Delivering Communitas: Wilderness Adventure and the Making of Community

Abstract

AbstractThis paper offers 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 how the organization and its trip leaders went about delivering communitas, emphasizing the key elements of establishing the mission, selecting and training trip leaders, setting the tone, maximizing authority, and guiding interpretations. This study concludes by raising some general questions about authenticity, community, and structural transformation when leisure is used as a setting for delivering communitas.KEYWORDS: Communitaswilderness adventureethnographysocial integrationcommunity