Communitas

The sense of foreignness that many migrants experience, at least at the beginning of their journey in a new country, seems, at first glance, to contradict Turner’s concept of communitas.

Turner (1957) described communitas as a sense of belonging to something greater, something beyond the individual. It is the joy found in shared group experience. It is a collective feeling in which the group itself acquires meaning. What is interesting is that this feeling sometimes emerges without preparation.

Is it possible to experience communitas when leaving behind the familiar and moving to a new place? A place where the language and customs are different from those we once knew?

I believe it is.

Migrants often enter what I call “social bubbles.” Within these, communitas is strong. The sense of belonging is deeply felt. It can emerge through a song in a familiar language, through music, or through a national anthem from the country of origin. It can arise in conversations that reinforce what we believe in, who we are in familiar smells and tastes from home.

A shared collective experience.

A deep experience in a foreign place.

I would like to take this idea one step further and suggest that migrants’ sense of communitas can also emerge with local people. It may arise in a shared moment on a football field while cheering for a team, or even in a spontaneous moment of singing at a concert.

Last week, I attended a jazz concert. At the end of the encore (there were three), the musicians returned and spontaneously played Killing Me Softly. People who did not know each other, who had not even looked at one another before, began to hum and then to sing. A process of communitas emerged among complete strangers.

For a brief moment, the entire hall became one.

A feeling of belonging. And every voice mattered, because without it, the music would not be whole.

A place where sounds become one. Where people belong to something beyond themselves to the place, to the space, and to those around them.

Perhaps communitas does not disappear in migration.

Perhaps it simply changes form.

Sometimes it is a home.

And sometimes it is a moment.