In permanent transition: Multiple temporalities of communitas in the Enawenê-nawê ritual everyday

This article extends Turner’s central idea about the dialectic between communitas and structure, which he understood to generate social and historical dynamics across cultures. For Turner, this tended to be a story of temporal alternation and the constitutive instability of social structures which are always being potentially undone by communitas. In this article, the author starts from the premise that Enawenê-nawê society is hyperstructured – like other central Brazilian societies made famous by Lévi-Strauss and others – and that as such, it also needs a heavy dose of communitas. The article is about the nested temporal scales at which communitas interacts with structure. It argues that the Enawenê-nawê have achieved permanent communitas – an egalitarian social structure – by living in a permanent state of transition.