Article

Introduction – Urban Charisma

On Everyday Mythologies in the City

Thomas Blom Hansen and Oskar Verkaaik

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract ■ Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of
their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures
emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity
of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the
city’s functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way
of being in the world and must be understood as a dense and complex cultural
repertoire of imagination, fear and desire. We propose to understand the urban
and its charismatic potential through three registers: the sensory regimes of the
city; the specific forms of urban knowledge and intelligibility; and the specific
forms of power, connectivity and possibility which we call urban infra-power.
Keywords ■ charisma ■ diviners ■ knowledge ■ space ■ underworld ■ urban
sensorium

Urban spaces have spirits, and cities have souls. Some are dangerous,
menacing, but also seductive; others are marked by beauty and excess;
others again by their dreariness or spookiness. These are contagious
qualities that are said to seep into the character of the people living in such
cities. People speak with pride about being Londoners, being from Jozie
( Johannesburg), or of being Bombaywallahs, Cairene, Madrilenos and so
on. By invoking the name of the city as their own they also incorporate, and
bring into existence, the myth of the city as something that lives within
themselves. It is an urban habitus they do not entirely own because it is
larger and more enduring than themselves, or any individual life.
Some urban spirits are global in reach, others mainly local or regional.
They are reproduced in everyday stereotypes and mythologies. None of
these are of course true in any sociological sense but the proliferating
fantasmic and mythical qualities of cities and urban spaces are effective
realities that shape the behaviour, cosmologies and desires of people in
cities, or of those who visit them, imagine them, or describe them in narra-
tive or imagery. The mythologies of cities, or single neighbourhoods, are
remarkably durable and seem impervious to falsification by events or experi-
ences that seem to contradict them. ‘It’ – the myth or the truth of the city
– always exists somewhere else, or remains true in a more general way.
In his famous essay on walking in the city, de Certeau argues that names
of cities and places never can hold their ‘proper’ meaning against the
actual practices of city-dwellers. They can only hint at certain meanings: ‘A
Vol 29(1) 5–26 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X08101029]
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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

strange toponymy that is detached from actual places flies high over the
city like a foggy geography of “meanings” held in suspension, directing the
physical deambulations below’ (de Certeau, 1984: 104). While we agree
that demotic practice and language always improvise and often subvert
official schemes of naming and function, we argue that the names and the
associated myths of the city and its places are always potentially imbricated
in the most mundane activities in the street. Some urban spaces are so
heavily mythologized and enframed through circulating images and narra-
tives that they suffuse, if not overdetermine, any empirical or sensory
experience. Anyone walking in New York, Venice, Rio or central London
on a summer’s day will become drawn into crowds of visitors who all walk
in the city, take pictures of its buildings, and the urban crowds – mainly
tourists – while they engage in a strangely circular and fantasmic gaze upon
themselves, and the gaze of other visitors doing the same thing. The city is
here a monument and a living prop. The act of walking in the city is a
collective, fantasmic re-enactment of a demotic, supposedly local every-
dayness that is only made possible by the presence of the tourists. Yet the
awareness of this fundamental in-authenticity takes nothing away from the
visitors’ experience because they do not walk in the actual city. They are
flâneurs du fantasme, walking in the fantasmic city whose symbolic weight
and presence imbues everything occurring in the actual urban space,
however banal and unexceptional, with a special significance.
This is one commonplace aspect of what we call urban charisma. By
this term we mean two things: on one hand the charisma of a city as in its
‘soul’ or mythology that is emitted from its buildings, infrastructure, the
historicity of its sites and its anonymous crowds. On the other hand, there
is also charisma to be found in the city – in its crowds, in the styles and
reputations of its people, their knowledge, and the special skills and extra-
ordinary acts the city enables and necessitates. Quintessential urban figures
– be they artists, taxi drivers, cops or those belonging to a more opaque
popular world – may be charismatic by virtue of their actions and the knowl-
edge and resources in the city they are rumoured to command. They, like
their gestures, are suffused with that elusive spirit of the city, or the neigh-
bourhood, itself.
We use the term ‘charisma’ liberally here by extending it to larger, and
non-human, entities such as cities, sites, objects and collectivities. No longer
merely a sociological concept, charisma has today entered mainstream
popular and commercial culture. Charisma is no longer an inalienable
quality of a select few individuals. Neither an effect of proper initiation, nor
the property of an office, nor the ‘mystery of ministry’, as Bourdieu (1991)
puts it, charisma is today radically democratized, at least in principle, in the
marketplace, in the arts and in the world of everyday politics. Charisma,
understood as unique, or the vaguely magical power of presence, style,
seduction and performance is now a widely marketed and desired object of
self-making, within the reach of those with sufficient skill and purchasing
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Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

power. Democratization of the aspiration to charisma has entailed a measure

of objectification – standardization, definition and tangibility – and a
commercial exchangeability of objects, attributes and skills that are assumed
to produce charisma. Charisma is actively embraced as personal quality and
as a collective spirit by evangelical churches, marketing strategists, self-help
guides, motivational speakers, popular advice columns, makers of perfumes
and much more. The dynamic social life of charisma stands in interesting
contrast to the remarkably unchanging conceptualization of charisma in the
social sciences.
In Weber’s original formulation, charisma is defined as something
unique, an ‘anti-economical principle’ attributed to individuals, who in
their being and gestures articulate the hopes and aspirations that are enter-
tained by large numbers of people. To Weber, this is a recurrent, if not
trans-historical, quality found in some individuals who, when the time is
ripe, can acquire large followings and political importance. Less spectacu-
lar forms of routinized charisma, often expressed through a founding myth
or through memory embedded in institutions, are at the heart of the daily
functioning of power and authority in many societies (Weber, 1978:
241–62). Subsequent scholarship on this enormously suggestive notion has
offered surprisingly little conceptual development. Charisma is often
deployed as a truncated shorthand for a range of processes, many of which
are attached to extraordinary situations, mythical structures and objects
rather than specific individuals. The concept itself, however, remains firmly
embedded in the quasi-mystical relationship between the call of a leader
and the responses of suggestible followers. This is true of even the most
sophisticated attempts to transcend Weber’s basic frame, such as that of
Francesco Alberoni’s suggestion that charisma is a product of specific social
situations and milieus rather than individuals. Extending Freud’s (1959)
classical work on group psychology, Alberoni argues that new socialities and
intense solidarities can arise when enough otherwise disconnected people
experience social and cultural ruptures and seek a libidinal investment in
a leader:
The charismatic leader is first and foremost a strategist of moral behavior. . . .
There is nothing magic or mysterious about his behavior [but] he is able to
ensure salvation and social cohesion among the group’s members and to
overcome danger from without. (1984: 144)

