Normative Communitas

the egalitarian model we have called normative communitas, become in complex and literate societies, both ancient and modern, a positive torrent of explicitly formulated views on how men may best live together in comradely harmony

Turner argues that normative communitas — the implicit egalitarian model found in liminal and structurally inferior contexts of preindustrial societies — becomes, in complex societies, the generative source of ideological communitas, explicitly articulating ideals of fraternity, justice, and equality.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis

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the “social” is not identical with the “social-structural.” There are other modalities of social relationship.

Turner’s foundational methodological claim that social life exceeds structural analysis provides the theoretical ground from which the concept of normative communitas — as a distinct, non-structural modality of relation — becomes intelligible and necessary.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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a processual paradigm of the fate of spontaneous communitas when it enters social history. Subsequent movements, both religious and secular, tend to follow, at varying tempi, the pattern of Franciscanism in its dealings with the world.

Turner uses the history of the Franciscan Order as the exemplary case of how spontaneous communitas passes through normative phases before being absorbed into or destroyed by social structure, establishing a recurring historical paradigm.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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communitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure

Turner establishes that communitas — including in its normative form — can only be apprehended relationally, in dialectical tension with structure, making the normative phase the crucial mediation between pure immediacy and institutionalization.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure, while, in rites de passage, men are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas

Turner describes the dialectical rhythm by which communitas and structure alternate, within which normative communitas functions as the transitional moment where lived egalitarianism begins to acquire normative shape before full structural reintegration.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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With Elias, structure; both material and abstract, had begun to replace communitas.

Turner’s account of how the Franciscan Order’s organizing figure Elias converted the founder’s communitas vision into institutional apparatus illustrates the normative communitas threshold — the moment structural replacement begins.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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The great human temptation, found most prominently among utopians, is to resist giving up the good and pleasurable qualities of

Turner identifies the utopian fixation on communitas — the refusal to let it pass into normative and then structural forms — as a fundamental social pathology, implicitly underscoring normative communitas as a necessary and transient phase.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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Structureless communitas can bind and bond people together only momentarily. In the history of religions, it is interesting to observe how often communitas-type movements develop an apocalyptic mythology, theology, or ideology.

Turner argues that because unstructured communitas cannot persist, movements passing through the normative phase frequently develop apocalyptic ideologies as a compensatory mechanism to hold together what structure has not yet organized.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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Society (societas) seems to be a process rather than a thing-a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be-if one can use such a controversial term-a human “need” to participate in both modalities.

Turner’s processual model of society as a dialectic between structure and communitas contextualizes normative communitas as one necessary phase within a larger rhythm that no human society can forgo without pathological consequences.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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apocalyptic, 153-1 54 developmental cycle, 97 and “ hippies,” I 12, I 38 ideological and spontaneous, I 34, 140 modalities of, 131-133

The index entry for communitas in Turner’s text maps the full range of modalities — including normative, ideological, spontaneous, and apocalyptic — confirming the systematic typological structure within which normative communitas is situated.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside

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Among the more striking manifestations of communitas are to be found the so-called millenarian religious movements, which arise among what Norman Cohn has called “uprooted and desperate masses in town and countryside”

Turner’s analysis of millenarian movements as communitas-type phenomena illustrates contexts where the normative phase is bypassed or disrupted, producing unstable communitas expressions that resist structural consolidation.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside

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All human societies implicitly or explicitly refer to two contrasting social models

Turner’s claim that all societies navigate between structural and communitas models provides the comparative anthropological framework within which normative communitas functions as a cross-cultural transitional phenomenon.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside

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