Normative communitas: Katrina Thralls

The book equates communitas with social antistructure, yet people are without exception drawn both to social structure, which seems to be inherent in most or all societies, and communitas, “which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances.” So how do people reconcile these not-quite-opposite, yet seemingly incompatible desires? Normative communitas, “the attempt to capture and preserve spontaneous communitas in a system of ethical precepts and legal rules.” How can this be? If something is attempted, is it really spontaneous? Can you have a system of antistructure? The book claims that “religious systems and pilgrimage systems are examples of normative communitas, each originating in a nonutilitarian experience of brotherhood and fellowship, which the participating group attempts to preserve, in and by its religious, moral, and legal codes.” While not the only form of religious system, what I have seen of churches, both dogmatic and non-creedal, offers an alternative perspective to this. While there is community, it is usually a community with particular social roles and mediated communication that arises intentionally, which in my opinion does not fit with the definition of communitas, despite the separation between spontaneous and normative communitas.