communitas

Unadapted borrowing from Latin commūnitās. Doublet of community.

communitas (countable and uncountable, plural communitates)

1. (sociology) An unstructured community of common experience.
   • 2012, Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film, →ISBN, pages 17–18:

     Monastic life, pilgrimage, bonds of friendship formed among the group of young initiates, contemporary teenage counter-culture movements are all good examples of communitates.

2. (sociology) The very spirit of community; an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness.
   • 1986, Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press, page 43:

     A sense of harmony with the universe is made evident and the whole planet is felt to be communitas.

   • 1986, Victor W. Turner, Contesting the Sacred, Routledge, published 1991:

     The achievement of communitas is the pilgrim's fundamental motivation.

   • [2004, Kate Fox, “Rules of Sex”, in Watching the English, Hodder & Stoughton, →ISBN, page 330:

     Their focus is on group bonding, and the euphoric, almost transcendental experience of becoming one with the music and the crowd (which sounds like a version of what the anthropologist Victor Turner called ‘communitas’—an intense, intimate, liberating kind of group bonding, experienced only in ‘liminal’ states).]

   • 2013, Isher-Paul Sahni, “More than Horseplay”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 35, page 81:

     Liminality, in other words, engenders communitas by levelling social distinctions while at the same time destabilizing normative structures and inspiring criticism.

From commūnis (“common, public”) +‎ -tās.

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /komˈmuː.ni.taːs/, [kɔmˈmuːnɪt̪äːs̠]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /komˈmu.ni.tas/, [komˈmuːnit̪äs]

commūnitās f (genitive commūnitātis); third declension

1. a community
2. public spirit, a sense of duty and willingness to serve one's community

Third-declension noun.

• commūniō
• commūnis

• “communitas”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “communitas”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• communitas in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• communitas in Ramminger, Johann (2016 July 16 (last accessed)) Neulateinische Wortliste: Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700‎, pre-publication website, 2005-2016