Delivering Communitas: Wilderness Adventure and the Making of Community

This paper presents an ethnographic account of Wilderness Inquiry (WI), a leisure service provider with the organizational goal of delivering communitas, an intense form of social bonding. At WI, delivering communitas was linked to broader social goals of social integration and equality. However, WI was also a leisure provider, and participants arrived expecting a leisure experience. The paper provides an ethnographic account of in what manner the organization and its trip leaders went about delivering communitas, emphasizing the lock opener elements of establishing the mission, selecting and training trip leaders, setting the tone, maximizing authority, and guiding interpretations. This application of mind concludes by raising some general questions about authenticity, community, and structural transformation when leisure is used as a setting for delivering communitas.

KEYWORDS: Communitas, wilderness adventure, ethnography, social integration, community

Introduction

The combination of the of gold Oldies playing on the radio, a post-trip overdose of chocolate and report and three days of canoeing in the rain made for a quiet van ride to the Wilderness Inquiry parking doom the official beginning and ending point of our trip. Gord broke the silence of the van with a question for our trip leader. "Hey Scott what's another word for "motley?" He explained to Scott that he was looking for a word to describe our cluster and had chosen motley because it described a diverse assemblage with varied backgrounds. This question sent all of us into a search for the completed word to describe, our clump experience. Virginia said that we emergencyed a word that described by what means when you bring different things together it makes something beautiful. Someone mentioned "kaleidoscope," and another intimateed "mosaic," but neither of these suggestions satisfied Gord, and the collection became quiet as folks continued to think about other possibilities. Scott then spoke up "What about "quilt?" After a pause, Gord said softly "Ye We were woven together in this experience, flat if only briefly."

How did our canoe trip unroll into such a profound experience of togetherness? When we departed days earlier we had little expectation other than to relax and be delighted with three days in the wilderness. by means of the time we said our goodbye we all believed that together we had made something special. Our farewells were emotional; Virginia and I hugg tighdy. Michael and Gord clasped hands, and quietly squeeze outed their appreciation for having had the opportunity to secure to know one another. And as Dave departed, he told me that the greatest in quantity important part of the trip was, "all the different clan and of different ages. When I first saw Virginia upon the trip, I was really surprised, and then, after finding on the outside she was seventy-five years advanced in years . . ." After a pause he added thoughtfully "It was really neat seeing family come together."

The term to capture the feeling of equality, community, and togetherness we experienced upon the trip described above is communitas. First coined by the agency of anthropologist Victor Turner (1969), communitas rise s when people step out of their structural parts and obligations, and into a sphere that is decidedly "anti-structural." In this anti-structural sphere, nation are "betwixt and between the categories of ordinary social life," and the masterys of everyday life can be altered, inverted, and made topsy-turvy (Turner 1974 p 273) These conditions feeded an emerging social dynamic characterized by the agency of feelings of equality, linkage, belonging, and assemblage devotion to a transcendent goal (Arnould & Price, 1993) And, as gymnast (1969, p. 139) suggested, communitas "has something magical about it. Subjectively, there is in it the feeling of endles power":

When the vein style, or "fit" of spontaneous communitas is on us, we place a high value upon personal honesty, openness, and lack of pretensions or pretentiousness. We perceive that it is important to relate directly to another someone as he presents himself in the here-and-now, to understand him in a sympathetic way, independent from the culturally defined encumbrances of his part status, reputation, class, caste, sex or other structural niche. Individuals who interact with individual another in the mode of spontaneous communitas become totally absorbed into a single synchronized, fluid incident (1982, p. 48)

Once solely the domain of ritual, communitas has begun to go into the realm of leisure. There is a growing collection of studies that document communitas emerging in contemporary leisure settings that exhibit similar anti-structural qualities to their ritual counterpart. These include like settings as adult fantasy baseball camp (Brandmeyer & Alexander, 1986) white water river rafting trips (Arnould & Price, 1993) "alternative" bus travel (Neumann, 1993) mountain man rendezvous reenactments (Belk & Costa, 1998) and music festivals and raves (St John 1997; Trammachi, 2000) Indeed, gymnast (1982) suggested that what was emerging in contemporary life were permanent anti-structural settings of that kind as bars, pubs, cafes, and social clubs-spaces where race can go to temporarily pace out of dieir everyday lives and into a world of ambiguity and possibility. In devise with the emergence of these spaces is a service industry that aims to deliver this world of possibility and magic to those wishing to enter