“…30. For a nuanced account of the mixed motives of Crusaders, see Kostick (2008). Hegghamer (2010 concedes that a sense of adventure may have motivated many foreign fighters but notes that it cannot explain why adventure seekers would be channeled into this particular form of adventure.…”
How should we understand the religious dimensions of political conflict and political violence? One view sees religiously grounded conflict and violence as sui generis, with a distinctive logic or causal texture. The alternative view subsumes them under political conflict and violence in general, or under the rubric of politicized ethnicity. I seek to highlight both the distinctiveness of religiously informed political conflict and the ways in which many conflicts involving religiously identified claimants are fundamentally similar in structure and dynamics to conflicts involving other culturally or ethnically defined claimants. I identify the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order. And I specify six violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms (though all can also enable nonviolent solidaristic or humanitarian social action): (1) the social production of hyper-committed selves; (2) the cognitive and affective construction of extreme otherhood and urgent threat; (3) the mobilization of rewards, sanctions, justifications, and obligations; (4) the experience of profanation; (5) the translocal expandability of conflict; and (6) the incentives generated by decentralized and hyper-competitive religious fields. None of these violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms is uniquely religious; yet religious beliefs, practices, structures, and processes provide an important and distinctively rich matrix of such modalities and mechanisms.
KeywordsReligiously informed political conflict, religious stakes in political conflict, violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms.The lecture was delivered on 15 June 2016. The talk draws freely on Brubaker 2015b.
Rogers Brubaker University of California (UCLA)I'm deeply honored to have been asked to deliver one of your Max Weber lectures. I became a sociologist by struggling to come to terms with Weber's work, which remains as rich, difficult, and compelling today as it was a century ago. One of the very first things I was assigned to read as a college student was the dense and difficult section on the "Types of legitimate domination" from Part One of Economy and Society, rendered more difficult still by the fact that we were using the less than felicitous translation of A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. I found the section impenetrable yet somehow also compelling; I underlined every word; and I was hooked. I ended up writing my undergraduate senior thesis, which eventually became my first book, on the idea of rationality in Weber's work; and though I never took a sociology class in college, I decided to attend graduate school in sociology.Religion, conflict, and violence: few themes, taken separately, were more central to Weber's work than these. The themes come together at certain points in his work. Conflict and struggle were central to Weber's sociology of religion, as they were to all his work; and Weber's compendium on the sociology of religion in Economy and Society touched briefly on the...
“…30. For a nuanced account of the mixed motives of Crusaders, see Kostick (2008). Hegghamer (2010 concedes that a sense of adventure may have motivated many foreign fighters but notes that it cannot explain why adventure seekers would be channeled into this particular form of adventure.…”
How should we understand the religious dimensions of political conflict and political violence? One view sees religiously grounded conflict and violence as sui generis, with a distinctive logic or causal texture. The alternative view subsumes them under political conflict and violence in general, or under the rubric of politicized ethnicity. I seek to highlight both the distinctiveness of religiously informed political conflict and the ways in which many conflicts involving religiously identified claimants are fundamentally similar in structure and dynamics to conflicts involving other culturally or ethnically defined claimants. I identify the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order. And I specify six violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms (though all can also enable nonviolent solidaristic or humanitarian social action): (1) the social production of hyper-committed selves; (2) the cognitive and affective construction of extreme otherhood and urgent threat; (3) the mobilization of rewards, sanctions, justifications, and obligations; (4) the experience of profanation; (5) the translocal expandability of conflict; and (6) the incentives generated by decentralized and hyper-competitive religious fields. None of these violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms is uniquely religious; yet religious beliefs, practices, structures, and processes provide an important and distinctively rich matrix of such modalities and mechanisms.
KeywordsReligiously informed political conflict, religious stakes in political conflict, violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms.The lecture was delivered on 15 June 2016. The talk draws freely on Brubaker 2015b.
Rogers Brubaker University of California (UCLA)I'm deeply honored to have been asked to deliver one of your Max Weber lectures. I became a sociologist by struggling to come to terms with Weber's work, which remains as rich, difficult, and compelling today as it was a century ago. One of the very first things I was assigned to read as a college student was the dense and difficult section on the "Types of legitimate domination" from Part One of Economy and Society, rendered more difficult still by the fact that we were using the less than felicitous translation of A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. I found the section impenetrable yet somehow also compelling; I underlined every word; and I was hooked. I ended up writing my undergraduate senior thesis, which eventually became my first book, on the idea of rationality in Weber's work; and though I never took a sociology class in college, I decided to attend graduate school in sociology.Religion, conflict, and violence: few themes, taken separately, were more central to Weber's work than these. The themes come together at certain points in his work. Conflict and struggle were central to Weber's sociology of religion, as they were to all his work; and Weber's compendium on the sociology of religion in Economy and Society touched briefly on the...
