During the liminal stage, normally accepted differences between the participants, such as social class, are often de-emphasized or ignored. A social structure of communitas forms: one based on common humanity and equality rather than recognized hierarchy. '"Communitas"...has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact...unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations'. For example, during a pilgrimage, members of an upper class and members of a lower class might mix and converse as equals, when in normal life they would rarely converse at all or their conversation might be limited to giving or receiving orders. 'Such collapsing of classes and occupations in the new community...a full-scale "Communitas" of equal beings' may be of longer or short-lived duration. According to Turner, this sense of Communitas is created as the pilgrims “distance themselves from mundane structures and their social identities, leading to a homogenization of status”.
'Following Victor Turner in The Ritual Process', one may see such communitas as the product of 'anti-structure...Anti-structure is anti- "structure", ideological rejection of the idea of structure itself. However anthropologists are currently in debate over whether the liminal stage of rituals has an absence of structure (anti-structure) or "hyper-structure", or whether both are possible.
In general, 'the undifferentiated presents itself as preliminary to (re-)differentiation'; in the meantime, however, the darker side of liminality may produce alongside communitas 'undifferentiated monsters' -'the unsavoury agonistic side of the community..."the dark mirror of what humanity is"' - as 'the dissolution of differences encourages the proliferation of the double bind'.
Read more about this topic: Liminality