Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)

This is a wonderful book, bringing together decades of ethnographic field research with the experience of being in, and creating relationships among people. Reminiscent of the concept of the beloved community, Communitas expands on the work of Victor Turner, exploring the ways in which groups can create a sense of connection, bringing/allowing new people into the shared space of belonging through the ritual process.This is an important addition to the literature of anthropology and speaks to the apparent hunger in our alienated society for a sense of connection as expressed by various populist movements such as OWS.It is also quite simply, a pleasure to read and the gift of an exceptional anthropologist and humanist.

We have known very little about how apparently spontaneous, temporary community sentiments emerge and are perceived across cultures. This book provides an important dimension to our understanding of human behavior across cultures by examining and exploring the special counterpoints to social structural rules and regulations that dictate our lives. It is written as a series of stories and thus is easy and enjoyable reading.

This book serves as an excellent resource of stories and descriptions of the experience of "communitas" a originally defined by Victor Turner, here extended to a far-reaching range of collective celebration both in the secular and religious worlds. It suffers from poor translation and editing. Pick through it. There are treasures of understanding and enlightenment awaiting.

This book provides a really amazing insight to the idea of Communitas. It was a fantastic addition to the source list for my thesis.

An excellent book by an excellent scholar.

Edith Turner, cultural anthropologist, makes a clear deeply felt case for the power of communitas, living in and through community, that this ancient connectivity provides us with a lasting gift of true happiness and joy in being one with the many. It's beautifully demonstrated through tales from various societies. It's out ancient primitive heritage of making society really work and perdure through the challenges of survival, especially as experienced tribes, families, and the many groups humans invent and preserve for their own joy of making life a shared pleasure.

This is a wonderful investigation of how joy affects our individual and collective life. We get a look at how creative, and powerful is our human capacity for joy, and how ,when it reaches a certain pitch of shared experience, communitas, it touches a profound dimension of reality which includes the full range of our human -ness, creating new pathways of social functionality. Turner's book is inspiring and uplifting and should be read in schools so that the new generation will be better able to participate in the making of occasions when communitas can arise. She explains how this quality emerges spontaneously and cannot be manipulated or contrived, but nevertheless there is a heightened awareness and a fuller consciousness when it does occur..