Edith Turner offers an excerpt from
the preface of her book, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. In the
excerpt, she recounts an incident while doing fieldwork among whale hunters in Alaska
when a moment of "collective effervescence" was generated by the
community in an effort to influence environmental conditions to better support
their whale hunting activities. When anthropological research enters a culture
for the purposes of fieldwork, it may exist as a strange seed inside the womb
of that culture. It grows and strains against its flesh, producing something
entirely new—a combination of that culture’s own truth, and the gift of a
vision of what that society is really like. This book describes scenes where
light dawns for all kinds of groups, times, and places, where people stumble on
“the best time they’ve ever had” – the time of communitas, unexpected and
extraordinary. Read more.
