Ritual and Charisma in

Over the past twenty-five years or so, the post-everything (post-modernism, struc-turalism, colonialism, positivism), the attempt to portray “how the natives think” (or thought), or even what they are doing when they do what they do, has come in for a good deal of moral, political, and philosophical attack. The mere claim “to know better, ” which it would seem any anthropologist would have at least implic-itly to make, seems at least faintly illegitimate. To say something about the forms of life of Hawaiians (or anybody else) that Hawaiians do not themselves say opens one to the charge that one is writing out other people’s consciousness for them, scripting their souls.-Clifford Geertz As in all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.-John Stuart Mill This article is an ethnographic study of an Islamic mystical (Sufi) order based in the tribal area of Pakistan. Fieldwork was conducted in 1996-1997 as a participant-observer of the order and at other sites in and around Pakistan. By using broader methods and theory more appropriate to the analysis of mysticism, the article aims to challenge previous ethnographic studies of the Sufi orders that attributed their existence largely to social, political, and economic factors. By more clearly defining both the nature of saintly charisma and the mystical ritual process, it argues that the raison d’être of the orders is the cultivation of deeper states of consciousness. It concludes by calling for a new theoretical framework, a “transcendental anthropol-ogy ” more appropriate to elucidating mystical states and practices