The Ritual Process: Liminality and Communitas — Key Concepts
Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death
Rites de passage involve three phases (as van Gennep defined): separation, liminal/threshold period, and aggregation/reincorporation.
During liminality, individuals are in-between, with ambiguous or undefined status; they “belong” to neither the old state nor the new one.
Two overarching models of society during rites:
Structure: fixed offices, statuses, and hierarchical differentiation.
Communitas: a temporary, unstructured, egalitarian bond among initiands or participants.
Communitas is not simply the sacred vs secular; it also includes a recognition of a generic human bond that can cut across status boundaries.
The ritual process interplays between structural differentiation and moments of communitas, creating a dialectic that can generate new social forms or reinvigorate old ones.
Liminality
Liminality refers to the ambiguous phase in rites where participants are between social states (threshold people).
Charms of liminality: death, womb, invisibility, darkness, wilderness, etc.; neophytes may appear as if they have “nothing” (no status, property, rank).
In liminality, distinctions of rank disappear; symbols emphasize equality and communal bonds.
Key features often include passivity, humility, anonymity, and obedience to ritual authorities.
Sexual continence and a temporary suspension of ordinary kinship obligations are common in liminal periods.
Liminality can reveal two models of social relatedness: (i) a structured, differentiated society, and (ii) a communitas where all initiands are temporarily equal and united by common purpose.
The Liminality of an Installation Rite (Ndembu Kanongesha example)
High chief position is paradoxical: apex of structure and symbol of the community as an undifferentiated whole.
Kumukindyila (Reviling of the Chief-Elect): chief-elect is stripped of status, humiliated, and subjected to communal critique before installation.
Kafwana (a senior headman) mediates the process, administering ritual medicine and moral admonitions to the chief-elect.
The rite dramatizes the liminal phase: the chief-elect is clothed like an initiand, renamed as mwadyi, and undergoes tests of endurance and humility.
Outcome: public aggregation with the ceremonial installation, but the liminal experience underscores the community’s authority over the chief and reinforces communal bonds.
Themes: the “power of the weak” (commoners’ authority over the sovereign during liminality) and the transformation of power through ritual humility.
Attributes of Liminal Entities
Liminal beings are often described as tabula rasa, blank slates awaiting inscription by communal wisdom.
They are modeled to learn the group’s values through instruction, ordeal, and symbolic acts.
The liminal phase is frequently accompanied by a mystic or sacred dimension—powers believed to shape the neophyte’s future role.
In many traditions, liminality involves strategies to temper ego, such as public rebuke, ritual fasting, and controlled exposure to danger.
Examples across cultures show that liminality is linked to broader themes: birth, death, renewal, fertility, and the earth’s powers.
Liminality Contrasted with Status System
Turner provides a binary framework to contrast liminality with status structure:
Transition/state vs totality/partiality
Homogeneity/heterogeneity
Communitas/structure
Equality/inequality
Anonymity/systems of nomenclature
Absence of property/possession of property
Absence of status/status
Nakedness/uniform clothing/distinctions of clothing
Sexual continence/sexuality
Minimalism of sex distinctions/maximization of sex distinctions
Absence of rank/rank distinctions
Humility/pride of position
Silence/speech
These oppositions capture how liminal periods temporarily suspend or invert ordinary social order, only to re-integrate into structure later.
The religious and ethical implications of liminality recur in monastic life, pilgrimage, and other egalitarian or utopian visions.
Communitas: Model and Process
Communitas is a mode of relationship between concrete individuals characterized by direct, experiential, and often egalitarian bonds that stand apart from, and sometimes against, formal social structure.
Turner distinguishes three modalities:
Existential communitas: spontaneous, in-the-moment human solidarity or “happening.”
Normative communitas: codified or rule-governed forms that arise when communitas becomes institutionalized (usually through rituals and myths that simplify structure).
Ideological communitas: utopian or doctrinal visions of a society without structured inequalities, often articulated in religious or political movements.
Communitas tends to emerge in the interstices of structure, during liminal or transitional periods, and is often linked to a sense of moral equality and universal human bonds.
However, communitas cannot stand alone; it risks becoming chaos or despotism if untempered by structure, and vice versa: structure without communitas can become cold, oppressive.
Two classic exemplars of the dynamic between structure and communitas are Franciscan poverty and the Sahajiya movement in Bengal.
Modalities of Communitas
Existential Communitas
A moment of unstructured, immediate human connection; highly affective and transformative.
Normative Communitas
Emerges when spontaneous communitas is organized into social forms, rules, and institutions; can lead to reforms or rigidity.
Ideological Communitas
A utopian blueprint that seeks to realize a communitas-like social order; often crystallizes into movements that challenge existing structures.
The relationship among these modalities is dialectical: existential communitas can give rise to normative and ideological forms, while those forms can re-ignite or suppress existential experiences.
