| Abstract: | 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. |
