Communitas

[1] 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.

Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position.

At the heart of Turner’s theory is the notion that communitas involves a connection to the sacred, elicits powerful emotional experiences, and plays a key role in revitalizing social bonds and energies.

Structural action swiftly becomes arid and mechanical if those involved in it are not periodically immersed in the regenerative abyss of communitas.”[3]Edith Turner, Victor's widow and anthropologist in her own right, published in 2011[4] 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.

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.

In 1998, Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito published a book under the name Communitas challenging the traditional understanding of this concept.

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.

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.

[13] 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.