ABSTRACT
Early in the 2012 Gathering, Dave and I ran into an old friend, Jackson, who invited us to the kitchen he was camped with and volunteering for (in Rainbow terminology, he was on the kitchen's “crew”). There I sat in on a kitchen council of one of the earliest kitchens to arrive that year. Gathered inside a tepee, a dozen or so people passed around a pipe filled with marijuana while a man called Lazy talked about the kitchen's organization and needs. A shirtless man in denim overalls perhaps in his early thirties, Lazy is clearly an authority at this kitchen. He has many of the qualities of a charismatic leader. Sociologist Max Weber thought that charismatic leadership was a particular form of leadership that appealed to people's affectual side—it is leadership that lures people's emotions, where people come to believe in a leader as a person and not just as a set of commitments or actions. 1 Talkative and articulate, confident and friendly, Lazy looks you right in the eye when he's speaking to you and knows just how to phrase things to evoke your most positive emotions (for example, by using the word “Family” a lot).
