6 - Non-ordinary powers: charisma, special affordances and the study of religion

Summary

Max Weber's (1978) Economy and Society embeds religion, or, more precisely, religious behaviour in a sociology of social action, grounded in the subjective meaning that actors implicitly or explicitly attach to their behaviour. Although his approach is sometimes referred to as “interpretive sociology”, Weber was equally concerned with interpretation and explanation (1978: 4—5). He began with action as understood from the point of view of the actor or actors, then sought to situate it within “an understandable sequence of motivation”, taking into account a range of factors (e.g. biological, psychological, social, environmental), many of them outside of subjective awareness and largely devoid of conscious meaning. He then attempted to determine the relative weight of the various factors in relation to the action in question. He assumed that hypotheses regarding the weight that should be assigned to various causal factors required testing. In some cases, hypotheses could be tested by means of psychological experimentation, and in others through statistical analysis of large data sets. In still others, “there remains only the possibility of comparing the largest possible number of historical or contemporary processes which, while otherwise similar, differ in the one decisive point of their relation to the particular motive or factor the role of which is being investigated. This [Weber argued] was the fundamental task of comparative sociology” (ibid.: 9—10).