Alberoni explores how charisma is produced through unequal exchanges

of love: the leader is made to embody an ideal of completeness and
competence. He needs no-one but loves all, which makes it possible for the
followers to understand their own need for community (the movement, the
neighbourhood) through their love for one, the leader.
For all its sophistication, Ernesto Laclau’s long-standing work on
populism also remains embedded in the same problem of charismatic
leadership. Laclau argues that the construction of the ‘people’ as the most
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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

pregnant and yet ‘empty signifier’ is the single most important element in
the political imagination of modern societies. Political power and legit-
imacy flows from the ability to act in the name of the people, and to name
oneself and one’s followers as instances of the ‘popular’, as the ordinary
people and so on (Laclau, 2005: 67–128). This structure of political desire
– to become and embody the impossible identity as ‘the people’ – is indeed
an essential condition of possibility for charisma, imputed, symbolic but
always efficacious, to become a powerful political force.
Yet none of these works explores how charisma is attributed and dis-
tributed as unique powers and potentials embedded in people, things,
places and situations. In its original Greek kharisma means a gift and thus
something unique, non-trivial and powerful. But a gift can also be shared,
transferred and exchanged. In the following, and in the contributions, we
will try to translate this understanding of charisma as both portable and
shareable, as a quality that can be conferred upon objects both material
and fantasmic – such as cities, crowds and physical sites. But we also want
to retain charisma as a name for specific registers of conduct, in this case
conduct by different ‘urban types’, i.e. people whose gift it is to know the
city and to act decisively, with style and without fear. These figures dis-
tribute certainty, they convince followers of their own special qualities and
self-sufficiency and demonstrate new potential and possibility.
The production of this form of charisma is, as Peter Worsley pointed
out many years ago (1968: 221–77), premised upon the ability to deal with
taboo and abjected matter, and the ability to incorporate these dangerous
situations or substances into one’s own body. This is akin to the traditional
healer or diviner who interprets a dangerous and powerful natural world
but violates taboos in order to do so. A powerful charismatic figure is also
allowed to break taboos as long as he/she can perform the key function of
interpreting the present and giving a direction amidst an unknowable and
ostensibly dangerous environment. Modern urban life is indeed character-
ized by a constitutive unknowability. No city can be fully known and inter-
preted because it, like its people, is one of modernity’s most powerful
‘empty signifiers’: too multi-layered and overflowing in both histories and
meanings to be fully captured by a single narrative or name, and yet an
object of irresistible desires and identifications.1 Historically, it was the
emergence of the modern city, its squares and its densities, that made it
possible for ‘the people’ to emerge as a concept, to name itself and thus be
made visible to itself and to those who wished to represent the people as
such.2 Those who claim to know the urban world, its significant sites and
physical layers, those who demonstrate abilities to manoeuvre and control
the urban environment, and those who are able to create narratives about
the city and its people, can thus draw on the latent charismatic potentials
of urban life itself. Or rather, they are able to convert the opacity, impen-
etrability, historicity and latent possibilities of urban life into a resource in
their own self-making.
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Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

We can now see that the everyday mythologies of urban life can give
birth to our two forms of urban charisma. On the one hand, the charisma
of the city, in the sense of the myth of a city which imbues its physical sites
and objects, and thus the people who live in them, with unique capabilities
and even magical forms of agency. This charisma of the city can easily be
transferred, for instance through processes of naming, onto symbols and
material objects that stand in for the city: to invoke and to name its styles,
slang, music and ambience as they are reproduced in demotic discourses,
in advertising, and official celebrations of an urban space expressed in
endless series of commercial insignia and products. It also arises from
multiple forms of reproducible maps, guidebooks, urban magazines and
other tools that claim to capture and present the city to itself and its visitors.
At the heart of the formulaic global tourist economy, it also has deeper
effects on how the city becomes available for its own inhabitants as an
objectified horizon that can envelop and subsume their own identities.
Charisma in the city rests on special forms of knowledge, networks,
connectedness, courage and daring that enable some individuals – poli-
ticians, gangsters, business tycoons and the everyday hustler – to assume
leadership, or to claim hidden and dangerous abilities and powers. These
two forms of charisma, one mythical, the other performative, are mutually
dependent and live off one another. The former charisma of the city func-
tions as a reservoir of myth and narrative that can be re-interpreted, re-
invented and re-enacted by those who claim charisma in the city in a variety
of forms.

The city is not one

The spirits of cities have today moved to the centre stage of human life. In
the richer parts of the world the ‘souls of cities’ inform the making of
identities and the marketing of lifestyles – including design, art and music
– that are taken as quintessentially urban. These forms of invocation often
amount to a bourgeois celebration of the city as the quintessential space of
self-making ex nihilo, of the city as an open space of endless possibility,
driven by the desires and energies liberated by the intrinsic freedom and
anonymity of urban life. Yet, no city is ever one, and its public spaces are
neither fully public, nor equally inviting to everyone in the city. Neighbour-
hoods, central squares, thoroughfares and settlements of squatters all have
discrete rule and discrete publics, whether formal and visible, or mani-
fested through rumour and informal networks.
Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, cities are associated with
enormous possibility but also with moral crisis and death.3 Many of these
cities are postcolonial cities that began their existence as colonial centres
or trading entrepots. The cultural construction of life within these post-
colonial urban spaces is deeply marked by a colonial legacy. This continues
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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

