Communitas revisited: Victor Turner and the transformation of a concept

Abstract

Victor Turner's concept of communitas has been used in and beyond anthropology for years in a variety of ways. It is an effective concept for understanding one form of collective human experience, particularly the transcendent emotional experiences in liminal contexts that may stimulate the emergence of a sense of connection and co-humanity. There is immense contemporary value in the concept, however, many key elements are often overlooked and the complexities of ‘communitas’ ignored. This can lead to surface-level or misleading applications which threaten to undermine the utility of the concept. As such, I explore Turner's theoretical understandings and reflections, before considering the diverse ways other scholars have used communitas. I advocate a more nuanced understanding of communitas and investigate how this would benefit our understandings of communitas in contemporary social contexts. I engage with the work of Turner and others to contribute to theoretical discussions of communitas, while also reflecting on the value of concepts and the benefits of both ambiguity and clarity in communicating anthropological knowledge through such concepts.

Introduction

A curious phenomenon occurs when an engaged group of people slip between the cracks of social structure. A feeling of intense connection to others around them might be generated, evoking what they feel to be a quintessential human experience, a sense of collective belonging. Victor Turner ([1957] 1968a) conceptualised this – the potent emotionality, intensity and sense of fellowship among a collective arising from anti-structural environments – as communitas.

Communitas has become a valuable concept in the anthropological theory ‘toolkit’ to capture the experience of feeling ‘one with humanity’. Predominantly used in relation to ritual experiences, communitas describes a connection that is more than that experienced in mundane life:

[Communitas] is not the pleasurable and effortless comradeship that can arise between friends, co-workers or professional colleagues any day. [It is a] transformative experience that goes to the root of each person's being and finds in that root something profoundly communal and shared. (Turner, [1969] 1991: 138)

Contemporary applications of communitas have at times diminished this emphasis on its transformative qualities. Turner's own ambiguities over the years have contributed to some misapplications of communitas. This has led to a conceptual transformation resulting in a dilution of communitas’ conceptual efficacy. While the ubiquitous use of communitas demonstrates its vast analytical value and significance, there has been little effort to analyse communitas’ actual use and applicability.

In this article I thus explore Turner's communitas, considering its value, characteristics and problematics. I do so in three sections. First, I demonstrate the significance of communitas as an anthropological concept, analysing Turner's initial conceptualisation and the relevant historical background. I examine the elements of communitas through the lens of Max Weber's ideal-type, building a framework to help evaluate diverse uses of communitas. According to Weber (1949: 34, 51), ‘When a categorical definition of the content of the concept is sought, there remains only the ideal-type’, making the ideal-type a useful heuristic device for analysing empirical materials and ordering the chaos of the world into fragments to comprehend them. Second, I analyse the ubiquity of communitas in anthropology and beyond, which demonstrates the concept holds value beyond the contexts in which it was developed. Few scholars explain or justify their use of communitas, or why they have used it instead of, for example, Durkheim's collective effervescence or solidarity. I discuss how complementary concepts provide insight into the understanding of ‘community’ itself, something which leads people to (mis)use communitas. Third, I discuss why this transformation might have occurred, and what this means for current uses of communitas. I argue that the ubiquitous use of ‘communitas’ without explicit attention undermines its immense value. I hope to open discussion around the transformation of concepts and the value they provide us to understand cultural phenomena.

History of communitas and Victor Turner

Victor Turner developed communitas in analysing the ritual processes of the Ndembu of Zambia. As Ndembu rituals commonly interacted with ancestral spirits, Turner's initial frames of identifying communitas were through ritual and religion ([1957] 1968a). Though Turner did not limit communitas to these phenomena of ritual and religion, they are integral to understanding his conceptualisation. From Ndembu rituals to hippie communities, Christian pilgrimages and theatrical performances, communitas wove throughout Turner's academic career. Turner ([1969] 1991) was a poet, a creative thinker who saw something ‘more’ when observing the Ndembu's rituals: a moment in time where an essential ‘humankindness’ connected people beyond structure, boundaries or difference.

Turner's self-acknowledged academic and personal growth evidently influenced his work. He was trained as an Africanist under Max Gluckman as part of the Manchester School during the zenith of structural-functionalist thinking (Turner, 1975). In his later works, Turner reflects on how changing disciplinary trends shaped his research approach, such as the influence of processualism in Schism and Continuity in an African Society ([1957] 1968a). Similarly influential was Turner's conversion to Christianity in 1958. Victor's wife and collaborator, Edith Turner (2006), remarked that the Catholic Church offered them the ritual experience they longed for after leaving the Ndembu. Victor Turner (1975: 31) described learning ‘the ontological value’ of ritual and symbolism from the Ndembu, and how he ‘became convinced that religion … is really at the heart of the human matter’. Turner's fascination with communitas reflects his interest in human experience. This theme, too, wove throughout his career, culminating in From Ritual to Theatre, a self-described ‘anthropology of experience’ (Turner, 1982: 64), and in the co-edited volume The Anthropology of Experience (Turner and Bruner, 1986).

Turner's later applications of communitas beyond ritual (and religion) caused him to discuss its emergence in varied ways, most notably in romanticised visions of communitas as the apparent joy in connecting. This has led to ambiguities surrounding the concept, with discussions of communitas highlighting different, sometimes contradictory, elements. In the following sections, I examine Turner's early conceptualisations to provide context for the later transformation of communitas. I begin by outlining the core characteristics of communitas evident in four key features: ephemerality, anti-structure, emotion and experience. I then move to an analysis of the three forms of communitas that Turner identified (existential, normative and ideological), and demonstrate how viewing these features as an ideal-type develops a methodological model to view possible contexts for communitas.

Characteristics of communitas: anti-structure, ephemerality, emotion and experience

Communitas as a temporary transformative experience arises from a moment where people are ‘neither here nor there’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 95), and entails the transcendence of social structure: the ‘patterned arrangements’ of social, legal and political roles, statuses and norms, such as the normalisation of class stratification (Olaveson, 2001: 104; Turner, 1974). Thus, communitas is inherently bound to anti-structure, a ‘bond uniting … people over and above any formal social bonds’ (Turner, 1974; see also 1967, [1969] 1991, 1975; Olaveson, 2001), and anti-structure is inherently bound to, or contained within structure. Slipping out of, and transgressing, the mundanity of ‘normal’ life allows a connection to others because all are temporarily liberated from society's formal bonds (Turner, 1974).

