Community sentiment in Marsascala, Malta

Abstract

Marsaskala has always been a summer resort. This thesis aims at identifying what the residents of this settlement think are the components that produce a community. A community does not have definite boundaries but it is the people themselves through their behaviour that construct such a phenomena. During the last twenty years, Marsaskala has experienced a great inflow of people which has considerably influenced its communal fabric. In order to achieve the desired results, interviews were conducted among 25 residents of different educational background. Moreover, different aspects of the settlement were observed through the eye of a human geographer and a number of photos which relate to communal formation were taken. The findings showed that people associate different issues with communities such as the settlement feast, the sea, band clubs, central areas of a settlement, distance to the church and the location of the church itself amongst other things. Thus, people attach different meanings to communities and moreover the latter can take different forms through space and place. Indeed, nowadays we also refer to imagined communities. Residents still think that the formation of communities take place in nucleated settlements where most of the buildings are concentrated around a central building which most often is the church. Furthermore a critique of the difference between Constructionist and Classical Approaches was emphasized in order to make clearer the historical and theoretical evolution of communities.