in institutional exclusions, spatial separations and discrete economic

networks that connect the formal economy with vast and flexible networks
of services, labour and informal connections. Colonial cities were founded
on a distinction between the proper colonial citizens, living in regulated
and planned spaces, and the masses of urban poor and recent migrants who
were concentrated in slums, favelas, souks and bidonvilles. The majority of
the prevailing theorizations of urban life take little note of these specific
historicities and different trajectories of the urban, and thus the different
possibilities of what the urban means, in the colonial and postcolonial
context.
Richard Sennett’s insightful works on urban culture are instructive
examples. ‘Modern culture’, he writes in The Conscience of the Eye, ‘suffers
from a divide between the inside and the outside . . . between the subjec-
tive experience and worldly experience, between the self and the city’
(1990: 21). Sennett argues that the modern city is constructed around a
‘fear of exposure’ of the individual or of the inner life of communities
because ‘exposure more connotes the likelihood of being hurt than of
being stimulated’ (1990: 23). This produces what he calls ‘a militarized
conception of everyday experience’ (1990: 30), warfare as the preferred
trope for everyday life. Another result is that urban spaces are turned into
bland, impersonal, homogenizing spaces that remove the threat of social
contact: the mall, the gated community, the ever-moving highway. For
Sennett, this is linked to Christianity and its stern moral injunctions regard-
ing the sincerity of conviction, the autonomy of the soul and the inner life.
This is undoubtedly a somewhat culturalist explanation that leaves out the
persistent fear of the poor and the structure of the economy, the localiz-
ation of labour and so on. It is also an idea of the urban that is essentially
North American. It does not resonate with the urban realities of many parts
of Europe, and even less so with urban spaces of the Middle East, South
Asia, Latin America and Africa.4
In those latter parts of the world, the urban scene is not one of neutral-
ity and blandness but one of intensity, heterogeneity and creativity visible
in market places, streets, sounds and smells. This radical mixing is neither
enjoyed nor appreciated by everyone in such cities and is the site of
enduring conflicts. This is particularly visible in how cities are publicly
represented. On the one hand, one finds in official rhetoric and the
bourgeois celebration of the city a praise of the heterogeneous, the noisy
and lively. At the same time, this very density is deeply resented among the
middle classes and the elite for whom the lived city is but a burden of dirt
and overflowing humanity. There is a drive across the world today to
produce the situation Sennett describes: to fence off the poorer neighbour-
hoods, to produce impersonal and homogeneous spaces of the highway,
the mall, and equally formulaic beach and harbour fronts. A relatively new
development in South Asia and many parts of Africa, this effort has reached
its highest development in North and South America (see Caldeira, 2001;
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Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

Davis, 2006). Today, as explored by both Jensen and Worby in this collec-
tion, the South African city is transforming into something else – not a free-
flowing heterogeneity but a new and often creative way of using and
appropriating an erstwhile racially defined set of urban spaces (see
Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004).
Outside the offices of urban planners and strategists it is clear that
there is never just one but many competing and often antagonistic under-
standings of the city. The streets full of hawkers that may appear so
charming to the tourist and the middle-class shopper, appear to the hawker
himself as streets of danger and fear: fear of the police and immigration
authorities, or of the informal cartels and financers that regulate a great
many of these street economies. For the impoverished, the central parts
of cities are often seen as threatening and dangerous, not familiar or
navigable like the popular neighbourhoods in which they live – however
riddled by violent crime or insecurity such spaces may be.
The process of gentrification that takes place in many cities in the
Western world and elsewhere depends on the appropriation of erstwhile
industrial and popular neighbourhoods and buildings – now returned in a
purged and sentimentalized auratic form as funky entertainment and urban
charm. The charming diversity of cities is almost invariably highly produced,
sanitized, cleaned up, purged of its real heterogeneity and replaced with
gentrified and highly capitalized diversities of shops, cafes, renovated flats
and factories. Meanwhile, the actual popular neighbourhoods are
constantly being moved into the remnants of the 1960s cheap suburbs
and banlieus, spaces devoid of economic activity except consumption and
predatory economies of theft and drugs (see Wacquant, 2007).
Cities like Mumbai, Cairo or Nairobi are not completely governed by
such dynamics and are taking other routes, in spite of massive ongoing
attempts to reshape and reorganize their spaces along the lines of this
contemporary urban matrix. These intense and dense cities derive
enormous energy from a constant jockeying over space. This is an antag-
onistic battle between impoverished and respectable groups, between
newcomers and entitled, between city planners and those battling for liveli-
hoods, between cars, pavement-dwellers and pedestrians. The battle is
about how to handle the legacy of constitutive separation of life-worlds of
the city proper from that of the native quarters that was the main principle
of colonial city planning (see Pellow, 1991; Robins, 2005; Thompson, 2000:
171–224). The demographic and political pressure on these cities means
that these battles are antagonistic as the term is understood within medical
science – as substances or muscle energies that counteract, mitigate or
even neutralize each other’s effects in the same space. Many of the grand
urban plans will never materialize because of the popular forces that exist
in these city spaces. These forces inhabit what Partha Chatterjee (2004)
has called ‘political society’, that zone of negotiation and struggle between
the state and the popular world that happen along not very civil lines,
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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

often violent and almost invariably beyond a legal framework (see also
Bayat, 1997).5

