ABSTRACT
Anthropologist Victor Turner uses the term “communitas” to describe a sensation of shared humanity that occurs during the liminal phase of a rite of passage. Communitas is a “structure of feeling,” a term Raymond Williams employs to describe an affect that reflects a community’s lived experience “in solution” (1977, 133). In Turner’s example of Ndembu ritual, communitas arises between participants in the throes of an upheaval or transition as they simultaneously labor to discard the roles that have previously supported their phenomenological understanding of how they are embedded in a social matrix and begin to formulate a different mode of subjectivity.
