Tom Wright
University of Sussex
Tom F. Wright is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of English at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print and an Anglo-American Commons (Oxford, 2017) and editor of The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth Century America (Massachusetts, 2013). He has published widely on nineteenth century American and British writing and oratory, and is currently writing a book entitled The Birth of Charisma. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and founder member of the British Association of Nineteenth Century Americanists (BrANCA).
This paper traces the influence of ideas about Native American spirituality and oratory on the development of a nineteenth century conceptual language for mass audience psychology. From John Smith and Roger Williams onwards, depictions of the magnetic authority of indigenous orators became a powerful trope of commentary on Native cultures, by turns figured as demonic threat or model for virtuous republican governance. My argument is that readings of the affective climate of indigenous societies also held an unacknowledged importance for transatlantic social science
European and American ethnographers of the late nineteenth century, I argue, used depictions of the social effects of indigenous American beliefs such as wakan, orenda, shamanism and totemism as archetypes for the comprehension of democratic political modernity. The paper explores this through readings of texts from James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775) through John Stone’s play Metamora (1829) to Daniel Brinton’s American Hero-Myths (1882) and Max Weber’s writings on the Oklahoma plains.
The paper comes from a larger project on the origins of the modern concept of ‘charisma’. The word’s current usage famously derives from Weber’s 1910s revival of the ancient Greek term for ‘gift of grace’. But I reveal how the pre-Weberian language for audience psychology was formed through the interplay of languages of three discourses: emergent neuroscience, positivist social theory, and research into indigenous societies.
In exploring the latter of these three, this paper builds upon the work of Brigit Brander Rasmussen and David Murray on indigenous theology, Sandra Gustafson and Carolyn Eastman on Indian eloquence, and recent revisionist work on Victorian anthropology by Tim Larsen. Reassessing the role of Native American spirituality in transatlantic intellectual history, it presents a racialised genealogy of a keyword in our socio-political vocabulary, and offers new perspectives on how languages of mystification continue to dictate our political and disciplinary climates.