Re-imagining the urban

When one sifts through the literature on cities, the preponderance of work
on planning and disciplining, and the physicality of space and architecture
is striking. Decades of urban anthropology on forms of life within cities
notwithstanding, relatively less attention has been paid to the urban as a
kind of sociality, a mental condition but also a way of being in the world.
The best depictions of the urban as a distinctive social and mental form of
life remain literary, fictional and, most powerfully, cinematic depictions of
the moral complexities and sensuous dimensions of urban life.
Why is urban life so difficult to capture? Why does ‘the urban’ itself
often elude us? Is the experience of the city so dependent on the tactile,
the senses and the visual that textualization itself appears hopelessly in-
adequate? Ranjani Mazumdar has recently argued that only the cinematic
form can capture the lived realities of the city in India. Through the
figure of the gangster, the tapori (vagabond/hustler), the marginalized but
righteous avenger and the dangerous femme fatale, a ‘disavowed vernacu-
lar archive of the urban in India’ has emerged in low-brow Bollywood
productions over the last two decades (Mazumdar, 2007). Only in the visual
and narrative form, can the body language, the colloquial street lingo, and
the moral complexities and dangers of the city emerge. The central figures
in many of these films are people who somehow navigate and manage the
city through networks and ways of knowing that are unavailable to the elite
and to the official gaze. They represent an otherwise disavowed perspective
on the city, the ‘real’ of the urban, a perspective that only with the greatest
difficulty can emerge in a sociological register through court transcripts,
police reports or the stories presented by social workers, and the odd
anthropologist. In her contribution in this issue, Vyjayanthi Rao develops
this point to show that in the world of fiction and cinematic narrative, the
gangster and the terrorist have become something like a ‘reading principle’
through which a chaotic urban space acquires a structure of intelligibility
and intentionality.
In the following, we reflect on how cities in both their fantasmic and
physical forms are interpreted and acted upon by the people living in their
midst. The issue we are concerned with is how one can produce a range of
what Benjamin called ‘profane illuminations’ of urban life. Let us try to
outline such illuminations along three axes. (1) Sensing the city, i.e.
reading, reproducing and domesticating the urban soundscapes, the visual
overflow, the styles, smells and a physical landscape that can be read
through everyday mythologies of past actions, heroes, martyrs, events,
danger. (2) Knowing the city in the sense of decoding it, managing its
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Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

opaque and dangerous sides, controlling and governing the urban land-
scapes. (3) The capacity for ‘urban gestures’ and actions – acting, showing
oneself and performing within registers that are known to, and understood
by, people in specific neighbourhoods, whether as individuals or as crowds.
We are interested in exploring the styles, the references and the use of the
discursive and visceral archive of the city, or a neighbourhood, in such
urban gestures. This last register pre-supposes a knowledge and familiarity
with the two former and is at the heart of reproducing the charisma of the
city, and charisma in the city. It is also crucial in creating and maintaining
durable and informal networks of resources and connectivity which we
tentatively have called urban infra power.

Sensing the city

If cities have souls, can it also be said that cities have bodies? Without
wanting to reify cities in the way state apparatuses often are depicted as
living, willing and acting organisms, there are perhaps two good reasons to
explore the notion of cities as bodies. First, people might sense a bodily
intimacy with particular urban spaces that goes beyond the mere fact that
being in a city also implies a physical experience. That sensation, we suggest,
may have something to do with the way urban spaces leave their traces on
human bodies, that is, make a mark in the memory or unconscious of
human beings through repeated sensory stimuli. For a visitor, a migrant or
newcomer some of these may be overwhelming at first: the surplus of light
at night, the deafening noise of mid-day traffic, the disorienting mixtures of
smells in bazaars and other public spaces, or the tactility and physical density
of human crowds. Such impressions are difficult to forget or be indifferent
to and often morph into strong dislike or deep attachment. The city
penetrates one’s body and structures bodily functions to such an extent that
city-dwellers visiting the countryside may have difficulty sleeping in
complete darkness and silence.
Second, the physical nearness of the city – or parts of the city – may
generate a fantasy of the city as a presence that transcends the notion of
the city as a mere physical site. Although it is difficult to imagine people
talking to the city, people may actually talk about their city as an organism
they love, sympathize with or are having a row with. Cities are often
gendered. In the collective fantasy of the inhabitants of Karachi, for
instance, their city is definitely female in relation to the much more mascu-
line city of Islamabad. This of course has everything to do with gendered
representations of the dominant ethnic groups in both cities – Muhajirs
and Punjabis respectively – and in that sense cities are, in a Durkheimian
sense, anthropomorphic totems of self-representation. These imaginaries
enable Karachiites to be ashamed of their city (for the way it has been
‘raped’ and ‘molested’ by recent migrants and indifferent administrators),
to admire its humour, its capacity to survive and its refusal to surrender.
Karachi may be a girl but not a submissive one.
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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

If, however, cities can be imagined as bodies, they can also be depicted
as being ill, as being attacked by disease-bringing vermin or as being in
need of surgery. Stephen Graham (2004) and others have suggested that
the modern city is the product of an ongoing process of large-scale urban
destruction, carried out under the name of urban planning, and often justi-
fied by images of spontaneously grown city parts as unhygienic, disorderly
places that spoil the healthy nature and future of the city as a whole. Terror-
ism, they argue, has only revived an already existing fear of the unknown
and unruly neighbourhoods where state surveillance is incomplete or
absent (Graham, 2004). Bombs and bulldozers – sometimes acting in
concert – have been instrumental in these operations. Graham mentions
the destruction of the old city of Algiers by the French colonial army in
1847 as one of the first examples of modern ‘urban pacification’, a model
that continues to be followed in our days in places like Jenin and Baghdad.
A deep-running theme in these counter-insurgency measures is the fear of
disorder and rebellion, and disgust felt in relation to dirt, smell or noise.
Hygiene is often the deciding incentive behind large-scale urban inno-
vation projects.
Since the end of the 20th century, democratic processes generated by
ethnic, religious and populist politics has brought new social groups into the
political arena, into the heart of political power and into erstwhile bourgeois
urban spaces across the globe. The modernist utopia of ‘washing’ the masses
to make them civilized subjects is quickly giving way to an elitist dystopia that
combines a nostalgic longing for an imagined past of decreed order and
civility of the colonial city, with a growing fear of the poor and the associ-
ated smells and noises. In his discussion on taste, Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 2)
argued that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir). But
what about the capacity to hear (entendre) and smell (sentir)?
As Martijn Oosterbaan (2006) argues in this issue, sound – like smell,
and more than the visual – has a profoundly trans-local character. Sound
in many ways dominates city life in Rio. This includes amplified sermons by
Pentecostal pastors as well as the loud music of baile funk parties – often
accompanied by the sound of gunshots and fireworks. Oosterbaan shows
how the private or semi-private constantly intrudes upon the public space
of the city. Religiously, ethnically or racially organized groups, as well as
the urban poor, make their entrance into the public sphere of the city
through sound. We find similar arguments in Hansen’s work on taxis and
kwaito music in South Africa (2005), in Charles Hirschkind’s work on the
Islamization of the public space in Cairo through dawa cassettes (2006) and
– for smell – in Arvind Rajagopal’s discussion on how the slum, through the
stink of faeces and dead bodies, penetrates the public spaces of Bombay
(Rajagopal, n.d.). In a sense, this jumble of noises, smells and signs only
confirms the cosmopolitan and metropolitan ideal of speed, squalor and
synthesis immortalized by great 1920s novels like John Dos Passos’ Man-
hattan Transfer and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Yet today, fusion
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Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

