Communitas

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Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants Neo-Paganism Ritual Angakkuq Babaylan Bobohizan Bomoh Bora Dukun Miko Jhākri Pawang Slametan Wu Revitalization movements Cargo cult Ghost Dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual Poles in mythology Lived religion Elite religion
Major theorists Augustin Calmet Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Joseph Campbell Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Mircea Eliade Arnold van Gennep René Girard E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Fustel de Coulanges Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Steven Ozment Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Edward Burnett Tylor Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
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Social and cultural anthropology
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Communitas is a Latin noun commonly referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community. It also has special significance as a loanword in cultural anthropology and the social sciences. Victor Turner, who defined the anthropological usage of communitas, was interested in the interplay between what he called social 'structure' and 'antistructure'; Liminality and Communitas are both components of antistructure.

Communitas refers to an unstructured state in which all members of a community are equal allowing them to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. This term is used to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. There is more than one distinction between structure and communitas. The most familiar is the difference of secular and sacred. Every social position has something sacred about it. This sacred component is acquired during rites of passages, through the changing of positions. Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position.

Communitas is an acute point of community.^{[further explanation needed]} It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. This brings everyone onto an equal level: even if you are higher in position, you have been lower and you know what that is.

Turner (1969, Pg.132; see also ) distinguishes between:

• existential or spontaneous communitas, the transient personal experience of togetherness; e.g. that which occurs during a counter-culture happening.
• normative communitas, which occurs as communitas is transformed from its existential state to being organized into a permanent social system due to the need for social control.
• ideological communitas, which can be applied to many utopian social models.

Communitas as a concept used by Victor Turner in his study of ritual has been criticized by anthropologists such as John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow's book Contesting the Sacred (1991).

At the heart of Turner’s theory is the notion that communitas involves a connection to the sacred, elicits powerful emotional experiences, and plays a key role in revitalizing social bonds and energies. In this sense, Turner’s work is closely linked to Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Although Turner does not directly reference Durkheim’s seminal work in The Ritual Process, it is clear that Durkheim's ideas on collective effervescence form a fundamental part of Turner’s argument. For instance, Turner states:

Edith Turner, Victor's widow and anthropologist in her own right, published in 2011 a definitive overview of the anthropology of communitas, outlining the concept in relation to the natural history of joy, including the nature of human experience and its narration, festivals, music and sports, work, disaster, the sacred, revolution and nonviolence, nature and spirit, and ritual and rites of passage.

Communitas is also the title of a book published in 1947 by the 20th-century American thinker and writer Paul Goodman and his brother, Percival Goodman. Their book examines three kinds of possible societies: a society centered on consumption, a society centered on artistic and creative pursuits, and a society which maximizes human liberty. The Goodmans emphasize freedom from both coercion by a government or church and from human necessities by providing these free of cost to all citizens who do a couple of years of conscripted labor as young adults.

In 1998, Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito published a book under the name Communitas challenging the traditional understanding of this concept. It was translated in English in 2010 by Timothy Campbell. In this book, Esposito offers a very different interpretation of the concept of communitas based on a thorough etymological analysis of the word: "Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves." He goes on with his "deconstruction" of the concept of communitas:

For more on this perspective, see also Jean-Luc Nancy's paper "The Confronted Community" as well as his book The Inoperative Community. See also Maurice Blanchot's book The Unavowable Community (1983) which is an answer to Jean-Luc Nancy's Inoperative Community. Giorgio Agamben engages in a similar argument about the concept of community in his 1990 book The Coming Community (translated in English by Michael Hardt in 1993). Rémi Astruc, a French scholar, recently proposed in his essay Nous? L'aspiration à la Communauté et les arts (2015), to operate a distinction between Community with a capital C as the longing for communitas and communities (plural and small c) to name the numerous actualizations in human societies. Finally, on the American side, see The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common by Alphonso Lingis. Christian author Alan Hirsch used the term to describe a more active, tighter-knit community in his book "The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church."[1]

• Read the introduction from Roberto Esposito's book Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community : Introduction: Nothing In Common
• Turner, Victor. "Rituals and Communitas." Creative Resistance. 26 Nov. 2005
• Eade & Sallnow, 'Contesting the Sacred' (1991)
• Carse, James P. "The Religious Case Against Belief", Penguin, New York, 2008