“…Hearing of Baldwin's appointment as ruler of Edessa in March 1098, the Turkish emir Balduk of Samosata was ‘struck by a great fear’ (AA 176–77); and the citizens of Sororgia were similarly ‘terrified with fear’ (AA 178–79) when they learnt of the count's preparations for besieging the city . Conor Kostick (265) has suggested that Baldwin's social status was elevated after his instalment as Edessa's ruler, as Fulcher of Chartres thereafter designated him among the few princes. Nevertheless, in Albert's Historia , Baldwin's suppression of a rebellion in the summer of 1098 was also presented as a crucial moment in his consolidation of power, once again communicated through the vocabulary of fear: From that day on Duke Baldwin became a man to be feared in the city of Edessa, and his name was spread among the people right to the limits of his land .…”
This article explores the role and significance of emotions in the Historia Ierosolimitana attributed to Albert of Aachen, long recognised as one of the most detailed and colourful histories of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement in the East. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the crusaders' lived passions, it analyses the comments the author made about emotions and the ways in which emotion terms functioned in his history. It will be argued that emotions interacted with, and helped to communicate, a number of key themes in Albert's Historia, three of which are discussed here: crusader piety; Christian brotherhood; and power. At the same time, through a comparison with contemporaneous narratives of the First Crusade, it will be suggested that the emotional content of Albert's Historia is not without historical value, for it offers a window onto wider social and cultural conceptions of emotions in the 12th century.Research into the emotional standards of the Middle Ages -and, indeed, most periods of historyhas been facilitated by developments in the field of anthropology, above all the emergence of 'social constructionism': the revelation that, albeit partly biologically preconfigured, emotions and the valuations we attach to them are conditioned by social and cultural stimuli (Harré; Lutz and White). Though not without its critics (Reddy, 'Against Constructionism'), the social constructionist viewpoint has enabled historians -including Barbara Rosenwein, Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet -to overturn traditionalist interpretations of the Middle Ages as an era of emotional turmoil (Huizinga 13-14; Elias 60) and has simultaneously spawned a number of alternative methodological approaches.
“…While modern theories of social impressiveness and charisma are useful for understanding leadership in the Middle Ages, not to mention how the person in charge implemented their authority, medieval terms often carry different connotations to similar words used today (Kostick 2008). 1 In this case, the twelfth-century chronicles of the crusades 2 (Constable 2001) clearly include a concept of compelling and divinely inspired leadership resembling the modern ideas of charismatic authority, but they do not refer to the leaders of the expeditions as charismatic.…”
Section: Leadership Charisma and Twelfth-century Crusading: An Introd...mentioning
It is hardly surprising that in the chronicles of the First Crusade (1096–1099) and in the Chronicon of William of Tyre, accounts propagating Christian warfare, impressiveness, authority and command stem from military actions blessed by God. In the depictions, the position of being a leader is constructed and maintained by a public display of martial ability, by deeds rather than by words. The sources certainly describe aristocratic warriors influencing their peers or larger mixed audiences by speech, but in these cases too, to be successful, the grasp on command normally requires that physical effort follows the communications. The narratives equate physical action with the motives, values and beliefs of the first crusaders. The initiative aimed at achieving leadership is often described approvingly, but the sources also criticize the leaders for manipulative behaviour and unwillingness to cooperate with each other. The judgement of the sources depends on authorial agenda and dynastic rivalries: the leaders of the First Crusade, here especially Bohemond of Taranto (c. 1054–1111), Tancred of Hauteville (c. 1078–1112) and the successors of Godfrey of Bouillon (c. 1060–1100), understood the relation between written history and the claim on power and actively contributed to the production of the heroic image of the first crusaders, that is, the highlighting of their own alleged excellence as leaders. For these three leaders, a cultural legacy, whether initiated during their lifetime or posthumously, was crucial to creating a lasting image of effective leadership. The case of Peter the Hermit, a preacher from Amiens with a supposedly low social background, is different. The fact that chroniclers and composers of chansons included a figure without military expertise and verifiable support from kin and allies among the leaders of the First Crusade, albeit in a controversial manner, bears evidence in itself of his recognition by medieval audiences. Leadership is a gendered talent in the twelfth-century chronicles. The close relation between command and military action on the one hand, and the categorical exclusion of women from the field of battle on the other, discouraged depictions of female leadership in the crusading context. As a result, women were excluded from the leadership of the First Crusade, and references to female authority did not appear in the sources until several decades later in an altered context, with Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (c. 1105–1161) being the clearest example. In her case, too, gender formed a barrier to action and leadership. William of Tyre’s description of her reign is ambivalent, while her sister Alice’s (c. 1110—after 1151) claim to the regency of Antioch is portrayed negatively. This article compares the models and qualities of the leaders of the First Crusade in medieval sources. The first section considers modern definitions of imposing (charismatic) authority and ties the discussion to the overarching theme of exploring medieval crusader leadership. The second part examines the examples of the leaders of Antioch and Jerusalem and their cultural legacy in the chronicles.
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