Victor Turner
The Ritual Process
1995

It is through the work of Victor Turner that I came to truly appreciate and understand the meaning and charge of the term ‘liminal’ as a threshold inherent to a ritual of transformation. As an anthropologist, Turner spent time studying the rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and teases out an idea of inter human relation beyond superlative structures. In this text, Turner introduces the term communitas referring to an unstructured community in which participants function sans hierarchy. I am interested in the way communitas can be paradoxically applied within the BDSM / kink communities.