Mingming Wang
Translating Charisma
First, I will reflect on my study of Chinese grassroots charisma. Second I will outline Max Weber’s perspective of charisma in his sociology of religion and study of the religion of China, which I have taken as a kind of cultural translation. Finally I will present a short overview of Chinese reception of Weber’s sociology, and his idea of charisma.
Mingming Wang is professor and founding chair of anthropology at Beijing University. He has published numerous historical and anthropological works in Chinese, including Social Anthropology and Sinology (1997), The Supra-Societal Systems (2015), and The City of Zaytun (2019). His English writings include The West as the Other (2014) and For Heaven-human Conviviality (2023). In March 2017, he delivered the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture in Social Anthropology in which he spoke about his approach to comparative and relational cosmologies.