Book Reviews 347 its openness to exploring the new trends in African religions provides us with a valuable contribution and insight into the realm of religion as the nexus that links African commu- nities throughout the diaspora. O Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Thomas J. Csordas. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1997.320 pp. MICHAEL LAMBEK University of Toronto This provocative book attempts several complex arguments. Atone level it is an explanatory account of the rise and his- tory of the first 25 years of the Charismatic Catholic Re- newal, drawing on extended ethnographic work in several leading communities in the U.S. Midwest. At a second level, it attempts to understand a process Csordas calls rhetorical involution and radicalization of charisma that is often char- acteristic of religious movements. At a third and most gen- eral level, it attempts to rethink the relationships between ritual, language, and creativity, entering what is arguably one of the most important discussions of contemporary so- cial theory, namely the relation of performance to practice. The arguments are bold yet extremely well grounded in the literature. At all levels I found much to admire and learn from, and something to argue with. Csordas begins with a striking incident. On the way to his first prayer meeting, the driver of the car he was in began to speak in tongues. To Csordas's relief this did not affect the driver's ability to respond to traffic, but it set him thinking about "the meaning of such ritual utterance across the shift- ing states and settings of a daily life transformed by experi- ence of the sacred, that primordial sense of otherness" (p. 41). The former part of this quotation establishes the signifi- cant intellectual trajectory along which Csordas is able to travel very far in this book. However, this definition of "the sacred" strikes me as problematic. Does not the ontological specification of "that primordial sense of otherness" (citing Eliade and van der Leeuw) bespeak an unduly religious es- sentialist leaning? In attempting to locate the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, Csordas offers an interesting deconstruction of the concept of a "religious movement," but one at some risk of reifying ideas about "thepostmodern condition." 1 would have preferred a com- parison with the "first" Protestant Reformation. Csordas raises three psychocultural "preoccupations" of contempo- rary North Americans central to the self-objectification characteristic of the Charismatic "sacred self," namely inti- macy, spontaneity, and control. He provides an elegant and subtle discussion of their interplay, limits, and contradic- tions within Charismatic ritual and practice. However, he does not fully explicate either the conservatism of the movement at home nor the ethnocentrism characteristic of its mlssionizing endeavors abroad. Csordas elaborates how charismatic performance trans- forms the dispositions comprising practitioners' habitus. In- stead of documenting the Weberian routinization of cha- risma, he takes up the much more innovative and challenging task of demonstrating the "radicalization" of charisma. This occurs, he argues, as ritual and rhetoric be- come "involuted" and intensified, pervading daily life. Given world events that have taken place since this reviewer began his task, this is obviously an issue of pressing impor- tance. However, in the case of the Catholic Charismatics, radicalization has its limits. This is world renunciation, as Csordas wittily puts it, "of a kind that is financially sound" (p. 86). It would have been useful to establish a clear distinction between Weberian and Charismatic meanings of charisma from the beginning and to keep them distinct. Although I appreciate that these are not unconnected historically, I was often confused as to whether the subject was charisma in the sense of the signs produced during worship or in the sense of personal authority. In chapter 5, Csordas offers an origi- nal and significant argument locating charisma "in rhetoric, that is, in the persuasive means by which a vision is articu- lated" (p. 153). Interestingly, there appears to be a strong distinction in the movement between prophets and leaders; the authority of the individual leaders is clearly not the same thing as the charisma produced in prayer and proph- ecy. And it is not the oratory of the leaders upon which Csordas focuses so much as the rhetoric of prophecy. Yet prospective prophecies must be cleared with officials before they can be pronounced in public, leading to questions of power and control that have little to do with charismatic leadership per se. Members of the congregation who pray and prophesy appear to produce (Charismatic) charisma without "having" (Weberian) charisma themselves. In the final section, Csordas develops an engaging theory of performance comprised of event, genre, and act. The dis- cussion of acts is particularly rich, conjoining speech act theory with a Burkean vocabulary of motives and Fernan- dez's argument about metaphoric predication. I would only suggest here that an emphasis on rhetorical persuasion in the transformation of habitus and the ritualization of prac- tice should not ignore the practical and moral consequences of illocutionary acts. As readers of his influential previous work might expect, Csordas complements the semiotic/rhetorical analysis with attention to the "phenomenology of revelation" and its em- bodied ground. Glossolalia, says Csordas, is language "incar- nate" and the basis for his argument that experiences of force and otherness derive from the body. In the end, the rich application of philosophy of language, intertextuality, and socioiinguistics is preempted by phenomenology as Csordas identifies "the body as the existential ground of the sacred" (p. 2b4). However, while Charismatic prophecy may suggest emendations to more general theories of ritual, language, and subjectivity that lwiw disregarded its specific features, by the same token it cannot be the prototypic in- stance from which general theories derive.