Turner often linked communitas as anti-structure to the liminal ¹ phase of rituals, where there is an absence of structure. Arnold van Gennep's work on rites of passage, which he identified as tripartite ritual and initiation processes, greatly influenced Turner's understanding of ritual (Turner, [1969] 1991). Van Gennep ([1908] 1960: 43), a fellow Africanist, describes the three stages of the ritual process as ‘separation, transition and incorporation’, which Turner ([1969] 1991) refers to as separation, liminality and reaggregation. In this, ritual participants are removed from ordinary society (separation) and enter a space where there is an absence of structure, where they are neither inside nor outside society (liminality), ² before returning to their previous positions at the end of the ritual process (reaggregation).

The point between ritual separation from society and reaggregation is where participants recognisably occupy new social states (Turner, [1969] 1991). The absence of structure generated through liminality creates an equal relationship among ritual participants as they experience separation together. Their collective experiences (such as pain and suffering in male circumcision rituals) bind them together developing a strong sense of ‘comradeship and egalitarianism’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 95). Simultaneously, these ritual experiences let one stand outside of regular society, allowing critique or awareness of one's society (Turner, [1969] 1991, [1977] 1979a).

Three categories of communitas

Existential, normative and ideological communitas are three forms that remained consistent in Turner's work ([1969] 1991, 1974; Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011). These three categories are a helpful starting point, and a useful anchor to refer to through Turner's modifications. They track the spontaneous emergence and existential experience of communitas, to the normative attempt to sustain and control it, to the ideological visions of creating it in societies. In each form, Turner emphasised that people do not experience this connection to humanity in their everyday life (Olaveson, 2001; Turner, [1969] 1991, [1977] 1979a). It is much more than the connection you may feel during a common social interaction. Rather, communitas refers to spaces in which mundane life can be temporarily transcended ³ through the acknowledgement of co-humanity (Turner, [1969] 1991; Moore, 1995).

Of Turner's three forms, scholars typically refer to ‘existential’ or ‘spontaneous’ communitas. This is the strong yet fleeting collective energy that is provoked and experienced as a feeling of unity – what ‘William Blake might have called “the winged moment as it flies”’ ⁴ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 120), the guiding understanding for Edith Turner's (2012) communitas as ‘collective joy’. ‘Normative’ communitas, which Victor Turner ([1969] 1991) classifies as egalitarian, is the transformation of this existential state into an enduring social system ‘due to the necessity for social control’. The inevitable return of structure challenges the desire to maintain – or ‘capture and preserve’ (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011: 252) – a permanent state of communitas. To sustain communitas, organisation and systematic processes are required, often involving the formation of hierarchy ⁵ , undermining egality and making it unsustainable.

Lastly, ‘ideological’ communitas is used to analyse utopian simulations exhibiting existential communitas. This echoes the desire to experience communitas, the longing to stay within it, and the inevitable inability to do so. Ideological communitas expresses an element of social systems that aspire to achieve unattainable utopia. It describes how people ‘may best live together in comradely harmony’ (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011: 122), but the transience of communitas means that attempts to permanently sustain it fail. This desire to catch and sustain communitas is paradoxically tied to the everyday structure of society. Structure and anti-structure function in a dialectical push-and-pull, continually inflecting each other (St John, 2008), but because communitas occurs in the interstices of structure the ability for the two to exist simultaneously is impossible (Olaveson, 2001).

On the usefulness of concepts

In discussing the use of ‘ritual’ to describe diverse phenomena, Jack Goody (1977; see also Goody, 1961; Ingold, 1996; Strathern, 1996) warns against the overuse of words to not conflate concepts and undermine their value. Bell (1992) and Sullivan (2005) argue the same: that over-using or misusing concepts could damage their value. This applies to Turner's communitas. It has become something of a cult concept, with both superficial and productive interpretations. Turner's continued emphasis on communitas reaching beyond everyday life to something profound (our collective roots as humanity), has often been under-emphasised by scholars, diluting the potency of communitas and its conceptual or comparative utility. Nevertheless, seeing different applications of communitas is significant, as it demonstrates how concepts travel throughout disciplines, and how scholars perceive collective human experiences.

Graham St John (2001, 2006, 2008, 2009) is a key theorist of communitas in modern, secular, technological contexts, focusing on electronic dance music (EDM) events and raves. St John has extended Turner's communitas in important ways, recognising its analytical utility while acknowledging that people need to be cautious about claiming that just anything is communitas. St John (2008: 4) remarks that ‘Turner rarely paused to galvanise his ideas into a transparent theoretical model’, although he developed key ideas, not the least of which is the question of ‘how society (symbols, conflicts, performance) is actually lived by its members’. Noting that technological advances have reformulated North Atlantic societies into sites of social mediation, St John (2008: 13) sees them as ‘enabling and enhancing the very immediacy, social spontaneity, identification and sacrality that Turner embraced as a human necessity’. Simply put, social changes influence how people connect, including the contexts in which they search for communitas and in which it emerges. Understanding these characteristics highlights the value of communitas in understanding collective human experience, which can be reduced when it is used to describe any group situation in which individuals feel a sense of togetherness. There is some benefit to blurred conceptual boundaries, however, we should also recognise the intended characteristics to preserve the usefulness of the concept itself. If anything could be classed as communitas, would it retain its scholarly significance in describing a particular phenomenon?

Developing an ideal-type

Communitas has taken on a life of its own. Its popularity has seen it used in diverse fields. Many scholars engage with Turner's conceptualisation, reflecting on the intensity of experience that Turner illustrated. Contexts like sacred pilgrimage analyse the anti-structural removal from mundane life, in the active formation of a collective purposefully moving towards a sacred space, often to experience a formulation of ‘paradise’ (Myerhoff, 1976). Other contexts such as theatre and sport analyse audience/crowd behaviour as they physically move to spaces outside mundane life, become vulnerable, passive receptors of an organised event and active participants in their imaginative, vocal engagement with the organised ‘display’ (Ingham and McDonald, 2003; Schechner, 1974; Turner and Schechner, 1988). Music event sites echo this and form ‘alternative cultural heterotopias’, counter-sites different from an ideological utopia as a context for the occurrence of communitas (St John, 2001: 51). Some work conflates communitas with liminality, where the liminal space enabling the occurrence of communitas is developed as not just facilitating but being the potent connection of communitas (e.g., Ryan, 2013). Similarly, others try to display contexts in terms of a ritual framework, possibly thinking that communitas cannot occur outside of ritual (Jencson, 2001). As evidenced by his elaboration of hippie communitas, theatre and pilgrimage, Turner did not restrict his own applications in this way.

