Communitas

Communitas is Victor Turner's term for the intense, unstructured and egalitarian bond that arises among people who are together outside the ordinary social structure. He developed it in The Ritual Process (1969) as the companion to liminality: in the middle phase of a rite of passage, when initiates have been stripped of their former status and have not yet acquired a new one, they are levelled, anonymous and equal, and what emerges among them is not the ordinary web of roles and rankings but a direct and unmediated fellowship.

Turner set communitas against structure and treated the two as alternating and mutually necessary rather than simply opposed. Society cannot run on communitas, which is transient by nature and dissolves the moment it is organised; but structure without it becomes rigid and generates precisely the pressure that produces it.

He classified three kinds. Spontaneous or existential communitas is the immediate happening, what arises unplanned among strangers in a shared crisis, a crowd or a festival. Normative communitas is what results when a group attempts to preserve the experience by organising it, as a monastic order or an intentional community does, at which point rules and offices reappear and the original quality is compromised. Ideological communitas is the utopian blueprint describing the condition in the abstract.

The concept has been widely applied, and pilgrimage is Turner's own major application, developed with Edith Turner: pilgrims leave home and status behind, travel among strangers, often wear common dress, and experience a levelling that the ordinary social hierarchy at home does not permit. Later scholars, notably John Eade and Michael Sallnow, argued in response that pilgrimage sites are as often arenas of competition and contested meaning as of harmony, and that Turner had generalised from a congenial case. The concept has also been applied to monasticism, millenarian movements, the counterculture of the 1960s among which Turner was writing, festivals, disaster response and the sociology of protest.

Its critics make three main points: that it is romantic and takes participants' own accounts at face value; that apparent levelling frequently conceals persisting hierarchies of gender, caste, age and wealth that reassert themselves as soon as the rite ends; and that the concept is elastic enough to be found wherever one looks for it. It remains, nonetheless, among the most productive ideas the anthropology of religion has produced, and it names something that people in these situations report with unusual consistency.

Among the many modern secular contexts where scholars have applied Turner's concept, Burning Man, the annual temporary community built in Nevada's Black Rock Desert since the early 1990s, is one of the most frequently cited, since organizers and participants routinely describe its intended effect in language closely tracking Turner's theory, even without naming it directly.

Burning Man's structure maps closely onto the liminal conditions the main entry describes as generating communitas: participants leave ordinary social structure behind by traveling to a remote temporary site, adopt shared and often deliberately transformed self-presentation, operate under a gift economy suspending ordinary market relations, and are subject to a "decommodification" principle removing money and status from most interaction, producing precisely the leveling and unmediated fellowship spontaneous communitas describes. Scholars observing participants have noted that attendees frequently report the kind of intense, transient, meaningful connection with strangers Turner's original subjects reported, and have framed the event's deliberately impermanent structure, built and dismantled annually, as a strategy for preserving spontaneous communitas against the routinization into "normative communitas" the main entry notes tends to compromise the original quality once a group tries to make an experience permanent.

The case also illustrates the critical objections the main entry raises: some participants have noted that apparent leveling coexists with real economic stratification, since the resources required to attend are unevenly distributed, and that the event's growing scale has generated the kind of contested meanings Eade and Sallnow's critique of pilgrimage-as-harmony predicts.