Ryan Lynch - Communitas

I recently learned about the concept of  communitas and how it contrasts to community.  Community is a very broad term relating to a group of people living the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.  Community nowadays can come to represent a more structured setting where people are forced into groups based off of social and financial status, as well as many other societal constructs.  This is where communitas differs from community.  Communitas is the idea of people meeting on an even playing field if you will. Free of societal bonds, and other constraints.  These people have no other predetermined reason to be socializing.  Communitas is unstructured, everybody is equal in this setting as they share a common experience.  Everyone almost constantly experiences community in our lives, but very few of us to get to fully experience communitas in our lives, and if we do it may just be a short period of time.  I think the closest that I have come to experiencing communitas was during my semester abroad.  I used Airbnb for my travels, and each time I visited my host and lived in their flat it felt like an equal experience that we both shared together even though we were strangers to each other.  We both opened up in our separate ways.  Their incredible hospitality was matched with my intrigue and friendliness.  While this equal and common experience may have been only shared between the host, my travel buddy, and myself it still resembled communitas, as it was something I had never experienced before.  Now being back in "community" I cherish those times spent with those random people and wish everyone can at some point in their life have a similar experience.  Community can provide many great things, but it can also feel restrictive and closed off.  Sometimes community is all people know, which is why someone experiences something even close to communitas it can feel incredibly liberating.