Turner's definitions of communitas were often ambiguous, though there were four features that he consistently emphasised as communitas’ main elements: the physiological and psychological experience, the anti-structural setting, the emotional effect and ephemerality. I use these as foundational attributes for building an ideal-type to understand communitas for further use. Developing an ideal-type of communitas provides a framework for analysing the concept, and helps to demarcate communitas from other concepts such as Durkheim's conscience collective, collective effervescence and solidarity.

Weber (1949) describes the ideal-type as a ‘means’, not an ‘end’, and as something which is useful to allow for a subjective understanding of objective qualities while also serving as a heuristic device to identify conceptual properties for further analysis. With communitas, there is a danger of drawing conceptual boundaries that are either too rigid or too abstract. As such, using Weber's ideal-type helps to build a framework for communitas that might assist with future applications. It is important to note here that I do not mean to view communitas as it is currently used, with its changes in meanings and ambiguity, as an ideal-type. On the contrary, I intend to shed light on communitas as it has transformed from Turner's conceptual development and amendments to contemporary uses and develop an ideal-type that provides something of a ‘categorical definition’ (Weber, 1949: 51, 2009: 60) that takes this history into account. To build this ideal-type, I analyse Turner's research to understand his perceptions of communitas.

Turner's communitas: From ritual to pilgrimages

Turner (1974) notes that despite our heterogeneity, humanity is unique, with some fundamental similarities among people. This is the potential for communitas: when a sense of universal commonality can be (sub)consciously harnessed. Turner witnessed this un/conscious sense of co-humanity among the Ndembu. He perceived something that united people despite social hierarchies, ‘a liberation of human capacities’ that allowed the transcendent connection of communitas to take hold (Turner, 1974). Turner developed the term ‘communitas’ from Buber's idea that the world is experienced through two relationships: I-Thou (interpersonal) and Thou-It (inter-object). To Buber, the I (self) is formulated through an interaction with the Thou (other). The relation is that between the self and others in society, with a person only recognised as I in relation to Thou. As Buber ([1923] 1937: 4) states, ‘all real living is meeting’, emphasising interpersonal relationships as necessary for developing a sense of self. The relation between the self (I) and society (Thou) allows an experience of being the other. Turner ([1969] 1991) saw that this meeting of I-Thou could be theorised as ‘an essential We’, the creation of a collective through meeting. Turner ([1969] 1991) used the Latin term of communitas to distinguish Buber's idea of community as ‘an area of common living’ from the social experiences born out of types of community. The formation of this collective and this experience of community is something Buber ([1923] 1937) regards as a potent, transient moment of relationality, which Turner ([1969] 1991) echoes when he regards communitas as ephemeral.

As Turner ([1969] 1991: 100, 120) states, ‘communitas is of the now’, its ephemerality strengthening its potency. This ephemerality is fundamental to communitas, but what does it mean, and how does one measure a transient experience? The idea of ‘transience’ is itself rather vague. Classic cases mark it as something very limited (Myerhoff, 1976; Turner, [1969] 1991) but other cases seem to allow for potentially much longer periods. Sahlins (1989), for example, refers to the pre-contact Hawaiian ritual season as including a ‘season of communitas’ each year, a point expanded by Jeff Sissons’ (2014) account of Polynesian societies’ conversions. Rationally this cannot mean communitas lasts a season in a permanent state, but would rather indicate multiple events potentiating communitas, making it a season of periodic communitas. Sahlins (1989) and Sissons (2014) both describe how the seasonal rituals of Polynesian and Hawaiian societies potentiated anti-structure and subsequently communitas, which was simultaneously held in a dialectic with ‘contrasting seasonal rites through which societas as hierarchy was re-constituted’ (Sissons, 2014: 12). This dialectic between anti-structure and structure is significant to Turner's communitas, as the transience of communitas is what reinforces its potency.

The idea of ‘transience’, then, could be anything from a few hours to a day, but necessitates brevity that forgoes the undue prolonging of communitas, which would allow time for mundane issues to seep into the moment taking the focus away from its overall connection. Engineering spaces to facilitate a fleeting occurrence of communitas is different from attempts to permanently sustain communitas. The Huichol Indians of Mexico, for example, fight the temptation to linger in ‘Paradise’, their sacred place of Wirikuta, longing to remain in a permanent state of ecstasy (Myerhoff, 1976). Ultimately, however, they must return to mundanity, as ‘real life is inevitably a dialectical process. It is a fluctuation between, at one pole, mundane needs met through social structure and at the other, the ecstasy of communion … communitas’ (Myerhoff, 1976: 246).

Communitas as a temporary transformative experience arises from a moment where people are ‘neither here nor there’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 81), and entails the transcendence of social structure: the ‘patterned arrangements’ of social roles and statuses that reflect ‘legal and political norms’ such as the normalisation of the stratified structuring of class (Turner, 1974: 201). ⁶ Sissons (2014) refers to the significance of the anti-structural communitas being held in a dialectic with structure. Structure pertains to the functional order of society, while anti-structure is the place of ‘humanity, intimacy, creativity and equality’ (Olaveson, 2001: 111 cited in Sissons, 2014: 11). Thus, communitas is inherently bound to anti-structure, a ‘bond uniting … people over and above any formal social bonds’ (Turner, 1974: 45; see also 1967, [1969] 1991, 1975; Olaveson, 2001), and anti-structure is inherently bound to, or contained within structure. Slipping out of, and transgressing, the mundanity of ‘normal’ life forges connections because all are temporarily liberated from society's formal bonds (Turner, 1974).

