Communitas is the anthropologist Victor Turner’s word for the intense, levelling bond that grows between people who pass through a threshold together, when rank, status and the usual roles fall away and people meet simply as equals. It is felt in rites of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this, pilgrimage, festivals, music, shared hardship and disaster. The books of Therapeutic Shamanism do not use the word, but they teach that hunter-gatherer bands were fiercely egalitarian and that belonging to a healthy tribe meant meeting one another as equals, which sits close to what Turner described.
What does the word mean? #
A bond of equals that appears when structure falls away. Turner took the Latin word, which means a community or a fellowship, so as to set it apart from the ordinary sense of ‘community’ as a place or a group of neighbours. In The Ritual Process (1969) he described two ways of being together. One is society as a structure of positions, ranked and differentiated. The other is people relating directly, as whole persons, without those positions in the way. That second way he called communitas, and the condition that frees it he called anti-structure.1
He first noticed it among initiates in the middle, liminal stage of a rite of passage, the stage when they are no longer what they were and not yet what they will become. Stripped of status, property and rank together, they tend to bond as comrades. Turner went on to distinguish spontaneous, normative and ideological communitas, and to find it well beyond rites of passage; that part of his work, and the criticisms made of it, are in Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas? The in-between stage itself is the subject of What is liminality?
Where does the idea come from? #
From a long line of thinking about why ritual binds people. The sociologist Émile Durkheim noticed that shared religious rituals produce a kind of elation and arousal, which he called collective effervescence, and thought it played a large part in giving people a sense of belonging to a community. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar describes Victor and Edith Turner’s communitas as an elaboration of Durkheim’s idea, a form of collective bonding created during rituals such as rites of passage, and notes that anthropologists and psychologists have since largely lost sight of it.2
Edith Turner, who worked alongside Victor throughout, went on to write Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (2012), following the experience through festivals, music, sport, work, disaster and revolution.
Where is communitas found? #
Wherever people go through something together that sets their usual selves aside. Rites of passage are the classic case, but people also know it from pilgrimages, ceremonies and festivals, from singing and dancing together, from shared hardship, and from the strange closeness that often follows a disaster, when strangers help one another as if they had always known each other.
Hunter-gatherers had their own ways of renewing it on purpose. Dunbar describes how, among the San, hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, small frictions between people could build up into jealousy, quarrels and a failure to share meat, and left alone would split a band. Their answer was the trance dance: whenever relations in a camp became too fractious, someone would call for one. In Dunbar’s words, “Trance seems to reboot the system”, bringing relationships back to how they were, until the ordinary niggles build up again and another dance is called.3 See What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing?
Is communitas always a good thing? #
Not always, and the research points both ways. On one side, the sociologist Jay Johnson studied sport hazing, the initiation rituals of team sports, which are often defended on the grounds that they bond a team. The athletes and coaches he interviewed reported that hazing fractured relationships on the team instead, the opposite of communitas, even though new players still wanted some ritual to mark their joining.4 The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse found that shared ordeals can fuse people to their group so strongly that they become more ready to fight and die for it, which armed groups have long made use of.5
On the other side, Dunbar’s own survey found that people who took part more often in shared religious services engaged more with their local community and reported greater satisfaction with their lives,3 and Edith Turner’s work traces communitas as a source of joy, healing and renewal in ordinary life. So the bond itself is strong; what it does depends on what holds it, who runs it, and what it is for. See Can initiation be recreated today, and what makes a modern rite of passage safe?
How does communitas relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through equality and belonging, though the books do not discuss communitas itself. Turner found communitas breaking out in the gaps of ranked, structured societies, and much of his own material came from farming peoples, Christian pilgrimage and modern theatre. What the books teach is that equality was how human beings lived for most of our history. Hunter-gatherers did not just practise equality, “they fiercely protected it, too”, and belonging to a healthy tribe meant coming from a place of equality and equanimity, which was both one of its costs and one of its benefits.6 Set side by side, the two suggest that the levelled fellowship a modern person meets only at a festival or in a crisis may once have been much nearer the ordinary texture of band life; that is an observation drawn here, not something the books say. See How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
That fellowship did not stop at other humans. For hunter-gatherers the wolves and bears, jaguars and foxes were brothers and sisters, and the land belonged to all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer.7 Becoming an Adult meant taking your place on the Earth as an interconnected being, “a member of the great tribe of all the Peoples”.8 Turner’s communitas is a bond between people, whereas the animist sense of belonging described in the books reaches out to the whole community of beings.
Can we find communitas now? #
Yes, though the conditions for it are mostly missing. Healthy groups, in Therapeutic Shamanism, follow certain Patterns: the costs of belonging do not outweigh the benefits, everyone takes responsibility for their own actions, all adults are equally Adult, EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this advise rather than command, and drama trianglesDrama triangle. The persecutor–rescuer–victim pattern; the poison of unhealthy groups. More about this are stopped before they poison the group.9 Those Patterns are much of what lets people meet as equals and stay that way, rather than for one bright evening.
For many people the deepest experience of that kind of belonging comes first in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer. Journeying to the Lower-World Tribe, or Ancestral Kin, is a way to experience what it is like to be part of a tribe where you really belong, and are “loved, valued, accepted, and truly treasured”, and so to heal old wounds around groups.10 Finding Your Deep Soul has exercises for meeting this Tribe. See What is the Lower-World Tribe? and What makes a healthy group or tribe?
