Unlikely Communitas-Will Geiger

This afternoon my father, who works for the PEW environment group, sent me an email that had hyperlinked into it a video documenting Wilderness Week. Wilderness Week, which took place September 26-30th, is a gathering of people from various conservation organizations, interest groups, and some people who just plain old like the outdoors. They all come to Washington D.C. to meet with representatives to advocate wilderness in over a dozen states, lobbying for over 2 million acres of wilderness. In the video, a man named Mike Matz discusses the value in all these people coming together to work to protect wilderness. He explains that everyone is there to do the same thing and through that they form a camaraderie with each other. Turner discusses in "Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture" the concept of communitas, specifically "spontaneous communitas" as a transient personal experience of togetherness. The cause that all 120 people that participated in Wilderness Week shared gave each individual a medium that they could connect to the group as a whole with. The individuals participating in Wilderness Week took time away from their respective families, jobs, and lives in general in order to devote themselves to a focused effort of wilderness advocacy during that week. In this way they are stripped of their normative customs and placed in a setting in which communitas is able to take place.