Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 4 Relations between men: from routinization of charisma to patriarchal
domination over men.
74
The routinized charismatic consociation of warriors is a special case of fraternization, and
thus of the 'status contract' which makes men into brothers. Weber defined this status
contract in his sociology of law, but he did not refer to it in his treatment of the concept of
'kinship', which because of this omission remained rather vaguely defined; I already
explained how 'fraternization' as described by Weber can be imagined to formalize the
relations between adult men, creating an important part of kinship relations. One might
therefore suppose that fraternization contracts formed the historical connection between
traditional and anti-traditional relationships and that they were also responsible for the
qualitative differentiation between the associations (Verbände) of women and those of men,
which resulted in the establishment of 'consociations of warriors' who claimed charismatic
domination. The training for 'rebirth' became a foundation, not only of all kind of privileged
masculine consociations, but of the privileges of 'masculinity' as such. When warrior
fraternizations develop, proven 'men' claim to be extraordinary beings.
It must be kept in mind that Weber nowhere explicitly states that the warrior consociations
always consisted of biological men. Indeed, he does not seem to have been concerned at all
with the question of who belonged to them. However, as we have seen, Schnitger reported
about women fighting in wars and bearing their weapons in public; travellers and scientists
have examined cultures in which girls were allowed to share in the education of boys and
become warriors.
40
A woman thus can be a member of a warrior fraternization and prove her
'manhood'. For this reason 'manhood' need not be identical with biological masculinity.
41
From Weber's silence on this point, though, one may deduce that he presupposes biological
masculinity to form part of the selection criteria for the routinized charismatic fraternization.
42
In his analysis, therefore, the reversal of the meaning of charisma by its routinization implies
a beginning of a process of reversal of the meaning of masculinity in which male sexual
characteristics acquire some special quality, even before the bearer of them performed
anything special.
43
was involved. "Other-worldly" goals were of course completely lacking in all this. *But ('Sondern') the capacity for
ecstasy might be used for the most diverse purposes. Thus, only by acquiring a new soul through rebirth can the
warrior achieve superhuman deeds of heroism. The original sense of "rebirth" as producing either a hero or a
magician remains present in all vestigial initiation ceremonies, e.g., the reception of youth into the religious
brotherhood of the phratry and their equipment with the paraphernalia of war, or the decoration of youth with the
insignia of manhood in China and India (where the members of the higher castes are termed the "twice-born"). All
these ceremonies were originally associated with activities which produced or symbolized ecstasy, and the only
purpose of the associated training is the testing or arousing of the capacity for ecstacy.' ES p. 534/5, WG p.
324/5.
40
See for instance Evelyn Blackwood, Signs, Vol. 10, 1984, no 1, p. 29 and Saskia Wieringa, Lover 1989, p. 89
ff. on the famous 'berdaches'; according to them the concept of 'gender' cannot be used in order to characterize
this kind of opposition of social position and biological sex.
41
If one shares this view, the question has to be asked in what stage of the routinization of charisma biological
manhood became a selection criterion for charismatic heroic education.
42
Weber suggests a connection between biological masculinity and charisma by speaking of 'castration of
charisma' by party organizations, ES p. 1132, WG p. 669.
43
Cf. Ch. 2,8 on EuM p. 210, on which Schnitger reports that Germanic women were defined as not being 'able-
bodied' and therefore not allowed to bear weapons. It is well known fact that in many cultures men at some point
in time made an unhappy association between male sexual organs and weaponry; on the military character of
male heterosexuality in classical Greece; see Borneman (1975) p. 224 ff.
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