The Sacredness of the People: The Communitas of Revolution and Liberation

Abstract

We have seen the communitas of disaster as a semi-miraculous non-rational phenomenon. Why did people actually love working together in the Dakota flood? We wonder at communitas that may even be present when death is certain, as in the cancer ward. We seem to be born for just such emergencies. We can see an opening beyond; we make a kind of jump into hope, into the future, such as occurs in the now-generally accepted near death experience. We were born for this hope.

One’s-self I sing—a simple, separate Person;

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass