I've wondered, reading through Urban Tribes, if the "it" I feel in my communities is the same as Urban Tribes, but Urban Tribes seems so mundane, similar to what I had with friends when I moved to San Fran in 1990. I had community, even a psuedo hippy house. The community I had in 1990, I loved but it didn't fascinate me. I think the difference is the ecstatic rituals and collective joy. This quote is great from

Barbara Ehrenreich at the Commonwealth Club
The Suppression of Collective Joy


"Why is there so little collective joy today? Why is our culture bereft of opportunity for this kind of thing? Mostly, we sit in cubicles at work and we sit in our cars. If you mention 'ecstasy' people think you're talking about a drug. The cure for loneliness and isolation and despair is Prozac... The simple answer is: the ancient tradition of festivities and ecstatic rituals was deliberately suppressed by elites -people in power who associated this kind of frolicking with the lower classes and especially with women...

"The Romans had their own Dionysus worshippers in Italy and they slaughtered them in 60 BC with the kind of ferocity they later directed at Christians... The Protestants were the real killjoys. They just wiped out that entire calendar of festivities from the Catholic church and outlawed dancing and masking. Around the world it was mainly missionaries who crushed the ecstatic rituals of indigenous people. In this country, slave owners banned not only reading and books, they banned the drum. They understood that in these kinds of rituals people found collective strength. "