often seems to cause confusion, and private and semi-private measures

against it, such as the high walls of gated communities or private homes,
may keep out the people, but hardly their smell and never their sound.
Is our capacity to appreciate and make sense of sounds and smells
equally dependent on how we have learnt to like some of them and dislike
others? What we want to suggest is that what is now happening in cities
today is less the fusion of sounds and signs and smells – a trope of
the modern cosmopolitan city throughout the 20th century – than the
democratization and fragmentation of taste regimes on aesthetic hier-
archies ranging from the beautiful and meaningful to the unbearable and
the absurd. In contexts that are politically charged, sounds and smells of
other ethnic or religious communities may generate feelings such as fear
and hate. The repeated conflicts over the azaan (call to prayer from the
minaret) in Indian cities is an example of such politicization of competing
taste regimes.
Sound signifies community in an immediate and visceral mode but,
beyond such an insight, what could an anthropology of urban senses be
like? The city appears as a place full of impressions that are often un-
intelligible beyond the fact that they signify the urban other, yet at the same
time have a profound physical impact on city-dwellers. We are, in other
words, surrounded by a multitude of sensory stimuli that cannot be
ignored, yet which are meaningless – not only to us as anthropologists but
also to urbanites themselves. Maybe we need to re-load Clyde Mitchell’s
(1956) classical arguments about the urban ad hoc classification of others,
and suggest that the urban cacophony of sounds and smells and signs
precisely demands easy stereotyping for it to be deciphered.

Knowledge and intelligibility

The slum, the township or the favela is often seen by anthropologist, and
by many city-dwellers, as a site of impenetrable force, stubbornness and
heroic resistance. This analytical matrix derives its force from a moral
reversal whereby popular neighbourhoods are depicted as spaces of
authenticity and humanity opposed to the blandness and brutality created
by many city planners. Although popular neighbourhoods do appear to
resist legibility, in James Scott’s (1998) sense as a gaze of the state, such
spaces are nonetheless navigated and interpreted by their residents on a
daily basis. They are also home to men and women who claim superior
knowledge of these densely populated spaces: the hustler, the hard man,
the wheeler-dealer.
The issue of legibility and intelligibility is intimately tied to the question
of governance and policing. Police departments across the world are deeply
dependent on informers living in the neighbourhoods they police. What
the police officers are interested in hearing, how they process the infor-
mation and how this knowledge is governed by already existing frames is,
of course, of interest to the anthropologist. The crime reporter is entirely
16
Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

dependent on police officers, as are script writers from Bollywood to NYPD

Blue. Detective novels revolve around the riddle of knowing the city. The
dark hero of the classical detective novel – the man who knows the city in
an unsentimental way – has today given way to the police drama and the
police station as the essential urban site where the truth of the city – dirt,
violence, greed and sexual perversion – is on display. In both cases, crime
is the governing trope of the city – as a netherworld that must be faced and
dealt with by hardened men with guns and numbed emotions.
But how can the urban anthropologist come to know the city, and its
popular neighbourhoods? Are we bound to repeat the same story, to
assume a similar cinematic gaze to that of the crime writer, or the diasporic
re-discoverer of the mysteries and the heart of darkness within the city as
when Suketu Mehta explores Mumbai in his Maximum City (2005)? In
Expectations of Modernity (1999), Jim Ferguson suggests that we should
understand the city as a performative space – a space that is only readable,
and liveable, if one acquires a measure of ‘performative competence’ of the
urban registers and an ability to read these performances. This is an import-
ant step away from the modernity–tradition dichotomy that has governed
so much urban anthropology and we would like to take this a step further
by asking the following questions: if the urban is opaque and difficult to
decode for everybody, how do people make themselves at home in it?? What
produces excitement and fear? Who do people turn to for favours, help or
revenge?
We are interested in the ‘urban specialist’, individuals who by virtue of
their reputation, skills and imputed connections provide services, connec-
tivity and knowledge to ordinary dwellers in slums and popular neighbour-
hoods. We may call these figures hustlers, big men, community workers,
brokers or even gangsters. These figures are supposed to be in the know,
supposed to have access to resources and knowledge that are not readily
available to ordinary people. The magicality of these connections derives
from their extra-local connections to centres of power – a gangster king,
powerful elite figures, high-level politicians, high-ranking bureaucrats,
powerful religious institutions – sites and figures of an outside and radically
different order, suffused with both benevolent and dangerous powers. The
charisma of such figures is powered by a fantasmic surplus – rumours and
circulating stories of certain deeds of these individuals, their past life and
career and so on. These are semi-public lives akin to the classical images of
the ritual specialist and the diviner whose powers derive from an invisible
realm of the sacred and the dangerous. The full expanse and hetero-
geneity of the city can be read and interpreted through these figures. Riots,
political machinations, accidents, killings, scandals . . . everything becomes
intelligible through stories about the cunning of hidden powerful forces
and their local and often excessively visible minions – the local hustlers and
big men.
 17
Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

