of uncertain futures. To capture the many aspects of this process, aspiring is explored as shared objectives, action-oriented pursuing, and affectively charged yearning. This proposed analytical tool sheds light on ever-evolving forms of sociality not only in their unity and togetherness but particularly in their ambiguities, conflicts, and power relations.

中文翻译：

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渴望的社区：根据社会生活的时间维度重新考虑社区

我在本文中认为，通过审视对共同未来的集体愿望的形成，可以增强我们对社区的理解。我以 2011 年山本镇东日本大地震后长期社区恢复的实地考察为例，说明了使用集体抱负的社会过程作为社区理论和研究的分析工具的潜力。我没有将社区视为一个特定的群体或身份，而是将社区的概念视为一种过程分析框架，用于理解由社会实践中连续且相互构成的制定和设想构成的各种形式的社会性。这种实践方法不仅克服了社区概念化的能动性、结构性、现实性和抽象性特征之间的张力，而且使我们能够探索社会生活未来维度的意义。集体抱负的未来导向概念使我们能够从人种学角度把握社区在争取理想未来的动态过程中的偶然形成，而不是对不确定未来的预期。为了捕捉这一过程的许多方面，我们将抱负视为共同的目标、以行动为导向的追求和充满情感的渴望。这个提出的分析工具不仅揭示了不断发展的社会形式的统一性和团结性，而且特别揭示了它们的模糊性、冲突和权力关系。