Turner often linked communitas as anti-structure to the liminal phase of rituals, where structure is absent. The ‘liminal’ stage, or ‘threshold’, is the middle stage of a tripartite ritual structure (Van Gennep, [1908] 1960). Liminality is notable in rites of passage, rituals indicative of a transition between social states (e.g., child to adult) (Turner, 1967). This is the point of ritual separation from society, before re-aggregation, where participants recognisably occupy new social states and are relieved of social burdens (Turner, [1969] 1991). Liminality generates an absence of structure creating an equal relationship among participants who experience separation together. ⁷

A significant aspect of this united experience of separation is that participants come to momentarily stand outside of ‘normal’ society, and this new perspective often encourages societal critique or awareness of social rules and norms (Turner, [1969] 1991; [1977] 1979a). The figurative removal from the current world in such rituals marks participants as ‘betwixt and between’ and ‘in and out of time’ (Turner, 1967: 93, [1969] 1991: 82), emphasising the importance of temporality. Early scholarship reinforces this, depicting rituals as shaping people's experiences of time. Eliade ([1954] 2005: 20, [1963] 1998: 18) has noted that people go through ‘time of a different quality’, and that ritual time takes place in ‘sacred time’, echoed by Durkheim (1912: 47 cited in Bellah, 2003: 31) when he says that ‘sacred ⁸ time is devoted primarily to ritual’ (see also Turner, [1977] 1979a). Therefore, while rituals have heuristic value in their formation of structure to potentiate anti-structure, it is the liminal space within rituals, not the ritual itself, that allows for a different experience of time.

Rituals are thus important to Turner's conceptualisations of communitas. Turner ([1969] 1991) once linked communitas to a ‘mystical power’, spurring people to bring ‘charism or grace’ from deities down (or up) to humans so they could experience this transcendent connection to each other and the human condition. This connection to ancestral spiritual forms, which was often achieved through rituals, influenced Turner's understanding of rituals as expressing beliefs, morals and values of society, leading to social cohesion. Here, Turner frames rituals as serving a social function, which reflects his structural-functionalist background (Turner, 1968b, [1969] 1991; see also Durkheim, [1915] 2012; Bell, 1992; Olaveson, 2001). This is but one view of ritual, as it is a debated and shifting concept. As Schechner (1985: 192) remarks, ‘ritual has been so variously defined as a concept, praxis, process, ideology, yearning, religious experience and function that it means very little for the simple reason that it can mean too much’. However, Turner also saw ritual as a highly symbolic ‘stereotyped sequence of activities … performed in a sequestered place … designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actor's goals and interests’ (Turner, 1973: 1100). He thus saw ritual as moving people beyond everyday life, connecting people through the interrelation of social values, echoed by Bell, who says that rituals encourage ‘social cohesion and equilibrium’ (Bell, 1992: 15; Turner, [1969] 1991, 1968b). Ritual thus has a mediating effect within societies, interacting with modes of governance, hierarchy and order. Combining Bell and Turner's descriptions of ritual, I see ritual as a practice uniting thought and action, encouraging social interconnection, using symbols and nurturing a sense of social communication. This view of ritual encourages a sense of unity in relation to the ‘frictions, constraints and competitiveness of social life’ (Bell, 1992: 20; see also Turner, [1957] 1968a).

Turner's initial framing of ritual through religion, and his consequent development of secular communitas, make religion and secularism important to understanding communitas, though they are equally debated and shifting. Early cultural and anthropological understandings did link religion to the supernatural (e.g., Tylor, [1871] 1958; see also Bowie, 2006), however, other understandings of religion have developed over the years. Geertz's contested (see also Asad, 1983; Frankenberry and Penner, 1999) notion of religion as a cultural system cites the importance of moods and motivations ⁹ which ‘sacred symbols induce’ (Geertz, [1966] 2004: 4, 10). Durkheim's development of the sacred and profane is a useful conceptualisation, stating all societies have things they set apart as sacred (Rosati, 2012): ‘religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things’ (Durkheim, [1915] 2012: 37). This, too, is often contested for reducing the world to a binary, for presuming an ‘interpretation of the sacred through … one general principle’ (Goldenweiser, 1917: 119) and for claiming the sacred/profane distinction is universal (Coleman and White, 2006). Despite this, the idea of ‘sacred’ aspects of societies is no longer strictly religious. Seed (2014) notes that often, secular societies also have sacred elements, which blurs the so-called secular/religious divide.

Generally, the secular, used to define contexts that are not explicitly or deliberately religious, is grounded in ideas that ‘human beings [are] the architects of their own destinies’ (Kapferer, 2001: 341). Though often seen as a Western historical construction, secularity moves away from theistic worldviews (though not all religions are theistic) (Cannell, 2010). Moore and Myerhoff (1977: 14) describe secular rituals as a move to ‘this-worldly’ outcomes and motivations, arguing that rituals can be secular and religious: instead of rituals moving other worlds to affect this one, ‘the secular world moves this world and this world only’.

In Turner's later work, he applied communitas outside ritual frameworks. However, his focus remained on the absence of structure:

[communitas] requires terms and norms to give it frame, focus, and a flow pattern … social and cultural structures seem immutable. But structures, and the symbols which manifest them, do break up and crumble. What often persists is communitas, no longer normative or ideological, but waiting to be given a new form. (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011: 202)

This shows that the specific structures potentiating anti-structure are not important, as all structures are prone to ‘crumbling’. The potential for communitas persists in these circumstances, a permanent possibility.

Turner ([1969] 1991) argues that the moment between structures allows an understanding of society, speaking to the potency of communitas. This is not just an emotional connection but a development of perceptions about how society works, which influences understandings of communitas outside of ritual contexts. Turner (1974) (and later, others) often linked communitas’ uniting ability to those with ‘inferior structural status’ and those who call the social order into question. Here Turner (1974: 268) notes ‘when we consider cultural institutions we have to look in the interstices, niches, intervals and on the peripheries of the social structure’. Linking liminality to festivals and the carnivalesque, with its chaotic and frivolous inversion of hierarchical social order (Bakhtin, [1936] 1984), ¹⁰ Turner quotes Davis (1975: 97 quoted in Turner, [1977] 1979a: 474) saying: ‘[this moment] can on the one hand perpetuate certain values of the community, even guarantee its survival, and on the other hand criticise the political order’. Further, Turner ([1969] 1991: 115) notes that liminality, ‘the interstices of structure’, is only one space in which communitas can develop: it also breaks through ‘at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority’. The marginal refers to critics of their own culture, while the inferior refers to ‘the weak’ or maligned (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011). This includes the collective suffering of the ostracised, and those living out Agamben's (1998) bare life: not recognised by the dominant class as being anything more than their base human functions. Within their collective suffering, expressed through anything from united (often ritualistic) fighting for rights (Robins, 2006), to communally caring for one another (Garapich, 2011), people are pushed beyond structure to experience moments of anti-structural communitas. Turner thus highlights various ways people could be taken outside of mundane social life through the dissolution of structure.

