community of equal individuals (1967:99ff.; 1969:96; 1982:47); an essential and
generic human bond (1969:97; 1985:233); a set of egalitarian, direct, non-rational
bonds between concrete and historical individuals (1969:131, 177; 1974:47); and a
deep, inherently emotional experience or state (1969:136ff.; 1974:46, 201, 205,
274). Also paralleling Durkheim’s collective effervescence, Turner thought that
communitas emerges in ritual and characterizes certain social gatherings. He
distinguished three different types of communitas: spontaneous or existential
communitas, which is characteristic of events such as counterculture ‘happenings’,
rock concerts and pilgrimage phenomena; normative communitas, in which
spontaneous communitas is translated into a set of moral and behavioural codes and
doctrines in order to normalize and regulate social behaviour along the lines of the
original experience; and ideological communitas, in which the ethos or ethic of the
communitas experience is translated into an ideology or blueprint, such as in
utopian societies or cults, or the ‘hippie’ communes of the American counterculture
(V.Turner 1969:132; 1973:191–230; 1974:169; 1979:45–8; see also B.C.Alexander
1991).
The ontological experience of connectedness ravers so often report as central to
raving is the experience of existential collective effervescence/communitas, and
possesses five distinct characteristics.
Electricity, exaltation, enthusiasmBoth the scant treatment and lack of clarity attending to sociological discussions of
effervescent rituals are partly due their ethereal nature. Durkheim described such
rituals as events infused by electricity, ecstasy and enthusiasm:
[Effervescence]...quickly launches [ritual participants] to an extraordinary
height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference
in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each one
echoing the others. The initial impulse is thereby amplified each time it is
echoed, like an avalanche that grows as it goes along. And since passions so
heated and so free from all control cannot help but spill over, from every side
there are nothing but wild movements, shouts, downright howls, and
deafening noises of all kinds that further intensify the state they are expressing.
(Durkheim 1995:217–18)Turner echoed Durkheim’s descriptions, and wrote that such rituals produce
‘direct, immediate, and total confrontations of human identities’ and ‘for the hippies
—as indeed for many millenarian and “enthusiastic” movements—the ecstasy of
spontaneous communitas is seen as the end of human endeavour’ (V Turner 1969:
132, 138–9). As St John (2001a) notes, these and other descriptions of communitas
bear a decidedly clinical ring to them, despite the fact that, as I have pointed out
elsewhere (Olaveson 2001), both scholars were writing about and Turner was
actually observing—embodied and extraordinary physical feats and mental states
RAVE AS NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT? 87