“Very communitas”: Testing a hypothesis in creative writing, methodologically

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of communitas in practice (as a loanword from cultural anthropology and social sciences), what it is and what it can offer creative writing, to test whether it might apply to different creative practice settings. Specifically for this essay, the setting is WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program) and the research project examining WrICE as the object of its enquiry (Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled “Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds, Encounter and Exchange”). If we think of communitas in the way anthropologist and poet Edith “Edie” Turner likes to describe it as (un)structured ritual, a condition for creativity, a space where the intensity of feeling or joy can arise (2012), how might a communitas unfolding look and feel as we practice creative writing? How might we think about communitas and what would it mean to do communitas as creative writing method, as drawing-as-method? Also, how might communitas be performed on the page in an academic context such as this: can we as researchers enact or embody communitas?