Language, Charisma, and Creativity

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary charges of anthropology as a discipline: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. In contrast to the portrayal of the distant cultural 'other' in ethnographic studies of tribal societies, this book shows that people who might be regarded by some as 'religious eccentrics' are quite comprehensible in terms of contemporary culture, while at the same time people who might be anyone's neighbors in fact inhabit a profoundly distinct world of experience. This new work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, sociology, studies of religion and ritual, cultural phenomenology, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American Studies.

• American studies
• anthropology
• Christianity
• culture
• globalization
• Habitus
• religion
• sociology
• Habitus
• history
• intellectual studies
• philosophy
• religion
• social science
• sociology

'A timely, well-written contribution to our understanding of a number of important phenomena in the contemporary world, this is also a contribution to debates over concepts and methods in anthropological and related scholarship.' - Erika Bourguignon, Ohio State University, USA

'Csordas is so familiar with the [Roman Catholic Charismatic] movement that he is to a large extent able to overcome the typical problem of the ethnographer - the assertion that his or her research may not be generalizable beyond the local situation.' - Peter Stromberg, University of Tulsa, USA

'This study of the Catholic charismatic renewal succeeds in the difficult feat of speaking both to specialists in a cluster of scholarly disciplines and to the general reader.' - R. W. Rousseau, University of Scranton, USA

THOMAS J. CSORDAS Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994) and Body/Meaning/Healing (2002), and editor of Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (2004) and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009).

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