This is a realm of action and imagination that in a certain sense belongs

to what de Certeau called dispersed and opportunistic tactics (as opposed
to strategies infused with rationality and intent): ‘a tactic is a calculated
action determined by the absence of a proper locus. The space of the tactic
is the space of the other . . . it operates within enemy territory . . . in isolated
actions, blow by blow’ (de Certeau, 1984: 37). Yet this phenomenon also
puts into question de Certeau’s strict opposition between those who govern
and plan, and those who evade, poach and improvise in the streets. The
figures in question are indeed of the popular world, and they often define
and represent this world vis-a-vis the powerful and the elite. But they are
also important mediators, elements of rule and social order that were semi-
institutionalized by colonial regimes, involved in nationalist politics as well
as in the functions of the postcolonial order as Wilson Jacob (2007) shows
so clearly in his work on Cairo.6
We propose to see the hustler, the street smarts and the local big men
as diviners of urban space, as people needed for their knowledge and
agility. Political organizations need credible mappings of localities in order
to garner support and numbers. Police departments need local informers;
civic authorities need spokespeople and representatives who can interpret
and translate bureaucratic commands into local keys of distribution,
eviction or punishment. The hustlers and the big man are thus figures that
connect the administrative, the political, the illegal and the sphere of
production and trade.7
Suspensions of order simultaneously invalidate and perpetuate these
forms of power. A riot, the burning of homes, loss of life, all signify the
failure of protection, the failure of divination and the failure to prepare for
conflict. In these situations, local criminals or strongmen are seen as both
the cause of violence and the only protective shield available. In the face
of the crowd – that faceless and uniquely urban monster that is so dreaded
and mythologized – the local strongmen can do little because the crowd
transforms humans into a different categorical order, both animalistic and
redemptive at the same time. The crowd is both human and non-human,
both ourselves and something radically alien in our midst. As Canetti puts
it: ‘in the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his
own person’ (1960: 20). In the crowd moral parameters and even ordinary
calculations of risk or tactics cease to make any sense.
[In the crowd] no risk is involved . . . the victim can do nothing . . . his
permitted murder stands for all the murders people have to deny themselves
for fear of the penalties for their perpetration. A murder shared with many
others, which is not only safe, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the
great majority of men. (1960: 49)

Deepak Mehta’s work on Dharavi, Mumbai’s biggest slum, during and

after the riots of 1993 shows how the failure of local figures to avert these
18
Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

events was sidestepped in favour of an emerging narrative which put the

blame squarely on outsiders, who were said to have arrived as a faceless
mob. This in turn reproduced the idea of the interior of the community as
both virtuous and knowable (Mehta and Chatterji, 2001). In slightly differ-
ent terms we can argue that the metonymic proliferation of smaller stories
of dispersed causes and ‘dispersed evil’ was replaced by a metaphorical cut
that condensed all evil in an exterior force. This made it possible to retain
the narrative of the local hustlers and warriors as the true, if overwhelmed,
defenders of the community.
These men (and some women) know that their reputations and future
livelihood depend on how they perform and appear in situations of crisis.
They are unique to the city because they are self-made – living realizations
of the possibility of the city, the act of self-creation and re-invention in
the face of a constant possibility of failure and disappearance into deep
destitution.
Is anthropology’s new fascination with this world of the urban slum
because it represents the new exotic, a radical alterity, or a darkness whose
magical forms of communion and sociality we are trying to record and
capture? Or should we regard the opacity of the popular world itself as an
inevitable outcome of the encounter between the strategies of planning
and regimentation, and the chaotic but incessantly creative force of
everyday life, as de Certeau (1984) puts it? Let us turn to Deleuze and
Guattari’s opposition of the tree and the rhizome as two distinct logics of
organization and being in the world to explore this question a bit further.

The tree and the rhizome – the cultural economy of urban gestures
‘Thought lags behind nature’, Deleuze and Guattari state in the intro-
duction to their irreverent, meandering, indulgent and highly suggestive
work A Thousand Plateaus from 1980. By this phrase, the authors meant that
natural forms are much richer and more diverse than our ability to use
them as metaphors and figures of thought. Their most compelling sugges-
tion is to distinguish between the tree, with roots and a centre and an
origin, as the dominant figure of social organization and thought, and the
rhizome as the meandering, spontaneous, de-centred, creative as well as
parasitical forms of ‘wild’ thought and ‘wild social forms’. This is a
compelling distinction that condenses an enormous range of similar oppo-
sitions from biology to linguistics – the molar vs. the molecular, the vertical
vs. the horizontal, the metaphor vs. metonym, langue vs. parole, the proper
name vs. the yet-to-be-named, and so on. These oppositions were developed
in an even clearer form by de Certeau both in the realm of language
(high/low, formal/demotic, etc.) and in terms of urban life – the irrever-
ence of everyday practices and low-brow flânerie as opposed to the planned
layout of the city, and the disciplines of work and government. In sub-
sequent scholarship, the opposition often becomes both epic and moral, a
perennial struggle between the spontaneous fullness and anarchy of life,
 19
Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

versus the impoverished, grey and disciplining forces of society, city and
state. This is, however, a flawed reading of Deleuze and Guattari, who state
that ‘The rhizome is an anti genealogy. It is short term memory, or anti-
memory’, thus reiterating that the rhizome as a social form has no stability,
no historicity, no independent life of its own. It is inconceivable without the
arboreal form (1988: 21). The rhizome is not an essential property of the
popular or even the urban, it is the inevitable and often highly unwelcome
double of any form of regular or formalized organization of any stability
and duration.
. . . there is no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological
dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are
knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover,
there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to
rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system
of trees, aerial roots and subterranean stems. The important point is that the
root tree and the canal rhizome are not two opposed models. (1988: 20)
The authors go on to explain that the two always coexist: the arboreal is
always an inherent potential within any rhizomatic form, just as rhizomatic
forms inevitably shoot off from, penetrate and envelop arboreal systems
with formal and historical properties. The two forms are not complemen-
tary but antagonistic in the medical sense we mentioned above – working
against and neutralizing each other’s effects – never producing a new
balance or a higher synthesis, just frustrating, impairing and wearing down
the other principle. Where there is a tree, there will always be rhizomatic
organization. Formal organizations, in other words, are full of rhizomatic
logics, networks of affect, conspiracy, evasions and informal help.
Although these networks are what help make formal organizations work,
they are not complementary, but invariably disavowed and parasitical,
principles that are at war with each other, and yet reproduced in ever
new forms.
To Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizomatic form is always tactical and
mobile, a war-machine – a gang, a parasite, a dissenting band of lay-
preachers moving in and out and through more crystallized institutions
and practices, and so on. They draw heavily on Pierre Clastres’ historical
understanding of mobile societies in Paraguay as organized around a
perpetual state of war and violence. War, Clastres argued, may justify the
election of a war chief, but he would be deposed as soon as the battle was
over and a state of acephelous normalcy would re-appear. The purpose of
this permanent state of war, according to Clastres, was to remain an inde-
pendent community, to live in permanent upheaval in order to prevent
hierarchical, ‘molar’ and fixed forms of organization from appearing.
These forms of organization, devoted to maintaining autonomy, small scale
and equality of condition, reproduced themselves as a constant counter-
points to the more stable and hierarchical communities that appeared in
and around Amazonia at regular intervals (Clastres, 1989).
20
Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

