Urban Charisma

City-dwellers, like urban anthropologists, struggle to make sense of a complex and ever shifting urban landscape. Throughout the world, they are faced with the same lack of intelligibility, the same experience of opacity, sensuous attraction and lurking dangers in the less traversed parts of the city. Within cities, it is always the poorest and most dense parts that acquire a quasi-mythical status as sources of crime, amorality and danger but also of hidden forces, enormous strength and heroic courage. The township, the favela, the mohalla have always been regarded as onerous problems resisting governance but it was always a resistance defying legibility - without a name, without a cause and without organisation.

We would like to propose, however, that these forms of resistance, protest or recalcitrance are symptoms of a set of more durable, and more ambiguous, networks and forms of authority which the organizers of this conference call urban infra-power. By this term we mean the repertoires of public authority that are produced in everyday urban life but rarely become visible and legible in institutionalised or textual forms.

The nodes in these networks would comprise varied figures from the sheikh to the hustler, the son of a rural headman, the self-made businessman, the street fighter and the local gangster turned politician. The resources they draw on, the registers of conduct, performance and reputation they are cast in, and the types of complex rhizomatic connectivity they depend on, are uniquely urban and dynamic. Each of these figures depend on local legitimacy and followers and their authority is always precarious and in need of re-affirmation and reproduction. Economies, signs and cultural meanings are constantly evolving in the city and urban charisma depends crucially on an ability to interpret, process and position oneself within this dynamic field of imaginings, material compulsions and desires.

The conference organizers posit that these networks and moral economies of authority can be explored through ethnographies, and may enable us to develop a broader and more fine-tuned conceptualization of both urban spaces and what ‘the political’ may mean in an urban setting. In detailed ethnographic studies, conference paper presenters and discussants will explore the making of the urban strongman, the local religious authority, local vigilantism, and ‘moral policing and control’ in neighbourhoods are based on networks of connectedness and shifting solidarities. The Urban Charisma conference will explore urban spaces in Europe, America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia and focus on the connections between and interplay of kinship, religion, patronage, and affect in the making of urban infra-power and urban charisma.