Communitas - Love and Be Loved

Victor Turner is a well-known anthropologist who has written much on the subject of something he terms 'communitas.' Communitas is born of the human desire for social connection, essentially, the need both to love and be loved (my interpretation) which can only arise in social situations of relative equality. This is opposed to a life lived within the confines of artificial social structures whose status barriers, among other things, separate and divide humanity, limiting or preventing the experience of communitas. It therefore is largely, though not exclusively, present among people living on the margins of society. 

There is some debate as to what degree our social structures actually aid in the smooth functioning of society and to what extent they are the origin of problems we believe them to be keeping in check. My interest in this subject is related to something Joseph Campbell once said:

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

It is my sincere belief that people feel most alive when they are intimately engaged with life. By intimate I mean that experience of warmth that is the result of an emotional openness and closeness to life, not restricted to one sole individual--one's husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, lover or best friend. 

Those relationships are only one way of possibly experiencing an intimacy with life. A more pervasive experience of being alive is dependent on a much broader sort of openness to life generally, including, paradoxically, the end of life, which is simultaneously also a beginning--death and vitality are intimately connected and so any experience of being deeply alive requires an openness to both.

Widening our circles of connection may be one way to inject a little vitality in our lives, deepening our existing connections could be another. Cultivating greater appreciation of, and sensitivity to, the subtle beauty and nuances in the details of our lives may be helpful as well.

Communitas to my way of thinking is the only way we can experience true social vitality. There is a lot of truth in the well known aphorism 'united we stand, divided we fall.' It seems to me that any experience of being alive as a human is dependent on social openness and inclusiveness, the necessary component of which is a sense of relative equality, a sense of all being in this together.

I recommend the Czech film Divided We Fall. It came out in 2001, won some awards and conveys in story form some of what I am trying to talk about here. Enjoy!