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Communitas
''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 sacr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communitas (book)
''Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life'' is a 1947 book on community and city planning by Percival and Paul Goodman. Presented as an illustrated primer on how city planning affects socioeconomic order and citizens' empowerment to better their communities, the book reviews historical and modern approaches to urban planning before proposing three of the Goodmans' own provocative community paradigms. The brothers worked on ''Communitas'' through the early 1940s based on an unsuccessful 1939 World's Fair proposal. The University of Chicago-published book was not well known until it was revised and re-released alongside Paul Goodman's '' Growing Up Absurd'' in a 1960 edition by Vintage Books. ''Communitas'' became known as a major work of urban planning and influenced historical, anthropological, and educational activists. Contents ''Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life'' argues for "human scale" urban planning, in which buildings, cities, economics, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Goodman (writer)
Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 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, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his ov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roberto Esposito
Roberto Esposito (Piano di Sorrento, 4 August 1950) is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, and professor, notable for his academic research and works on biopolitics. He currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Biography Esposito was born in Piano di Sorrento, Italy on 4 August 1950. He graduated at the University of Naples Federico II. He was vice director of the Italian Institute of Human Sciences of Naples, full professor of theoretical philosophy, and the coordinator of the Ph.D. program in philosophy until 2013. For five years he was the only Italian member of the International Council of Scholars of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. He was one of the founders of the European Political Lexicon Research Centre and of the International Centre for a European Legal and Political Lexicon, which was established by a consortium made up of the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Padua, Sale ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 NobelArt/Architecture; What Design For a Synagogue Spells Jewish? ''New York Times'', December 2, 2001. and "the most prolific architect in Jewish history."Michael Z. Wise"America's Most Prolific Synagogue Architect," ''The Forward'', March 9, 2001. Biography Percival Goodman was born in New York City to parents who were in the arts business. His father was a leading New York auctioneer who abandoned the family when Percival was young. His brother was the noted writer and sociologist Paul Goodman. At age 14, he became an apprentice for an architect. In 1925, Percival Goodman received the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects Paris Prize which sent him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, for architectural training. Paul GoldbergerPerci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 rite of passage, rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic anthropology, symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Early life Victor Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, son of Norman and Violet Turner. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a repertory actress, who founded the Scottish National Players. Turner initially studied poetry and classics at University College London. In 1941, Turner was drafted into World War II and served as a noncombatant until 1944. During his three years of service, he met and married Edith Turner (anthropologist), Edith Brocklesby Davis, who was serving during the war as a "land girl". Their five children include scientist Robert Turner (scientist), Robert Turner, poet Frederick Turner (poet), Frederick Turner, and Rory Tur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ritual
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally associated with gestures, words, or revered objects, rituals also occur in non-human species, such as elephant mourning or corvid object-leaving. They may be prescribed by tradition, including religious practices, and are often characterized by formalism, traditionalism, rule-governance, and performance. Rituals are a feature of all known human societies. They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and ritual purification, purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages, funerals and more. Even common actions like handshake, hand-shaking and saying "hello" may be termed as ''rituals''. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy ( ; ; 26 July 1940 – 23 August 2021) was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was ''Le titre de la lettre'' (''The Title of the Letter'', 1992), a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including ''La remarque spéculative'' in 1973 (''The Speculative Remark'', 2001) on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ''Le Discours de la syncope'' (1976) and ''L'Impératif catégorique'' (1983) on Immanuel Kant, ''Ego sum'' (1979) on René Descartes, and ''Le Partage des voix'' (1982) on Martin Heidegger. In addition to ''Le titre de la lettre'', Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles. Nancy is credited with helping to reopen the question of the ground of community and politics with his 1985 work ''La communauté désoeuvrée'' (''The Inoperative Community''), following Blanchot's ''The Unavowable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes). The concept of liminality was first developed in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rites. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rituals And Communitas
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally associated with gestures, words, or revered objects, rituals also occur in non-human species, such as elephant mourning or corvid object-leaving. They may be prescribed by tradition, including religious practices, and are often characterized by formalism, traditionalism, rule-governance, and performance. Rituals are a feature of all known human societies. They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages, funerals and more. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying "hello" may be termed as ''rituals''. The field of ritual studies has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropologists have pointed out that through culture, people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances). Cultural anthropology has a rich methodology, including participant observation (often called fieldwork because it requires the anthropologist spending an extended period of time at the research location), inter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Hirsch
Alan Hirsch (born 24 October 1959) is an Australian author, serial entrepreneur, thought leader in the missional church movement, key missions strategist for churches around the world, and founder of numerous global organizations. Life Hirsch was born into a Jewish family in Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu language, Zulu and Xhosa language, Xhosa: eGoli ) (colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, Jo'burg or "The City of Gold") is the most populous city in South Africa. With 5,538,596 people in the City of Johannesburg alon ..., South Africa in 1959. He moved to Cape Town, in 1963 where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. Then, he went to university in Cape Town where he studied business and marketing and moved to Australia in 1983 with his family. Although his family was not particularly religious, he was very much influenced by his Jewish heritage. He emphasizes Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and makes distinctions between Hebraic and Hellenistic thought. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphonso Lingis
Alphonso Lingis (November 23, 1933 – May 8, 2025) was an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, and professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization included phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complemented the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography. After a brief illness he died in Maryland on May 8, 2025, at the age of 91. Career Lingis attended Loyola University in Chicago, then pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His doctoral dissertation, written under Alphonse de Waelhens, was a discussion of the French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning to the United States, Lingis joined the faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1960s he moved to Penn State University, where he published numerous scholarly articles on the history of ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
