In social anthropology, a sodality is a non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other), and frequently spanning villages or towns.
One aspect of a sodality is that of a group "representing a certain level of achievement in the society, much like the stages of an undergraduate's progress through college [university]".
[4] The term was first used with this meaning by Elman Service (no doubt drawing on the sodality vs. modality distinction used in some Christian churches), as part of his band-tribe-chiefdom-state model for the progression of political integration.
[5] Arjun Appadurai uses the concept of sodalities to describe what he views as the collective, cultural dimension and function of the imagination given the globalization of electronic mass media and transnational migration.
For Appadurai, sodalities, much like what he terms "localities" or "neighborhoods", are cultural groups or spaces that mediate globalized cultural flows and, importantly, create possibilities for "translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine" (p. 8).