problematical essentialism underlying Turner’s limen, of which communitas is a
modality. Especially in its application to pilgrimage phenomena, communitas has
become a reified and all-encompassing ‘primal unity’ that fails to account for the
underlying and backstage diversities, tensions and multiplicity of competing voices
in such phenomena. St John also notes that, despite a late theoretical interest,
Turner was not an anthropologist of the body and ‘the communions he had in mind
tended to be clinically social, not somatic’ (St John 2001a:60).
Ben Malbon’s Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality (1999), thus far the longest
academic publication seriously to treat the embodied experiential dimension of
clubbing or raving, also draws on the concept of communitas, along with
Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of ‘unicity’. While Malbon’s book is a turning point in
ethnographies/geographies of dance-based cultures, he neither understands nor
adequately analyses Turner’s ideas, rejecting the heuristic value of communitas
according to the unsubstantiated assumptions of other dance ethnographers rather
than addressing Turner’s work directly. On the other hand, St John’s critique of the
essential and disembodied communitas is a useful corrective, highlighting the need
to heed the complexity and carnality of contemporary ritualized social movements
and gatherings, such as rave and dance events. Acknowledging this critique, in the
next section I further probe the early formulations made by Hutson and Tramacchi.
Connectedness and the rave experience as collective
effervescence/communitasÉmile Durkheim’s concept of ‘collective effervescence’ was given its fullest
treatment in his last and greatest work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(Durkheim 1995). While it has recently experienced something of a revival in the
social sciences in the works of such theorists as Michel Maffesoli, Chris Shilling,
Philip Mellor and other ‘neo-Durkheimians’ who discuss the resurgence of sacred,
communal social gatherings and collectives, it had originally received little attention
—a circumstance likely due to the fact that Durkheim had never given it precise
definition, often using it interchangeably with such terms as ‘moral density’,
‘concentration’, ‘heat’, ‘sentiments’, ‘emotion’ and ‘delirium’ (Jones 1986; Nielsen
1999; Ramp 1998). Nevertheless, it is important to note that Durkheim did not
intend the term to be epiphenomenal. As I discuss below, he thought collective
effervescence was a feature of certain types of social assemblies, especially religious
rituals. Possessing several characteristics, it is: inherently communal and collective;
energetic, electric, or ecstatic; an essentially non-rational affective state or experience;
ephemeral or temporary in nature; and a possible source of great cultural creativity.
Victor Turner’s widely cited concept of ‘communitas’ is central to his theories of
ritual and social creativity. Like Durkheim, Turner often had difficulty precisely
defining communitas, but cautioned that it was not a mere epiphenomenon, but an
ontological reality: ‘Just because the communitas concept is elusive, hard to pin
down, it is not unimportant’ (V.Turner 1969:29; see also 1974:231).
Turner described it variously as: an unstructured or rudimentarily structured
86 TIM OLAVESON