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In 2001/02 a number of case study communities in both metropolitan and regional urban locations in Australia were chosen as test sites to develop measures of ‘community

acknowledges in a note on the vicissitude of Mesoamerican peasantries that the disregard of connective networks, networks other than those of the market, turned out to be a major shortcoming of his approach (Wolf 1986:327). He is not the only one to be charged with this neglect, which indeed has a long history in Mesoamerican anthropology. Blom and La Farge had noted another three decades earlier that the groups they had visited during their expedition to Mexico and Guatemala were quite different from those in North America and Africa, where social relationships and shared ideologies formed the basis for solidarity. In Latin America those ties appeared loose and the authors noted skeptically that communities were built on geographical proximity alone (Blom und La Farge 1927:354). Consequently, then-popular kinship-based models to analyze social organization were discarded as inadequate to describe ethnic groups south of the Rio Grande. Sol Tax was the first to address this challenge analytically. He argued that the intra-cultural variation within the Quiché-speaking community is so high that the Quiché could hardly be a unit of ethnographic description, analysis and comparison. Instead, Tax proposed the municipio, the local administrative unit, as an appropriate focus of the ethnographic endeavor (Tax 1937). Redfield followed this line of