It would be tempting to argue that the world of crime is the inescapable

but antagonistic underside that makes the city work, but whose wild and
predatory nature also obstructs the perfection of the city as a space of
discipline and separate homogeneities. But even the world of crime and
illegality is full of ‘knots of arborescence’ and despotic formations.
Networks that seek to be permanently organized as gangs constantly break
off at the edges when betrayed by disloyal number two men. Gangsters seek
respectability and social recognition at any price, and rogue violence can
be a shortcut to respectability, eminence and visibility. Yet none of this is
quite possible because the rhizomatic logic always reproduces fuzzy edges,
loose ends, porous institutional practices.
An example: when Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule in India in
1975, she declared war on poverty and the lack of civic responsibility among
ordinary Indians. The cities were the main theatres of the government’s
attempts to root out corruption, to clear slums, beautify the cities and
to sterilize as many poor as possible. This was a war against rhizomatic
formations of all kinds and it was marked by both brutality and appalling
sociology. As shown by Emma Tarlo in her work on the Emergency, the
bureaucrats in charge of flushing out corruption and meeting the steriliz-
ation targets were forced to rely on all the local ‘busy-bodies’, self-styled
social workers, semi-legal big men that the same emergency decrees
precisely were attempting to displace and remove (Tarlo, 2003). The
authoritarian methods of the government were not defeated by popular
opposition but by the de facto break down of many policies in the face of
the indispensable and inevitable re-appearance of local big men, hustlers
and busy-bodies. In accordance with the well-established patterns of govern-
ance of the Indian state, these figures provided the intelligibility, the actual
force and the connectivity that enabled the bureaucrats to implement the
decrees, however haphazardly. Such forces are at the heart of what we call
urban infra-power.

Infra-power and urban charisma

Infra-power is a web of connections and structures of solidarity, fear, desire
and affect that traverse communities and neighbourhoods. These are
connections that are neither fully visible to an outside gaze, nor officially
codified, but also neither concealed nor secret. Infra-power cuts across
households and kin. It is ‘brokerage’ in that it enables and facilitates
economic flows through connections, obligations or friendships. It works
as exchange and distribution of favours, gifts, honour and protection. Infra-
power is a rhizomatic connectivity that spirals in and out of formal organiz-
ations, formal economies, formal politics and bureaucratic structures of
government and policing. It is not merely a compensatory logic, a set of
functions that emerge in interstices and absences of modern state power –
as Ernest Gellner (1977) explained clientelism and patronage. It is also not
a form of organization that claims an independent ontological ground and
 21
Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

genealogy in kinship systems, caste or religious ethos – although such

registers of affect and relatedness are rhetorically deployed by local
hustlers or big people. The phenomenon of infra-power – the ostensibly self-
organizing potential, informal ‘government’ and economic creativity of
popular neighbourhoods – is one that has emerged with the modern city,
especially the colonial and post colonial city. It is an ethos and form of
regulation that was made possible by the colonial habit of government at a
distance, of managing the popular and not easily intelligible enclaves in and
around the colonial city. These neighbourhoods were tolerated because they
provided essential forms of labour and services to the city proper, but they
were always inhabited by disenfranchised populations and were never
governed with the same intensity as that which began to be imposed upon
the labouring classes in European cities in the 19th century. It was not an
absence of government that gave rise to infra-power in the colonial and post-
colonial world as a force of compensation, but the need for order and
connectivity in poor neighbourhoods combined with colonial reliance on
native forms of authority, self-styled leaders and popular big men.
Infra-power thus provides connections in cities marked by radical
discrepancies and disconnections between adjoining and often antagon-
istic social and cultural worlds. Such spaces require mediators, charismatic
diviners and competent translators. However, infra-power provides not just
connections but ‘wild connectivity’ – unpredictable, often unlikely and
improbable connections between otherwise disconnected worlds of
economic exchange and/or political alliance. A good example is the
contemporary South African township that for so long was cut off from
economic functions and kept as a pure dwelling space, only devoted to the
reproduction and spatial incarceration of cheap and expendable labour. In
the new South African economy, the townships are beginning to become
zones of complex economic and cultural activity, of complex political
connections, of cultural production that spreads far beyond its own space.
To realize this, new and petty entrepreneurs in the townships need connec-
tions: people who are in the know, who know the space of the township and
its rules, lingo and dangers, as well as the world of money in the city centre,
the formerly white world of plenty and excess, and the ambiguous world of
fast cash, political connections and illegal transactions. The taxi operator
is the almost perfect embodiment of this new form of charismatic operator
and this new type of spatially liberated and versatile wild connectivity.
Another example is the music producer, whose trade is to discover and give
shape to the specific township sound, the new charismatic currency of the
post-apartheid city.
But how can we understand such ever mobile, tactical, evanescent and
morally ambivalent dynamics of power that seems to have no predictable
ontology of its own? Let us propose two terms that are at the heart of
charisma as exchange and distribution: potentiality and emergence. By
potentiality we mean the actual capacity for action. Potentiality implies the
22
Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

existence of a choice to realize, or put to use, some capacity in order to

live out one’s desire for something. But potentiality also implies the possi-
bility of not doing it, of what Agamben in his essay on potentiality calls
‘impotentiality’:
Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only
do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own
impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of
impotentiality. (Agamben, 1999: 182)