This emergence of anti-structure is one point where Turner's legacy seems to get confused. He explicitly states that he does not see communitas in terms of a structural reversal, as a ‘mirror imaging of “profane” workday socioeconomic structure or a fantasy-rejection of structural “necessities”’ (Turner, 1979b: 40). However, some scholars have analysed anti-structure as the ‘inversion of the normal’ (Ross, [1978] 2011: xli; Killinger, 2020: 471). Turner's consistent reference to anti-structure as not the opposite of, but the absence of structure is significant (Turner, 1974). Turner himself expressed this in sometimes-ambiguous terms. Over the years he emphasised an essential ‘unstructured’, ‘interstructural’ and simultaneously ‘destructured and prestructured’ state (Turner, 1967: 93, 98), identified it as more than a distinction between two opposing things (Turner, [1969] 1991), yet referred to them as a binary (Turner, [1969] 1991), highlighted being ‘stripped of structural attributes’ (Turner, 1974: 202), and noted ‘the liberation of human capacities … from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses’ (Turner, 1982: 41, see also 1979b: 471). Given this confusion, and the fact that he rarely reflected explicitly on his shifting conceptualisation, I return to his first description of anti-structure. In discussing witchcraft and sorcery, Turner (1967: 25) says:

The behaviour of witches in most societies is not altogether … ‘the exact reverse’ of that of other people…. [It] is not the ‘structural’ world upside down, or in mirror image. It is a world of decay, where all that is normal, healthy, and ordered is reduced to chaos…. It is ‘anti’-structure, not inverted structure.

This description is Turner's clearest defence of his perception of anti-structure. It reflects his view that anti-structure is different to the inversion of structure; structure must dissolve for the egalitarian potential of communitas to make itself known.

Contemporary communitas and complementary concepts

Thus far I have outlined Turner's understandings of communitas as a panhuman, collective, anti-structural phenomenon. From this, I perceive communitas to be characterised by four main things:

Emotional affect. The emotional variance of people does not negate the emergence of communitas. When it emerges, it affects individuals emotionally in similarly varied ways in their collective form.

Experience. The embodied, psychological, transcendental experience of connection that finds within each person something that is and is felt to be ‘profoundly communal and shared’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 126).

Anti-structural context. Communitas requires the dissolution of structure to emerge.

Ephemerality. The anti-structural space required for communitas involves a temporal suspension of time that is necessarily transient.

These four components encompass the essentials of communitas and, effectively, an ideal-type. However, Turner's inconsistencies continue to confuse how communitas should be understood. In a foreword to a re-publication of The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Roger Abrahams (in Turner, [1969] 2008: ix) confronts accusations against Turner that ‘concepts like liminality and communitas [are] too general and abstract’. Turner's response to this, notes Abrahams, was that the concepts were valuable in organising observations, and had proven useful to many ethnographers. This is true, and the concept's efficacy has proven that scholars are fascinated by the transcendental experience of connection that Turner identified in theorising ‘communitas’. The issue with communitas is not that it is too general and abstract, but that Turner's definitions were continually adjusted, while other scholars have taken its surface values and used them in their own ways.

Turner first sees it as a spontaneous, immediate, relationship between individuals ([1969] 1991), and an emotional state, with (mostly) pleasurable effects, which is almost all-consuming, wiping mundane thought from the mind and focusing the individual on the moment ([1969] 1991). Here, Turner's perception of communitas having emotional effect is confused by his reference to it as an emotional state, touching on ambiguities surrounding the first ideal-type component. Over his career, he continued to state that communitas is experiential, a dimension in which individuals confront each other as ‘human totals, integral beings who recognisantly share the same humanity’ without merging their identities (1974: 269, 274). This idea endures, of communitas as a ‘mutual confrontation’ between people stripped of status ([1977] 1979a: 471). He later moved to describe it with Edith Turner as relational, combining ‘the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity and comradeship … an essential and generic human bond’ (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011: 250). These descriptions remain relatively stable. However, saying people confront one another without merging identities and engage relationally due to a panhuman ‘homogenous’ humanity confuses the importance of overcoming heterogeneity through connecting humans based on their unique similarities, which he focuses on in The Ritual Process ([1969] 1991).

Furthermore, though Turner states that communitas can ‘never be adequately expressed in structural form’ ([1969] 1991: 125), he also states that ‘communitas itself soon develops a structure, in which free governed relationships between individuals become converted into norm governed relationships between social personae’ ([1969] 1991: 120). This is at first glance the evolution of existential into normative communitas, and one reason why ideological communitas will remain an ideology; the inability for communitas to be maintained in structure. However, it also indicates the important distinction between communitas as appearing in a framed structural context (such as concerts or sport), and communitas as inevitably developing its own structure. Later in his career, Turner (1979b) came to see communitas as liberating human capacities (anti-structural), an unmediated relationship between people, preserving individual distinctiveness (experiential), and as a generalised feeling of unity (emotional) able to be transformed into a ‘memory’ (ephemeral). Most of these definitions reflect his earlier ones, with some interesting developments, such as a type of ‘nostalgic communitas’. Alongside this, however, he also mentions one more: communitas as not emotional (Turner, 1979b). Somewhere along the way, Turner opposed his view of communitas having an emotional effect.

These developments and contradictions oscillate between communitas as anti-structure yet at risk of developing its own structure, and as a connection between individuals that preserves their distinctiveness, does not merge their identities, but fosters a strong relationship between them, as an emotion, as affective but not an emotion, as an experience, a state of mind, a state of being and sometimes pleasurable, yet not always. These contradictions seem more harmful to the concept's potential utility than the issue of abstraction noted by Abrahams, yet despite, or perhaps because of, Turner's equivocations the concept has spread into multiple analytical fields and been applied to phenomena far beyond his initial and later concerns.

