Communitas

This book presents three liturgical rights within an Afro-Baptist oral tradition of worship: the Wednesday night prayer meeting, the Deacon's devotion, and the Congregational worship. This examination provides one foundational study necessary to the creation of a liturgical theology of African American Christianity, through the study of sacred ritual within the lived experience of members of a community of traditional orallity and contemporary literacy, which together create a unique collective encounter of the Holy.

Communitas is inspired fellowship; a group's pleasure in sharing common experiences; being 'in the zone' - as in music, sport, and work; the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning. The experience of communitas, almost beyond strict definition and with almost endless variations, often appears unexpectedly.

Communitas is inspired fellowship; a group's pleasure in sharing common experiences; being 'in the zone' - as in music, sport, and work; the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning. The experience of communitas, almost beyond strict definition and with almost endless variations, often appears unexpectedly.

This book is a critical, transdisciplinary examination of a broad range of philosophical ideas, theoretical concepts, and artistic projects of community in the 20th and 21st century in the context of global/local social and political changes. This volume opens new vitas by focusing on carefully selected instances of multipronged crises in which existing concepts of commonality are questioned, reformulated, or even speculatively designed with a (better) future in view. As many authors of this volume argue, in the face of today’s unprecedented global ecological and economic challenges speculative design is of utmost importance as it can foster alternative, unthought-of forms of connectivity that go far beyond progressivist narratives of nation, corporation, and nuclear family. Focusing on the situations of upheaval, both historical and fabulated, the collection not only examines how multipronged crises trigger antagonisms between egalitarian forms of communitas and the normative concept of the nation (and other normative forms of communities) as a community that separates and excludes. It also looks closely at philosophical and artistic projects that strive to go beyond the dichotomies and typically extrapolated utopias, envisaging new political economies, ways of living and alternative relational structures. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies, cultural studies, political studies, media studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, critical anthropology.

Roberto Esposito, a leading Italian philosopher, deconstructs the notion of community by examining its etymological roots in the Latin munus, or gift, and then reads against classical political interpretations of community.

-- Lewis Mumford