The Anthropology of Collective Joy →

Paul Stoller:

…The characteristics of communitas show it to be almost beyond strict definition, with almost endless variations. Communitas often appears unexpectedly. It has to do with a sense felt by a group of people when their life together takes on full meaning…Communitas can only be conveyed through stories…

Here Edie tapped into something extraordinarily significant: the power of narrative to connect writers to readers, the power of narrative, in the words of the psychologist Jerome Bruner, to construct realities — a narrative construction of a reality that is irreducible to formulae to or a set of abstract theoretical principles.

Via Karen Dietz.