Mary Jo Neitz

Book ReviewsLanguage, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. By Thomas J. Csordas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xxii+320.

Thomas Csordas, an anthropologist, first encountered the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Columbus, Ohio, in 1973. At that time he researched a local prayer group for his master’s thesis. He did more extensive fieldwork from 1976 to 1979 with the Word of God Prayer Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan (an extremely influential community, which has provided leadership for Charismatics both in the United States and abroad), and then studied healing ministries in New England in the late 1980s. Finally, he returned to Word of God in 1991 to look at the second generation Catholic Charismatics there. Csordas is familiar with both the broad issues facing the international movement and with issues enacted face-to-face in one covenant community. He begins this book with a descriptive account of the development of the movement, first in the United States, and then internationally. The middle section of the book articulates Csordas’s thesis regarding the ritualization of practice and the radicalization of charisma. The third part of the book looks at the performance of ritual language in the Word of God community, including a semiotic analysis of an important prophecy. Scholars studying both neo-Pentecostal movements, of which the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is one, and the earlier Pentecostal movements have remarked on their relative leaderlessness: there is no one charismatic founding figure. For Csordas, this becomes a starting point for reconceptualizing the concept of charisma. Csordas asks whether the Catholic Charismatic movement—named for the charismatic spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament—is a charismatic movement in the Weberian sense. His answer is that charisma in the social scientific sense should not be considered a characteristic of a person but rather a quality imputed by others to be of that person: he wishes to “de-entify charisma” (p. 138). Elaborated in an extensive analysis of language, Csordas asserts that charisma is rhetoric: “a collective, performative, intersubjective selfprocess” (p. 145). Part of what is at issue for sociologists reading this book is the particular aspects of social movements problematized by different research traditions. Readers of this journal are no doubt more familiar with sociological approaches of resource mobilization and perhaps the more cultural ap-