communitas

Borrowed from Latin commūnitās. Doublet of community.

communitas

1. An unstructured community in which people are equal.
2. The very spirit of community; an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness.
   • [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).]

• 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.

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

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /komˈmuː.ni.taːs/, [kɔmˈmuːnɪt̪äːs̠]
• (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 (accessed 16 July 2016) Neulateinische Wortliste: Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700‎, pre-publication website, 2005-2016