ABSTRACT
Social scientists have long emphasized the political role played by myths and other forms of irrational discourses. Anthropologists have always dealt with them: as external observers catapulted into foreign regions of the world, they were in the best position to perceive them. The presence of myth among primitive populations could easily appear as a consequence of their ‘primitiveness’ and of the fact that politics could hardly be separated from religion here. 1 Historians and sociologists have also devoted an important part of their work to the symbolic dimension of politics – suffice it to think of Bloch's The Royal Touch (1973) or Weber's work on charisma (1969).
