Difference between Community and Communitias by Diana Cox

In the Turners’ book Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, he explains several aspects of communitias and community for scholars. The authors try to explain it in order for readers to comprehend the difference between what communitias is and what it turns into, a community. Communitias is a relational quality of full unmediated conservation. It arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups and situations. It liberates identities from the conformity to general norms. Communitias is part of everyone’s experience; it is important to religion, literature, etc. It breaks into society through the interstices of structure in liminality. On the other hand, the definition of a community is a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific space, share government and often share a similar heritage. In most cases a community shares common characteristics or interests. Although communitias and community are defined above it is easier to understand it in simpler terms and grammatical structures. Communitias happens when people are going through the same experience (liminal process), such as a pilgrimage. Communitias is when people relate and communicate with each other without any social structures. They are only relating to each other based on their experience not their place in society. As soon as a structure starts to evolve over time from the outside is when it forms into community. A community has structure and is based on social classes. Communitias holds no prejudices but it over time leads to a place in time where social classes and hierarchy matter.
Although, all of this information is covered with the Turners’ book; it was easier to understand during our class’s discussion. As a class we reviewed these terms and broke them down into smaller concepts to understand all the aspects of communitias and communities. It is not just about understanding the basic concepts; it is about comprehending and applying these two concepts later in life or if nothing else in our papers. As result of reading the Turners’ Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture and having a class discussion I understand these concepts and how they apply to our life. The information above will help explain these terms in such a way that anyone from scholars and students to blog readers will understand them.