communitas

plural communitates

1. countableuncountablehuman sciencesAn unstructured community of common experience.

   Monastic life, pilgrimage, bonds of friendship formed among the group of young initiates, contemporary teenage counter-culture movements are all good examples of communitates.

   2012, Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film, →ISBN, pages 17–18

2. countableuncountablehuman sciencesThe very spirit of community; an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness.

   The achievement of communitas is the pilgrim's fundamental motivation.

   1986, Victor W. Turner, Contesting the Sacred, Routledge, published 1991

   3 more examples

   A sense of harmony with the universe is made evident and the whole planet is felt to be communitas.

   1986, Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press, page 43

   Their focus is on group bonding, and the euphoric, almost transcendental experience of becoming one with the music and the crowd (which sounds like a version of what the anthropologist Victor Turner called ‘communitas’—an intense, intimate, liberating kind of group bonding, experienced only in ‘liminal’ states).

   [2004, Kate Fox, “Rules of Sex”, in Watching the English, Hodder & Stoughton, →ISBN, page 330

   Liminality, in other words, engenders communitas by levelling social distinctions while at the same time destabilizing normative structures and inspiring criticism.

   2013, Isher-Paul Sahni, “More than Horseplay”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 35, page 81