Victor Turner on Liminality and Communitas

Found on a site called Creative Resistance, here's an article that somewhat clarifies Victor Turner's dense, but profound concepts of Liminality and Communitas - both ideas being central to our understanding of The Well-Played Game, and all that is inherent therein.

"A limen is...literally a 'threshold.' A pilgrimage centre, from the standpoint of the believing actor, also represents a threshold, a place and moment 'in and out of time,' and such an actor - as the evidence of many pilgrims of many religions attests - hopes to have there direct experience of the sacred, invisible or supernatural order, either in the material aspect of miraculous healing or in the immaterial aspect of inward transformation of spirit or personality.

"Turner discovered that a potent and distinctive form of social community which he called communitas emerges in the liminal stages of pilgrimages. Communitas means relationships among people, ?jointly undergoing ritual transition? through which they experience an intense sense of intimacy and equality, an 'I-Thou' awareness. 'Communitas is spontaneous, immediate, concrete... undifferentiated, egalitarian, direct, non-rational...' In the process of liminality, the pilgrims progressively achieve a release from conformity to general norms and may experience a profound and collective sentiment for humanity which includes or is stimulated by the quest and presence of a sacred space, god and spirit."

DeKoven, on the other hand, notes that similar experiences of communitas and liminality are often experienced by players of, for example, Rock-Scissors-Paper Tag and Junkyard Sports. At least as often, as a matter of contended fact, as at Mardi Gras and other ritual pilgrimages.

In his comment on my article "Boredom Kills," embedded Player Chris Dickson notes that Turner is intelligently cited on pages 15-27 in the free-for-the-download, 12-megabyte book "Beyond Role and Play."