Spontaneous Communitas

the ecstasy of spontaneous communitas is seen as the end of human endeavor. In the religion of preindustrial societies, this state is regarded rather as a means to the end of becoming more fully involved in the rich manifold of structural role-playing.

Turner distinguishes how complex societies mistake spontaneous communitas for a terminal state, whereas preindustrial societies treat it as a transitional means, revealing a fundamental difference in the valuation of structure and communitas across societal types.

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

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he reveals 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.

The Franciscan Order is presented as the canonical historical demonstration that spontaneous communitas, once it enters institutional time, undergoes inevitable routinization and structural encrustation.

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

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a fairly regular connection is maintained between liminality, structural inferiority, lowermost status, and structural outsiderhood on the one hand, and, on the other, such universal human values as peace and harmony between all men, fertility, health of mind and body, universal justice, comradeship and brotherhood between all men

Turner establishes that ideological communitas, the discursive articulation of spontaneous communitas, arises consistently from positions of liminality and structural marginality, linking the raw experience to its formulated counterpart.

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

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Buber lays his finger on the spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas, as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure. Yet, communitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure.

Drawing on Buber, Turner argues that spontaneous communitas is ontologically immediate and concrete, yet paradoxically only becomes perceptible against the structural background it negates.

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 reality exceeds structural analysis — grounds the conceptual space in which spontaneous communitas, as a distinct modality, becomes theoretically necessary.

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

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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 articulates the dialectical rhythm between spontaneous communitas and structure as the generative engine of social process, with rites de passage serving as the institutionalized mechanism for this oscillation.

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

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The hippie emphasis on spontaneity, immediacy, and "existence" throws into relief one of the senses in which communitas contrasts with structure. Communitas is of the now; structure is rooted in the past and extends into the future through language, law, and custom.

Turner uses the hippie counterculture as a contemporary ethnographic instance of spontaneous communitas, defining it temporally as a mode of pure presentness opposed to structure's extension across time.

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

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the "essential We" is a transient, if highly potent, mode of relationship between integral persons. To my mind, the "essential We" has a liminal character, since perdurance implies

Turner maps Buber's 'essential We' onto the liminal dimension of spontaneous communitas, emphasizing its constitutive transience as both its defining feature and its structural vulnerability.

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 identifies the instability of structureless communitas as the historical driver behind the emergence of apocalyptic ideologies in communitas-type religious movements, linking spontaneous experience to millennial thought.

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 frames the relation between spontaneous communitas and structure as a constitutive dialectic grounded in an anthropological need, positioning communitas not as aberration but as indispensable phase of social process.

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

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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... living on the margin of society"

Millenarian movements are positioned as collective enactments of communitas arising from structural marginality, illustrating how spontaneous communitas crystallizes among those excluded from or subordinated by dominant social structures.

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

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from the perspectival viewpoint of those concerned with the maintenance of "structure," all sustained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.

Turner notes that from the structural perspective, any sustained expression of communitas is perceived as a threat requiring ritual containment, explaining why spontaneous communitas is systematically bounded by prescriptive frameworks.

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

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ideological and spontaneous, 134, 140

The index entry confirms Turner's formal distinction between ideological and spontaneous communitas as separately paginated sub-topics within his taxonomic framework in The Ritual Process.

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

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Boundless, unilateral love of every kind flooded over the usual compartmentalization and indifference among separate

Turner's ethnographic vignette of the Holi festival illustrates an experiential eruption of communitas in which structural boundaries collapse, serving as a vivid phenomenological illustration of spontaneous communitas in practice.

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

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Francis appears quite deliberately to be compelling the friars to inhabit the fringes and interstices of the social structure of his time, and to keep them in a permanently liminal state, where... the optimal conditions inhere for the realization of communitas.

The analysis of Francis of Assisi's deliberate cultivation of permanent liminality presents intentional structural marginality as a strategy for sustaining conditions hospitable to spontaneous communitas.

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

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