Table Of ContentCulture & Rhetoric
Studies in Rhetoric and Culture
Edited by Ivo Strecker, Johannes Gutenburg University Mainz and Addis
Ababa University, Stephen Tyler, Rice University, and Robert Hariman,
Northwestern University
Our minds are fi lled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and
incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and oth-
ers of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric which allows us
to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world
and which becomes central to the formation of individual and collective con-
sciousness. Th is series is dedicated to the study of the interaction of rhetoric
and culture and focuses on the concrete practices of discourse in which and
through which the diverse and oft en also fantastic patterns of culture—includ-
ing our own—are created, maintained, and contested.
Volume 1
Culture & Rhetoric
Edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler
Volume 2
Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life
Edited by Michael Carrithers
Volume 3
Economic Persuasions
Edited by Stephen Gudeman
Culture & Rhetoric
! ! !
Edited by
Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
First published in 2009 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2009 Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[to come]
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.
ISBN: 978-1-84545-463-0 Hardback
Contents
! ! ! ! ! ! !
Preface vii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler
Part I ! The Chiasm of Rhetoric and Culture
1. Th e Rhetoric Culture Project 21
Stephen Tyler and Ivo Strecker
2. Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Th eory 31
Christian Meyer
3. Homo Rhetoricus 49
Peter Oesterreich
4. Listening Culture 59
Daniel M. Gross
5. Practice of Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Practice 74
Vincenzo Cannada Bartoli
6. Chiastic Th ought and Culture: A Reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss 85
Boris Wiseman
7. When Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Lessons from Macbeth 104
Anthony Paul
vi ! contents
Part II ! Figuration—The Persuasive Power of Deeds and Tropes
8. Rhetoric, Truth, and the Work of Trope 117
Alan Rumsey
9. Figuration, a Common Ground of Rhetoric and Anthropology 150
Philippe-Joseph Salazar
10. Tropical Foundations and Foundational Tropes of Culture 166
James W. Fernandez
11. Convictions: Embodied Rhetorics of Earnest Belief 182
Michael Herzfeld
12. An Epistemological Query 207
Pierre Maranda
13. Beyond the Unsaid: Transcending Language through Language 211
Paul Friedrich
14. Future Imperfect: Imagining Rhetoric Culture 221
Robert Hariman
Contributors 238
Index 241
Preface
! ! ! ! ! ! !
This book is the result of years of work done by scholars involved in the
International Rhetoric Culture Project (see www.rhetoricculture.org), and in
order to show the scope of cooperation and the wide range of activities that
preceded the publication of results, we outline here the history of the project
in some detail.
According to our private myth, it all began one winter day of 1981 in the
Haddon Library at Cambridge University. Some rare rays of the sun were play-
ing on the books on the shelves and made Ivo forget what he had come for.
Th en, suddenly, the title of Stephen’s green book caught his eyes: Th e Said and
the Unsaid (1978). What a fi tting title, he thought, for it evoked all the prob-
lems that he was then encountering in his study of symbolism, later to be pub-
lished as Th e Social Practice of Symbolization (1988). Th ere and then he began
to read and found that in his preface Stephen had outlined a vision of research
that was very much in tune with his own, a “rhetorical and hermeneutical vi-
sion of language that returns language to its proper context of everyday uses
and understandings” (Tyler 1978: XII).
Here is not the place to recall the details of how we met and began to dis-
cuss our mutual interest in a rhetorical theory of culture. It must suffi ce to say
that we eventually arranged a workshop on “Rhetoric Culture Th eory” at the
1998 Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropolo-
gists (EASA) in Frankfurt/Main.
Aft erward we found it premature to publish any results and thought it
better to involve more of the leading scholars working on the intersection of
rhetoric, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, and the like. Perhaps noth-
ing would have come of our plans if the German Research Society (DFG) had
not agreed to fi nance Christian Meyer and a small team of junior students of
Mainz University to assist with the library research that still needed to be done
in order to draft an application for funding further conferences. In addit ion,
several senior students and staff joined our team, notably Anna-Maria Brand-
viii ! preface
stetter and Felix Girke of Mainz, and Anke Reichenbach of Leipzig University.
Th is was an exciting time when we had constant contact with each other, when
our email correspondence was growing daily, and when one distinguished
scholar aft er another joined our project.
In March 2001 we sent out an application to the Volkswagen Foundation
for support of a conference on “General Rhetoric Culture Th eory” and one on
“Rhetoric and Linguistics.” A few months later we were told that funds had
been granted to hold the two conferences as requested, scheduled for February
and July 2002 respectively, and to be held at the Institute of Anthropology and
African Studies at Mainz University.