Another issue with ambiguous definitions is that communitas often gets confused with similar concepts, especially Durkheim's solidarity, collective consciousness and collective effervescence (Olaveson, 2001; Throop and Laughlin, 2002; Bird et al., 2020). Solidarity is the concept that Turner ([1969] 1991: 120, see also 1982; 2012) most explicitly separates from communitas, stating: ‘[Communitas] is strikingly different from Durkheimian “solidarity”, the force of which depends upon an in-group/out-group contrast’. Solidarity focuses on inclusion and exclusion, where a group finds unity due to an opposing idea. This arises out of collective consciousness which Durkheim ([1893] 2014: 79) describes as the ‘totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society [which] forms a determinate system which has its own life … [it is] diffuse in every reach of society’. Solidarity, then, emerges in uniform thought prompting social cohesion, involving a harmonious attachment to a group (Durkheim, [1893] 2014). Communitas, though it may maintain elements of in-group/out-group contrast, is relational rather than oppositional, and the society-wide dispersed totality of beliefs in conscience collective is at odds with the transient connection of communitas. Communitas is ‘a phase, a moment, not a permanent condition’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 128).

Collective effervescence and communitas, however, are more alike, though Turner scarcely acknowledged this. Communitas arises out of anti-structure, betwixt and between structures in societies. Collective effervescence emerges out of congregations, spaces of societies set apart from the mundane (Durkheim, [1915] 2012). Collective effervescence is inevitably present when communitas is, building up (or into) the experience of communitas (Olaveson, 2001). The similar intense emotions that emerge during collective action are evident when Durkheim emphasises that ‘the very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation’ (Durkheim, [1915] 2012: 218). This both echoes and differs from the intensity of communitas. Collective effervescence is present with people's closeness generating a sense of excitement. Communitas is a deeper sense of connection, one that may be lasting, though the experience itself is essentially fleeting, with communitas reaching into the depths of understanding each other, ‘no longer side by side […but] with one another’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 114).

Analytical use of communitas

Turner's ([1969] 1991) own use of communitas looked at a variety of Ndembu rituals: rites of healing, chief installation, circumcision, funerary, hunting and puberty rites and twin ceremonies. His research spread beyond the Ndembu, as he looked at the anthropology of theatre, historical sub-groups, and eventually, pilgrimage. One field of contemporary communitas which Turner mentions, almost as an aside, is ‘hippie communitas’. He states ‘[hippies] are the “cool” members [of society] … [who] do not have the advantages of national rites de passage – who “opt out” of the status-bound social order and acquire the stigmata of the lowly’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 99). The hippies are an example of those who ‘try to establish “total” communion with one another’, something which continues to be seen in contemporary societies (Turner, [1969] 1991: 126).

Turner's later analyses of pilgrimage with Edith Turner looked at the emergence of communitas outside of strictly ritual bounds (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011; Turner, 1979b). The Turners discuss the actions of pilgrims as seeking communitas that is generally unavailable in mundane life, arguing that pilgrimage has elements of rites of passage such as liminality, where pilgrims are suspended from the rules and regulations that govern everyday life (Turner and Turner, [1978] 2011; Turner, 1979b). Some critique this, saying that pilgrims often have discordant experiences, preventing communitas (Ross, [1978] 2011; see also Coleman, 2002; Eade and Sallnow, 1991; St John, 2001). The prolonged liminality of pilgrimage also interestingly contradicts Turner's own views of unsustainable communitas, and the necessary transience of anti-structure.

In terms of conceptual development, Edith Turner's (2012) elaborations of communitas are important as she was influential in the dissemination of her late husband Victor Turner's ideas. In his later works, Turner seems to be enamoured with romanticised visions of communitas and the joy in connection, which is perhaps a reflection of his personal turn to Christianity and the desire to find the ‘good’ in humanity. Edith Turner's (2012) work advanced this perspective, strongly connecting communitas and joy. Other scholars, too, have expanded upon Turner's early applications of communitas, most commonly viewing communitas by its positive (joyous) attributes, reflecting Turner's enduring idea of ‘total communion’. The question is, how have people utilised communitas, and what characteristics of it have endured past Turner's ambiguities? Turner's initial outlines are fundamental to viewing the expansions of communitas. Whether further applications by other scholars are destructive or productive, its use identifies how various scholars have interpreted communitas, locating them in the ideologies of their disciplines and times, producing scholars as agents of knowledge that interpret and construct communitas in varied ways. No knowledge is 100%, all applications will be partial (Haraway, 1988), but what do these different applications bring to the phenomenon of communitas that is productive to the overall use of it as a concept?

Critiques and contemporary applications

The efficacy of communitas as a concept in and beyond anthropology suggests a phenomenon recognised for its explanatory use. However, Turner's continued emphasis on the ‘depth’ of communitas is often overlooked. Scholars have used communitas to explore human social behaviour in disasters (Jencson, 2001; Matthewman and Uekusa, 2021), riots (Blom, 2008), raves (Rill, 2006; St John, 2008), pilgrimage (Bilu, 1988; Coleman, 2002; Goldstein, 2021; Higgins and Hamilton, 2020; Liutikas, 2021), fan culture and sporting events (Ingham and McDonald, 2003), volunteer and work groups (Wallace, 2006), church services (Griffith and Mathewson, 1981), online and digitally connected communities (Helland, 2000; Herwig, 2009; McKeown, 2013; Valentine and Jensen, 2021), Riverdance and dancing groups (O’Connor, 1996), tourism and events (Bristow, 2020; Jahn et al., 2018) and to create business or leadership models of communitas (Bathurst and Cain, 2013; Pöyhönen, 2018; Ryan, 2013). Bird et al. (2020) argue that often solidarity and communitas are used interchangeably to refer to any instance of ‘togetherness’, which they discuss in terms of humanitarian exchange and community responses to emergencies such as the 2017 Peruvian huiaco disaster. They argue that conflating these terms and not following the ‘full life-cycle’ of disaster response can disregard the significance of each concept in practice and diminishes the impact of peoples’ experiences (Bird et al., 2020).

