Charisma Reconsidered

nothing prior to itself other than more taboos, such as the taboo on the body of
the chief. But here we face a familiar trouble. The mana of the imposer is the
source of the power of interdiction. But mana is as unhelpful a concept as
charisma, in the sense that it too is a dead end. In these societies, power is the
power to interdict, and mana is a name for this power, not an explanation
(Steiner, 1967 [1956]: 110). This is a difficult notion to grasp, but the point can
be made with a simple example. As a child I lived in a Catholic neighborhood,
where the Monsignor of the local parish church routinely imposed interdictions –
on forms of behavior and dress, on membership in organizations, even on what
bars to patronize. What was the religious ‘authority’ for this? There was no literal
authority, though there was the notion that he possessed delegated powers from
the Pope, who had them delegated from Jesus through Peter – hardly an active
consideration for those choosing what bar to patronize. Yet the uncertainty
surrounding the dangerous powers of the Monsignor himself meant that to
violate them was to act dangerously. Similarly for the imposition of taboo: what
enables the imposition of taboo is not a power of an imposer, like magic, or
charisma, which is a term like mana, but the effect of the act of interdiction, the
localization of danger itself. It is tempting to say that it is a vaguely felt fear of
the interdictor that enables the interdiction to have force, or that the reason a
given interdiction has force is fear of the imposer. But it is doubtful, in a situation
of generalized danger, that saying this amounts to anything more than the
interdictor is part of ‘the dangerous’ and that any interdiction from this source
serves to localize danger. This in turn is all that Steiner is saying. But it has the
uncomfortable Nietzschean implication that the root of morality is fear of
the other.
When we consider the broader question of the establishment of perceptions
of risk, it is evident that the actions of individuals – whether Madonna or a
political leader – serve to define risks just as the pronouncing of interdictions does.
Indeed, one may wonder whether the alteration of risk perceptions through action
is a more fundamental mechanism than interdiction. The power to interdict may
be the province of those who have mana, and this may be what mana consists in.
But it is also plausible to say that this power is itself rooted in fear – in taboo, as
Steiner says – which is in the end no more than a localization of the non-specific
dangerousness of those who may bring harm to one and thus must be obeyed.
The magical properties we attribute to the powerful (and which Weber takes to be
the concomitant of charisma), on this account, are no more than an aspect of the
localization of danger itself. If this is reasonable, there is no mystery about
primitive charisma: it is a by-product of the localization of danger that individuals
can, through their own actions, influence, and the fact that they can increase the
sense of their dangerousness or sacredness through their own actions.
The case that was puzzling for Weber himself was the idea of charismatic
law-givers who were assigned a particular historical role in the origins of legal
orders. The traditional puzzle of the philosophy of law of which Weber was well
TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 19