The city, and especially the postcolonial city with its enormously dis-
connected and discrepant worlds, is a massive theatre of charismatic poten-
tiality and its opposite, the non-realization and destruction of capacities
and talent. Infra-power, we submit, is a powerful symbolic enactment of
human potentiality, a display of how one can read, master and ‘work’ the
city to make it yield benefits, magical power and eros if one runs the risks
and has the courage to ‘play’ – the central trope in urban politics, exchange
and pleasure. The obverse is the possibility of non-action, the danger,
predicament and shamefulness of impotentiality, of not realizing a capacity,
of not ‘playing’ and sensing possibilities, of not performing as a hustler and
not aspiring to become a big man.
How do we then know what infra-power is? By what marks can it be
known – this informal connectivity and assemblage of potentialities that has
neither formal structure nor predictable form? We can find it embodied in
the figure of hustler or the big man, but also in others who are able to
‘work’ the city through playful and wild connections. Yet it is a form of
power that can only be known in action, as an emergent form. By this we
mean emergence as the complex realization of properties or potentialities
of people and their environment through actions and events. None of these
qualities exist prior to the action itself. The potential of the network, the
connections and the capacities of the people involved, only show them-
selves in actions and outcomes. Instability and unpredictability are the
heart of urban charisma, a property that cannot be permanently owned by
anyone but is only made visible through performative action and exchange.
Infra-power as described by the contributions in this issue seems indeed
to be rhizomatic but it also has a measure of historicity (as myths and narra-
tives of famous big men/hustlers/tricksters) and a certain spatiality. Infra-
power often originates in the popular neighbourhoods that defy legibility
and an ordering gaze while spreading their logic of wild connectivity
throughout the city. Yet these forms of power have no predictable form and
no shared archive. Burton’s sweeping and suggestive history of martyrdom,
blood-letting and violence in Paris since 1789 suggests that stories and auras
of violent deeds and misdeeds, conspiracies, sites of martyrdom (such as
Père Lachaise) circulate throughout the city as symbolic archives of how
street wars are fought and how the spilling of blood has created physical
sites of great charismatic power (Burton, 2001: 265–346). These traces, sites
 23
Hansen and Verkaaik: Introduction – Urban Charisma

and memories in turn, structure the rituals of conflict and mobilization in

the city – but never completely and never in a predictable way. The current
conflicts in the banlieus activate fears and animosities that draw on older
fears of the urban unwashed. But the actions, the burning cars and the logic
of mobilization defy the interpretive schemes of authorities and social
scientists alike and generate fears of hidden conspiracies and networks.
This is not unlike the situation in Mumbai where random blasts and killings
in the city produce their own ghastly theatre of a non-discursive politics that
gives rise to endless conspiracy theories and generalized fear of clandestine
and menacing networks.
Infra-power, we submit, is always re-invented in action. Its historicity is
open and visible at the moment of its articulation through reiteration of
certain mythological structures and certain spatial nodes. The articles in
this collection all try from different vantage points to make urban figures,
connections, play and fears visible through the three registers of the
charismatic urban we have outlined – urban sensory regimes, claims of
intelligibility, and the complex semiotics of action and gesture in the city.

Notes
1 This latter dimension is most powerfully captured in Berman (1982).
2 The theme of visibility as a precondition of the ‘people’ and a modern demo-
cratic imaginary is explored by Claude Lefort (1988), while the theme of the
city as a site of public life is most powerfully explored by Richard Sennett in
several works (e.g. Sennett, 1974, 1990).
3 This theme has been powerfully explored in recent work on African cities (see
for instance de Boeck and Plissart, 2004; Simone, 2004; see also Christiansen
et al., 2006).
4 It is striking, for instance, that even James Holston’s brilliant work on urban
planning in Brazil maintains a distinction between a pre-industrial/pre-modern
city and a modern and modernist city like Brasilia. The question of the
specificity of the colonial cities under discussion (Rio, Salvador) and the
specific economies of racial and ethnic exclusion they were founded on is never
raised (see Holston, 1989).
5 The continuities in the imagination of dangers arising from popular neigh-
bourhoods are striking. Burton (2001) shows in compelling detail how notions
of the bestial and animalistic recur in descriptions of the insubordinate Parisian
poor from the sans culottes, through the Communards, the ‘reds’ of the Resist-
ance, and now the youth of the banlieus.
6 Other examples of these popular local big men include the badmash/dada in
Bombay (Chandavarkar, 1998; Hansen, 2001, 2005) and the jawanmardi in
Teheran (Adelkhah, 2000).
7 The anthropologist often come to depend on such figures who are locally
known to be ‘in the know’, and well-connected. The similarities are striking:
the imputed command of the local nuances and stories, the supposedly effort-
less understanding of local inflections and connotations of words and events,
and the possession of special and unfathomable powers by virtue of being
connected to outside forces and specialized knowledge, and powers of ‘seeing’
24
Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

and divining. Often the alliance is mutually beneficial – it lends street-cred to

the anthropologist and another potential outside connection to the local
hustler who ceaselessly maintains his reputation.

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Critique of Anthropology 29(1)

■ Thomas Blom Hansen is professor of anthropology at the University of

Amsterdam. His most recent book is Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in
the Postcolonial World (2005), which he co-edited with Finn Stepputat. He is currently
finishing a book on the meanings and anxieties of post-apartheid freedom through
the eyes of people in a formerly Indian township in South Africa.

■ Oskar Verkaaik is affiliated with the Research Group for Religion and Society at
the University of Amsterdam. His work is concerned with questions of nationalism,
religion, ethnicity, and the city in both South Asia and Western Europe. His
publications include A People of Migrants: Ethnicity, State and Religion in Karachi
(Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1994) and Migrants and Militants: Fun and
Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princteon, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). [email:
[email protected]]