Aft er the conferences we entrusted the publication of results to Berghahn
Books, which agreed to start a new series entitled Studies in Rhetoric and Cul-
ture; and together with Marion Berghahn—who herself holds a Ph.D. in social
anthropology—and her staff , we draft ed a fi rst introduction to the series.
But although we had announced that we would now begin to publish, we
soon began to doubt whether this was wise, for we still needed further con-
tributions to general theory and had nothing or little on special subjects such
as economics, politics, social relations, and religion. Wouldn’t it be better to
use our energies fi rst to conduct further conferences that would address these
themes and would allow us once and for all to lay the foundation for the series
that Marion had so generously off ered to publish?
So, from Spring 2003 onward for a whole year we worked on yet another
application, supported in Mainz by Anne, Christian, and Felix as well as col-
leagues from other universities: Donald Brenneis (Santa Cruz), Ralph Cintron
(Chicago), Stephen Gudeman (Minneapolis), and Jean Lydall (Addis Ababa).
Others occasionally gave us advice, especially Jon Abbink (Amsterdam), Vin-
cenzo Cannada Bartoli (Rome), and Susanne Schröter (Frankfurt/M). Th e
Volkswagen Foundation took quite a while to decide, but eventually funds
were granted for two further conferences, one on “Rhetoric in Social Relations
and Religion” (February 2005) and one on “Rhetoric in Politics and Econom-
ics” (July 2005), and it was at this point that the “Rhetoric Culture Project”
really came into its own.
It would be tempting to tell more about the history of the project here
and relate, for example, how we discovered Jean Nienkamp’s new book Inter-
nal Rhetorics and celebrated it with a workshop held in her honor at Mainz,
July 2003; or how Philippe-Joseph Salazar invited members of the Rhetoric
Culture Group to explain their project and reveal their ambitions at his con-
ference “About an African Athens” in June 2004 at Cape Town University; or
how we began to realize the relevance of chiasmus for Rhetoric Culture theory,
discovered Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul, and subsequently asked them
to attend one of our conferences; but here there is room for only one more
episode:
preface ! ix
Sometime aft er we had completed the “Rhetoric Culture Conferences,”
Gerard Hauser invited several of us to the “12th Biennial Conference of the
Rhetoric Society of America” scheduled for 26–29 May 2006 in Memphis. He
wrote that he and Ralph Cintron had discussed the need to continue the dia-
logue between anthropology and rhetoric, and that they had fl oated a proposal
to David Zarefsky, President-Elect of the Rhetoric Society of America, to in-
clude a session devoted to the work of anthropologists that bore on rhetoric
and would highlight the presence of anthropologists, draw a good audience,
and promote debate.
Mentioned in the program as one of the highlights and entitled “Rhetoric
Culture: A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Rhetoric,” the panel was in-
cluded in the conference and drew indeed a good audience and promoted a lot
of fruitful talk. Most importantly, the conference brought out once again how
much rhetoric can gain from anthropology and vice versa. In his introduction
to the program, Zarefsky had written that the conference chose “Sizing up
Rhetoric” as its central theme because it was time “to take stock of rhetoric’s
current position in the academy and in our culture.” Scholars should also refl ect,
he continued, “on what rhetoric’s ‘size’ is and ought to be—how large should
be the scope and range of projects we undertake,” and fi nally he encouraged
everyone to “think bigger” about their research and teaching aspirations.
At the fi rst plenary session, Steven Mailloux (Irvine) enlarged on this in a
talk entitled “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Th e Contingent Universality of Rheto-
ric.” He stressed the point that the transdisciplinary perspective of rhetoric
both explains and challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries (thanks to
Steve for sending us the manuscript!). Th is was, of course, very much in ac-
cord with the Rhetoric Culture project, which by defi nition is based on a wide
concept of rhetoric and makes the case that the relationship between anthro-
pology and rhetoric is one of mutual interdependence.
Aft er the conference, we decided to ask a scholar of the Rhetorical Society
of America to join us as third editor of the Berghahn Books series Studies in
Rhetoric and Culture. Th e choice was not diffi cult, for Robert Hariman had
been helping us already a great deal with contacts, conversation, and editorial
advice. So we asked Bob, who without any ado accepted the invitation.
Th e conferences held at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz have
been recorded on video, and the resulting fi lms are available from Berghahn
Books and Documentary Educational Resources in a series entitled Confer-
ence in Film, which “captures,” as our fl yer says, “the rhetorical element of
scholarly discourse and enables viewers to witness the drama—or shall we say
comedy—of academic culture.”
Ivo Strecker (South Omo Research Center, Jinka, Ethiopia)
Stephen Tyler (Rice University, Houston, USA)
