''Communitas'' is a

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

commonly referring either to an unstructured

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, t ...

in which

people A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...

are equal, or to the very spirit of community. It also has special significance as a

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because ...

cultural anthropology Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portma ...

and the

social sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...

Victor Turner Victor Witter Turner (28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983) was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as ...

, 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 In anthropology, liminality () is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they w ...

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 A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such a ...

and communitas. The most familiar is the difference of

secular Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin ''saeculum'', "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negativ ...

and

sacred Sacred describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; is considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspires awe or reverence among believers. The property is often ascribed to objects ( ...

. 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.

Victor and Edith Turner

Communitas is an acute point of community. 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

in his study of

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized ...

has been criticized by anthropologists. See John Eade & Michael J. Sallnow's '' Contesting the Sacred'' (1991) 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.

Paul and Percival Goodman

'' Communitas'' is also the title of a book published in 1947 by the 20th-century American thinker and writer

Paul Goodman Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decen ...

and his brother,

Percival Goodman Percival Goodman (January 13, 1904 – October 11, 1989) was an American urban theorist and architect who designed more than 50 synagogues between 1948 and 1983. He has been called the "leading theorist" of modern synagogue design, Philip N ...

. 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.

Roberto Esposito

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'':

"From here it emerges that ''communitas'' is the totality of persons united not by a "property" but precisely by an obligation or a debt; not by an "addition" but by a "subtraction": by a lack, a limit that is configured as an onus, or even as a defective modality for him who is "affected", unlike for him who is instead "exempt" or "exempted". Here we find the final and most characteristic of the oppositions associated with (or that dominate) the alternative between public and private, those in other words that contrast ''communitas'' to ''immunitas''. If ''communis'' is he who is required to carry out the functions of an office ― or to the donation of a grace ― on the contrary, he is called immune who has to perform no office, and for that reason he remains ungrateful. He can completely preserve his own position through a ''vacatio muneris''. Whereas the ''communitas'' is bound by the sacrifice of the ''compensatio'', the ''immunitas'' implies the beneficiary of the ''dispensatio''."

"Therefore the community cannot be thought of as a body, as a corporation in which individuals are founded in a larger individual. Neither is community to be interpreted as a mutual, intersubjective "recognition" in which individuals are reflected in each other so as to confirm their initial identity; as a collective bond that comes at a certain point to connect individuals that before were separate. The community isn't a mode of being, much less a "making" of the individual subject. It isn't the subject's expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject."

Others

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 Giorgio Agamben ( , ; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and '' homo sacer''. The concept of biopolitics ...

engages in a similar argument about the concept of community in his 1990 book ''The Coming Community'' (translated in English by

Michael Hardt Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book ''Empire'', which was co-written with Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as domin ...

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 Alphonso Lingis (born November 23, 1933) is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, ex ...

.LINGIS, Alphonso (1994). ''The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common'', Indiana: Indiana University Press
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/ref> 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

Victor and Edith Turner

Paul and Percival Goodman

Roberto Esposito

Others

References

Further reading