One of the best examples of engagement with the nuances of Turner's communitas is Myerhoff's description of the Huichol Indians pilgrimage to the sacred place of Wirikuta, in a ‘return to paradise’ (Myerhoff, 1976: 15). The return signifies ‘the land which existed before time and the world began’ (Myerhoff, 1976: 244). The Huichol's sacred journey to Wirikuta is interspersed with rituals that are performed as they travel, their experiences heightened through peyote (one of many significant, traditional symbols), and an ‘ecstasy of communion’ is fostered (Myerhoff, 1976: 124, 226). Myerhoff (1976: 247) comments that there are ‘several kinds of communitas and many paths to reach it’ and describes how the sense of ‘becoming one’ permeates the pilgrims experiences. The re-organisation of society to allow for the pilgrimage is detrimental to the regulatory functions of society, something Myerhoff (1976: 246) recognises as the dialectical relationship with communitas and structure noting that communitas is ‘antithetical to everyday life’. ¹¹ She also describes the experiential physical journey, the psychological engagement with the idea of paradise, the emotional effect of desiring to stay in paradise and the ephemerality in having to leave.

Myerhoff uses communitas to capture the intensity of the Huichol's experience. This intensity has an emotional dimension, and yet this is not a purely joyous experience. The knowledge that the experience will end tints the Huichol's experience with longing and sadness, even while they are feeling an ecstasy in connection to paradise. This is also seen with disaster communitas, for example when a community experiences the intensity of bonding with each other when their everyday world is consumed by an environmental manifestation of anti-structure (Jencson, 2001; Korsbrekke, 2013; see also Turner, 2012). Jencson (2001: 46) details the carnivalesque atmosphere and camaraderie in the Minnesota Red River Valley flood support efforts in 1997, where people had a ‘wonderful time [in] coming together’, despite the inescapable crisis they were experiencing. The flood had ripped through their community, pushing them to try prevent further damage, save those worst affected and rebuild their community. Korsbrekke (2013) notes a similar response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where with the loss of people and homes the community stuck together, transforming the atmosphere (in this case) into a literal carnival. This balance of despair and resilience seems to mimic ‘joy’ through the carnival, and yet there is an ever-present sadness that connects the community beyond their current carnivalesque environment.

Jencson (2001: 48) ties the development of communitas in the flood relief efforts to specific ritual elements, such as characterising the literal boundaries of the flood as akin to the ‘specific, sacralised, bounded space’ of a ritual. She argues that a liminal space emerged, which disbanded hierarchy (citing the mayor's equal contributions to flood relief efforts), where emotions were heightened, and people shared the physiological and embodied experience of manual labour to help save, secure and protect people. Furthermore, she contends that the enforced liminal space develops in ritualistic circumstances. However, her study seems exemplary of non-ritual anti-structure (Jencson, 2001). The heightened emotions display the intensity of communitas, and through Jencson's (2001) descriptions it is evident that bursts of communitas were present in dire moments, and that shared despair can cause connection just as shared joy. Communitas may not have been present the entire time, but in the moments of working with strangers to save people from a quickly flooding house or creating a chain to carry water to people who need it, the co-humanity of communitas was evident.

The Future of Communitas: Taking communitas too far?

Other studies provide tenuous links to communitas. I reiterate here Turner's exclamation that communitas is not an everyday collectivity; it reaches into the roots of people, finding something ‘profoundly communal and shared’ (Turner, [1969] 1991: 126). One example is group tourism communitas, a derivative of pilgrimage, where travellers are temporarily without home or status within a differentiated structure outside of their everyday environment (Bilu, 1988; Choe et al., 2013; Graburn, 1983; Morinis, 1992; Sallnow, 1981; Wang, 1999). Tourism creates a liminal space, which potentiates – but does not guarantee – communitas. Choe et al. (2013) use the rejection of social structure (moving from mundane to free-floating social roles), dissolution of hierarchy and ‘fellow feeling’ as examples of communitas, arguing that tourism entails a self-motivated experience to escape from the mundane, generating egalitarian camaraderie between travellers.

Coleman (2002) contends that when people equate tourism (or pilgrimage) with sites of communitas they overlook the mundane conflicts that inevitably arise throughout travels. He emphasises the importance of ephemerality in communitas and liminality which a prolonged journey may not provide. In contrast to the Huichol, who pursue an idea of paradise, perform rites along the way to build a sense of communitas, use peyote to enhance their emotional journey and connection to the land and each other and only experience communitas at the end of a long journey, contemporary tourism does not express communitas in the same way. The anti-structural elements, for example, are more difficult to achieve, as moving between countries and borders outside of their quotidian structure involves constant confrontation with hierarchy and structure, making the ephemeral escape from structure a struggle. That does not negate the emergence of communitas in all contemporary tourism experiences, but it does limit it. Though scholars such as Choe et al. (2013) describe some elements which lead into communitas, they do not explore the interconnected web of elements such as transience and anti-structure, making their analyses rely on an idea of ‘fellow-feeling’ that, Turner notes ([1969] 1991) does not encompass the potency of communitas.

Other examples focus on the facilitation of liminality which develops communitas (Helland, 2000; Lugosi, 2007; Ryan, 2013), exploring things such as political and business leadership communitas which encourages recognition of the self and other (Bathurst and Cain, 2013; Pöyhönen, 2018), and digital platforms and place-making where people share experiences and develop communities (Herwig, 2009; McKeown, 2013). Often, these conflate marginality, separation, liminality and other forms of separation and communitas, vaguely equating good feelings or a sense of connection with communitas. Some of these depictions (e.g., Herwig, 2009; Lugosi, 2007) articulate solidarity as arising from a sense of conscience collective, focusing upon inclusion and exclusion and social bonding forming a sub-community, rather than the transcendental feeling of oneness that is essential to communitas.

What makes the concept of communitas so powerful are the foundational elements described earlier: the transience, emotionality, experience and anti-structural setting. Without these four elements the analytical potency of communitas is diminished, making the careful delineation of our ideal-types crucial to adequately explore phenomena. In defining communitas Edith Turner (2012: 16) says that communitas is ‘almost beyond strict definition, with almost endless variations’. In a sense, this is so of all concepts. However, this validates Victor Turner's critic's views of communitas being too general to be useful (Abrahams, [1969] 2008). Though Edith Turner means it positively, conflating the concept could render it unusable.

