Communitas

Communitas is a concept developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner in his 1969 book The Ritual Process, describing the intense sense of equality, solidarity and shared togetherness that can arise among people who pass through the liminal, transitional phase of a rite of passage together. Turner built directly on Arnold van Gennep's earlier three-part model of rites of passage, focusing especially on the middle, liminal stage, in which participants have left their previous social status behind but have not yet taken on their new one, and Turner observed that during this stage the ordinary hierarchies and structured social distinctions that normally organize a society, such as rank, wealth or formal social role, are often deliberately suspended or leveled among the participants. In place of that ordinary structure, Turner argued, an alternative mode of social relationship can emerge, communitas, characterized by a direct, egalitarian and intensely felt bond between participants who, for the duration of the liminal period, relate to one another simply as fellow human beings rather than as occupants of ranked social positions. Turner distinguished this liminal communitas from the structured relations of everyday social life that participants return to once the rite of passage concludes and they are formally incorporated into their new status, describing social life more broadly as an ongoing alternation between periods of structure and periods of communitas. The concept has been applied well beyond formal rites of passage to describe similar bonding experiences in pilgrimages, festivals and other collective events.