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Communitas is a Latin noun 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.

Communitas is an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness. 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 being the difference of secular and sacred. 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.

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) distinguishes between:

• existential or spontaneous communitas, the transient personal experience of togetherness
• normative communitas, communitas organized into a permanent social system
• ideological communitas, which can be applied to many utopian social models

Communitas as a concept used by Victor Turner in his study of ritual has recently been criticised by anthropologists. See Eade & Sallow's Contesting the Sacred (1991)

Sources:

Turner, Victor. "Rituals and Communitas." Creative Resistance. 26 Nov. 2005 <http://citationmachine.net/>.

Eade & Sallnow, 'Contesting the Sacred' (1991)

• Communitas.org - The Communitas Group, Bremerton WA.
• Communitas - Wikipedia community development journal at Meta
• Creating Communitas, a project at www.wechange.org, including two books by Forbes Leslie: Communal Sustainability and Forming Tribalized Communities.

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