The Power of Communitas

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Edith Turner offers an excerpt from the preface of her book, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. In the excerpt, she recounts an incident while doing fieldwork among whale hunters in Alaskawhen a moment of “collective effervescence” was generated by the community in an effort to influence environmental conditions to better support their whale hunting activities. When anthropological research enters a culture for the purposes of fieldwork, it may exist as a strange seed inside the womb of that culture. It grows and strains against its flesh, producing something entirely new—a combination of that culture’s own truth, and the gift of a vision of what that society is really like. This book describes scenes where light dawns for all kinds of groups, times, and places, where people stumble on “the best time they’ve ever had” – the time of communitas, unexpected and extraordinary. Read more.