ViGiLO - Din l-Art Ħelwa
ISSUE 54 • NOVEMBER 2020
27
IDEAS, IDEALS, REALITIES Community and heritage in Bormla
By Patricia Camilleri
A sense of place is understandably common amongst those who have grown up in a community. Some families will have lived in a particular town or village for generations. While conducting some research in Bormla – or Cospicua – a town of 5,000 inhabitants in the Southern Harbour area of Malta, I listened to various community ‘voices’. My conclusion was that their attachment to Bormla ran so deep that it demanded an explanation that was not going to be uncovered through simplistic declarations of familial connections.
C
ommunity is a word that we frequently hear with reference to race, religion and place. We talk about community diasporas as well as closed communities. However diverse, local or global these groups are, they share communalities which are important enough to allow the individual a place within that group. We can, of course, be part of more than one group, possibly several. Our adherence to a group can vary between superficial and visceral whilst extricating oneself from a community or joining a new one can be complicated. Shared information and the passing on of skills and techniques through traditions, rituals and stories has always been the strength on which communities relied and survived. Cultures tend to create mythic, significant narratives, of which Malta has many, which are told and retold and provide a handle to grasp onto in a changing world. To use a much-quoted phrase in museology, these are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They are not supposed to represent the truth but that does not mean that they cannot denote authenticity. A well functioning community also knows that those myths have to be flexible for the group to survive and flourish.
Over the centuries, perceptions of community have changed – from the Greek city state, to a concept subservient to ‘society’ and, later, the ‘nation’. More recently, sociologists have defined adherence to a community as a search for identity and belonging and, with the arrival of advanced communication technology, communities have accessed a global arena as never before. Strangely, however, the more global our world has become, the more the ‘local’ has taken on new significance amongst urban, suburban and rural communities. It is as though they sense that the global may see them integrated, nolens volens, into a vast group that might not appreciate the things that are meaningful to them. Communities provide markers of memory, both to the physical and to the ephemeral. They contain layers of recollection that are laid at different stages of an individual’s life and that of the group as a whole. In this way, a palimpsest of history is created and these various ‘histories’ are recalled through community initiatives today. They take on myriad forms and express past events and traditions, be they of old or more recent origin. However, these events would not take place unless there were a need to do so, a feeling that members of the community