However, how do we assess whether the wide applicability of a concept is misuse or efficacy? While ideal-types in their ‘conceptual purity … cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality’ (Weber, 1949: 34, 90), concepts surely require some common core to be workable. Yet Edith Turner captures something of what has happened to communitas. Others harnessed Victor Turner's initial conceptualisation for its value in identifying a potent panhuman phenomenon. As Turner applied it to diverse circumstances, he began to emphasise different elements. Yet the way people took its surface applicability weakened its validity and value. Further, people – Edith Turner included – focused on the joy that participants supposedly experienced through connection to the exclusion of the other facets of communitas. Turner's own depiction of communitas began to express a romantic vision of the phenomena during his exploration of pilgrimages with Edith Turner. They focused on the joyful powers of connection and the ‘good’ it does for communities, with Edith Turner ([1978] 2011: xli) saying that the ‘benefits of communitas are joy, healing, the gift of “seeing”, mutual help, religious experience, the gift of knowledge, long-term ties with others and humanistic conscience, and the human rights ideal’. This is contradicted by looking at Turner's ([1969] 1991) original texts where he identifies communitas of withdrawal and retreat, and of crisis and catastrophe.

After Victor Turner's death, Edith Turner (2005: 116) stated her desire to ‘find my own way to handle the ritual theory that Victor Turner left me’. She continued this in The Anthropology of Collective Joy (2012), searching for specific joyful emergences of communitas throughout the world. Though she rationalises that she has not ‘dealt with the negative aspects of communitas, nor [does she] show tough realism: for instance, there are no statistics about how much good or harm communitas may do to people’ (Turner, 2012: 222), the consistent reference to collective joy perpetuates misinterpretations.

Empirically, fervent ecstasy can be seen in highly problematic contexts. Scholars cite the Nuremberg rallies, utilising communitas as a cautionary example of not applying ‘progressive, socialist or even democratic ideals’ to the concept (Prendergast, 2011: 64). Edith Turner (2012) herself acknowledges the fears people had of applying communitas to events in fear of this connection to Hitler's rallies, to negative political ideology (see also Cassell, 2014). We cannot know exact emotional responses but restricting communitas to positive experiences of joy constricts our understanding of the scope of our humanity. This is important to consider, given both Victor and Edith Turner's claims that communitas is conceptually valuable in revealing something panhuman.

Conclusion

The many intricacies of communitas all derive from its core quality: that of a collective human experience. The human experience is simultaneously universal – as we are all humans – and fundamentally different, as we are all shaped by diverse cultural and social systems. This is what Turner identified with communitas: this panhuman phenomenon of an essential ‘humankindness’, a universal connection between members of societies (Turner, [1969] 1991). His development of communitas speaks to a ‘desire for a total, unmediated relationship between person and person, […safeguarding their uniqueness] in the very act of realizing their commonness’ (Turner, 1974: 274); a ‘sentiment for humanity’ (Turner, 1974: 274, [1969] 1991: 97). The fundamental basis of communitas is in this universal humankindness. It recognises how unique an individual's experience can be, while realising that, within a collective, something is generated that is characteristically unique to the human species.

Despite some contradictions, communitas remains an important and powerful concept. In an era where human connection is becoming fractured and increasingly mediated by technology, perhaps a deeper understanding of communitas and similar concepts will help us to invigorate our analyses of society, communities and this core element of humanity. The concept of communitas has far-reaching value: for understanding why people seek out certain experiences, how the ecstasy of feeling a fundamental ‘humankindness’ can lead people to act in certain ways, seek out different experiences and become ‘caught up’ in moments where anti-structure potentiates communitas. The efficacy of its use by scholars in anthropology and beyond demonstrates a fascination with moments of human connection. Understanding the characteristics of communitas can help us to recognise the value and conceptual potency of communitas.

In developing a clear understanding of the history of ‘communitas’ and developing an ideal-type, I hope to affirm the conceptual validity and strength of communitas and contribute to conversations around the value of Turner's work. Turner's conceptualisation of communitas is not limited to one set of circumstances, nor to a certain emotional state. These are significant aspects of the eventual emergence of communitas, but the fact that it emerges in sites of anti-structure means there is no strict definition of where it can and cannot occur. Rather, the analytical focus should be on the elements of communitas developed by Victor Turner which I have attempted to delineate as an ideal-type. There is value in both ambiguity and boundaries here, as with many concepts. Too rigid makes a concept barely applicable and analytically useless, too broad makes it insignificant and unsubstantial.

Turner's ([1969] 1991) three types of communitas – existential, normative and ideological – follow a pattern of the spontaneous appearance of communitas, attempts to control and sustain it, and following its failure, the ideological identifications of ‘communitas-friendly’ circumstances. Turner's ambiguities in defining communitas carries through with later scholars’ difficulties in being able to define and identify it. Ranging from a transcendental emotional experience (Turner, [1969] 1991), to it being ‘not an emotion’ (Turner, 1979b: 43), Turner's ambiguities left communitas open for reinterpretation and misinterpretation. His own developments of communitas in some ways reflect his life stages, and the equivocations can at times be mapped from his experiences as an Africanist studying the Ndembu of Zambia, to a converted Christian studying pilgrimages with his wife and co-scholar, Edith Turner.

St John's (2001) call to be cautious with communitas and others’ warnings regarding the overuse of a concept stem from Turner's equivocations, the subsequent misuses and the apparent utility of communitas. Despite this, the concept has continued applicability. Just because scholars apply communitas to situations which might rather be evocations of solidarity or collective effervescence does not disqualify their use. The desire for such a deep human connection to be seen speaks to the power and potency of communitas ideologically and conceptually. In contemporary society the origins of communitas in religion and ritual are important. The sacralisation of the secular (Seed, 2014) brings what were previously identified as religious transcendent experiences into the secular world, broadening the applicability of communitas, the desire for it to be felt and the mystic experience of it. This again exemplifies the efficacy of communitas.

In exploring its development and nuances I am advocating for the continued value and validity of communitas. Though it is a concept with some ambiguities, communitas remains efficacious. The possibility of undermining its use follows misapplications, and misunderstandings of it as a concept, something applicable to almost any concept. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1997: 4) says, ‘words are not concepts and concepts are not words…. But theories are built on words and with words’. At the core of communitas is something fundamentally human, emphasising the panhuman capacities of connection and understanding that we share.