Communitas

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A profound sense of connection and unity arises among individuals during shared experiences or collective activities, often manifesting in rituals or community events
2. This concept encompasses the spontaneous bonding and solidarity that can occur when people gather for significant communal occasions, fostering collective identity
3. An intense feeling of collective belonging develops among people engaged in shared experiences, particularly noticeable in communal gatherings or rituals

Etymology: Latin "commūnitās" was a perfectly ordinary word meaning something like "community" or "fellowship," built from "commūnis," "common, shared by all." English already had "community" as a doublet of this same Latin source, which came in through Old French, so "communitas" is the older-style form that entered English directly, without the French filter. That is why it still looks strikingly Latin on the page. The word's modern life owes most to the anthropologist Victor Turner, who revived it in his writing on ritual and social structure. Turner used "communitas" as a technical term for the intense, almost egalitarian bond that forms among people who share a threshold experience, such as a pilgrimage, initiation, or festival, where ordinary rank and status briefly dissolve. The term gave scholars a way to name a feeling that "community" alone could not capture.

Synonyms: community, collectivity