Social Belonging
The Dimensions of Human Involvement
It is necessary to distinguish four different dimensions or states in the involvement of individuals in the context of human relations: territorial location, ecological participation, social belonging, and cultural conformity (Pollini 1990) (Figure 1). Territorial location, as Weber showed in his famous sociological analysis of the medieval European city (Weber 1921) does not involve any form of social relation among the individuals of a population in a particular territorial area. This dimension was subsequently defined by Parsons as one of the three primary relational criteria, with the other two being biological position and temporal location (Parsons 1959, pp. 89–96).
Unlike territorial location, ecological participation involves some sort of reciprocal relationality among the individual members of a human population, whether settled in the same territorial area or not. To use the terminology of human and social ecology in reference to nonsymbolic social relations, recalling Mead's well-known distinction (Mead 1934), ecological participation involves a specific form of interdependence among individuals ("symbiosis") (Park 1936, 1939) that is distinctly different from social interaction (Quinn 1939). For Parsons, the ecological system is "a state of mutually oriented interdependence of a plurality of actors who are not integrated by bonds of solidarity to form a collectivity but who are objects to one another" (1959, p.
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