Notwithstanding the wide currency of the concept of charisma in contemporary social science, considerable confusion exists in regard to its employment. While some authors insist that the concept should be used in the Weberian sense, others advocate its emancipation from the ecclesiastical context in order to render it suitable for use in the modern secular context. I will argue that “charisma” is ultimately a product of social structure and hence its nature and content will undergo a transformation as the society itself changes.

The flourishing of Catharism in southern France was accompanied by marked prosperity among southern French Jews. While the Cathari were openly professing their heresy and winning converts in the courts of influential nobles, the position of the Jews was noticeably ameliorating. The Jews of Languedoc, for example, held land in franc alleu, collected tolls, and occasionally even worked as bailiffs. Indeed, their social and political status compared favorably with that of their co-religionists in any part of Europe.

The two authors of these papers face in common one very complex and perplexing problem: the place that representations of dramatic art take in the personal lives of their spectators. Enormous effort has been put into this question, particularly in works on the popular forms of dramatic art in the United States. Both authors take the same point of view on the question, that there is a fairly direct correspondence between the content of the dramas they analyze and the content of the personal experiences and social world of the spectators. Nash argues that the differing contents of the passion plays produced in the three towns she examines faithfully reflect the differing local configurations of religious organization and Indian/Ladino relations. Peacock argues that the ways the ludruk dramas characterize the inner, kampung life versus the outer, more modern and worldly city life bias the spectators directly in their personal attitudes and decisions toward rejecting features of kampung life in favor of modes of modern city life.

In 1905 the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, was forced to resign as a result of a disagreement with his Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. What began as a mild bureaucratic affair soon escalated into a major power battle, and the scene of the struggle shifted in turn from the narrow confines of Indian bureaucracy to the exalted chambers of Imperial decision-makers to the public forum of two continents.