Introduction — Urban Charisma

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.

“You can't buy a vote”: Meanings of money in a Mumbai election

“…Distributing water earned him the trust of community leaders, who began to compensate him for his services. In this way, and over time, Abdul's networks of contacts expanded, as did the scope of his knowledge of the inscrutable workings of the city (Hansen and Verkaaik ).…”

“…With the lower rungs of the state bureaucracy and administration described as embedded in local, “vernacular” (Kaviraj 1988) structures of power and authority, brokerage has been characterized, on the one hand, as the means by which relations of domination are produced and reproduced at the local level (Jeffrey ; Manor ; Witsoe ). Yet, by the same token—and on the other hand—scholars have shown that it is precisely because state resources are not distributed by an impartial bureaucracy, but are instead channeled from a “porous” (Hansen and Verkaaik :20) state through socially embedded networks of brokerage, that informal dealings can work to challenge entrenched hierarchies—what Jeffrey Witsoe describes as the “‘democratization’ of corruption” (2012:52; see also Jeffrey ). Even when challenging traditional patterns of authority, in other words, political brokerage has been characterized as a morally fraught (and frequently violent) sphere of activity, bound up with corruption and criminality as well as political‐administrative distortion and dysfunction (Berenschot ; Hansen ; Witsoe ).…”

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

“…As other ethnographers have demonstrated, the heightened sensory and interpretive skills of the hunter may be put to new uses in urban settings (Hansen & Verkaaik 2009: 5) or frontier economies (De Boeck 2001). Experienced fishermen at sea, like experienced hunters in the forest, learn to read a combination of visible, but often extremely subtle, clues in their surroundings.…”

Unmapped Water Access: Locating the Role of Religion in Access to Municipal Water Supply in Ahmedabad

“…Calling for examining water governance in terms of the conceptual "disembedding" of land and water infrastructures from socio-economic, legal, political, and hydraulic networks in which they are in reality entangled [5], this work highlights the role of myriad social actors-water mafias, water tanker operators, plumbers, local councillors, water department engineers, to name a few-in mediating water access in Indian cities [33,36,38,47]. Building on broader accounts examining the role of "the intermediary", "the middleman", "the fixer" [48], "the hustler", "the hard man", and "the wheeler-dealer" [49] (p. 15), this scholarship shows how everyday knowledge and authority are constituted, exercised, experienced, and narrated in relation to water governance in India. It instantiates broader assertions on how the Indian state cannot be thought of as a homogenous, predetermined, static entity [50] capable of exercising power on its own [51].…”