Jake Andrich- "Community vs. Communitas" (Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture)

When some people are on a spiritual journey, they join is being a communitas, which is very different from a community.  A community is a place that we refer to in our everyday lives as just a local group of people, having no sacred meaning to it.  A communitas is known to be an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality.  The only way community and communitas are similar to each other is that they both involve a group of people.  In a community everyone feels different and far beyond one unit.  In a communitas, everyone feels as if they are one unit.  Everyone feels socially equal.  In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, it mentions that “Communitas, or social antistructure.  A relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion, between definite and determinate identities, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances…The difference between structure and communitas is not the same as that between secular and sacred; communitas is an essential and generic human bond.”  It also mentions that communitas is an “essential and generic human bond”, meaning that when people are on a pilgrimage or a spiritual journey people tend to form these bonds with each other where even if they only knew each other for a day or so, they would feel like they've known each other forever and feel like they’re best friends.  When on a spiritual journey, people are known to form into a communitas, rather than just a normal community.