Franciscan Poverty and Communitas
Francis of Assisi as a poet of existential communitas who advocated poverty as a experiential pathway to social equality and humility.
Rule of 1221 vs Rule of 1223 shows a tension: the ideal of poverty and total renunciation (useless possessions) vs practical organization and property management to sustain communities.
Two branches emerged: Conventuals (more structured, institutionalized) and Spirituals (fiercely committed to poverty and usus pauper, sometimes in opposition to the hierarchy).
The spiritual critique highlighted tensions between property, obedience, and poverty; institutionalization gradually eroded Franciscan spontaneity.
Apocalyptic and utopian currents often accompanied communitas in Franciscan history, with moves toward a more disciplined structure over time.
Communitas and Symbolic Thought in Other Traditions
Caitanya and the Sahajiyas (Bengal, 15th–16th c.): devotion (bhakti) to Krishna as a communal experience; ritual sexuality among initiates symbolized the ultimate unity of Krishna and Radha, expressing a form of communitas beyond conventional marriage and caste rules.
The Sahajiya emphasis on breaking social distinctions (parakiya vs svakiya) and uniting lovers as an expression of divine love reflects communitas in a socially unbound form.
The Sahajiyas’ lower-caste, non-traditional partners and temple practices illustrate how communitas can challenge caste and kinship hierarchies; later movements split over doctrinal disputes, but the communitas spirit persisted in art, music, and devotion.
The Bhakti/Sahajiya scenario shows how the tension between structure (caste, marriage, property) and communitas (devotional equality, universal love) produces dynamic religious evolution.
Communitas in Kinship-Based Societies: Illustrative Cases
Tallensi (Fortes) and matrilineal vs patrilineal tensions
Patrilineal dominance (jural and political authority) vs matrilineal ties (spiritual and communitarian bonds) create “structural vs communitarian” tensions.
Mothers’ brother connections (matrilateral ties) function as bridges to wider community, balancing rigid agnatic (patrilineal) controls.
Bakologo (diviner’s shrine) embodies communitas through matrilateral lineage ties, linking distant lineages and expressing communal solidarity against strict structure.
Ashanti (matrilineal) ntoro divisions and blood symbolism
Ntoro divisions (e.g., Bosommuru, Bosomtwe) tie to water, rivers, and fertility; ntoro is father-to-son in lineage but also carries spiritual power linking to broader community and ritual life.
The Ashanti’s white symbolism (waters, rivers, and the Sky God) often contrasts with red symbolism (femininity, earth, and witchcraft), illustrating gendered dimensions of communitas in a patrilineal polity.
The matrilineal abusua (clan) and ntoro connections show a strong communitas dimension across a patrilineal political structure.
Ndembu: the Kanongesha installation demonstrates the liminal order within a strong hierarchical polity, where communitas transcends and then informs political authority.
Millenarian Movements and the Power of the Weak
Millenarian or apocalyptic movements often dramatize liminality and communitas as people pronounce radical equality and shared ownership, sometimes abolishing property or structure temporarily.
Such movements tend to oscillate: initial egalitarian communitas can give way to new structures as they institutionalize, leading to new forms of hierarchy.
Turner discusses Gandhi’s influence and other reform movements to illustrate how communitas interacts with political and organizational life.
Hippies, Communitas, and the Power of the Weak
Modern Western contexts (beat generation, hippies, and similar movements) display communitas through immediacy, spontaneity, and egalitarian exchanges—often with a critique of formal structure.
Turner notes the paradox: spontaneous communitas can be transformative but needs structure to translate into durable social change; unchecked communitas can devolve into chaos without norms.
The desire for a living, direct “we” experience contrasts with the necessity of lawful, organized society; the balance between structure and communitas remains a constant social task.
Structure and Communitas in Kinship-Based Societies (Brief Synthesis)
In many societies, kinship and descent systems (patrilineal or matrilineal) shape both structure and communitas; the weak or marginal often hold ritual or symbolic power that can mediate conflicts and sustain social cohesion.
Communitas can appear as a counterweight to rigid lineage claims, enabling broader solidarities and moral concerns beyond immediate kin groups.
The dynamic is dialectical: excessive emphasis on structure suppresses human solidarity; excessive emphasis on communitas risks anarchy and political instability.
The Big Picture: The Ritual Process in Practice
The ritual process is a constant negotiation between structure and communitas; both are essential for human society.
Spontaneous communitas provides the energy for renewal and moral vision, while structure provides the means to organize, produce, and sustain a community over time.
Historical examples (Franciscan poverty, Caitanya and Sahajiya, Ndembu rites, Tallensi bakologo, Ashanti ntoro) illustrate how this dialectic plays out in religion, politics, kinship, and daily life.
The enduring lesson: any healthy society must allow for moments of communitas to rejuvenate and reframe structure, but never lose sight of the practical necessity of organized social life.