Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric Author(s): Michael Carrithers Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 577-583 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804319 . Accessed: 24/02/2012 08:38
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COMMENTS

WHY

ANTHROPOLOGISTS STUDY RHETORIC

SHOULD

Michael University

Carrithers of Durham

Because there is born in us the power to per? suadeeach other and to show ourselveswhat? ever we wish, ... we have not only escaped from living as brutes,but also coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts,and speech has helped us attain practicallyall of the things we have devised. Isokrates1 Isokrates was a Sophist, and so comes down to us clouded by the reputation of the Sophists with their supposedly treacherous and twisting skill of persuasion, rhetoric. But in this brief essay I want to retrieve rhetoric for anthropology. I argue that rhetoric is a pervasive human character. It displays a feature of our species that at once differentiates us from other species and throws a revealing light on our peculiar and mutable form of social? ity. I also argue that attention to rhetoric sharpens the ethnographic eye and lays open to study that feature of social life that is so difficult to capture, its historicity, its eventfulness. I base my case here on an earlier argument set out in Why humans have cultures(Carrithers 1992), in which I tried to explain at some length our character not so much as culturebearing beings, but rather as something more, as culture-creating and -changing beings. There I concentrated on the intensely interactive character of human social life. I pointed out, for example, the human capacities to generate long connected skeins of actions and reactions, to comprehend such complexity through narrative thought, and to interpret, simplify, and creatively reinterpret that com? plexity into new forms. So in those capacities ? Royal Anthropological Institute 2005. J. Roy. anthrop.Inst. (N.S.) 11, 577-583

(and in others I will mention) I found our ability both to deal with the intense eventfulness of social life and to adapt and create new forms of social life. It is in this territory that I wish to place rhetoric ? or at least an understanding of rhetoric which is trimmed here and enhanced there to fit anthropologists' needs. Rhetoric adds to that previous depiction of human sociality a more vivid sense of (1) the moving force in interaction, (2) the cultural and distinctly human character of that force, and (3) the creation of new cultural forms in social life. Let me take each of these in turn.

Rhetoric

as a force

in

interaction

At a recent meeting of the International Rhetoric Culture Project2 - to which I owe the impetus for this argument - Ivo Strecker laid out for us a powerful image, an image good to think with, of rhetoric as a moving force. He showed us a metre-long woko stick used by the Hamar of Ethiopia (Fig. 1). The practical use of the stick is to gather with the hooked end fearsome thorn bush to build cattle kraals and to push with the forked end the thorns into place. Hamar use the stick in figurative work as well, in ceremonies of bless? ing and cursing. The speaker draws good fortune ? rain, fertility, and increase ? toward himself and his fellows with the hooked end and fends off enemies and bad fortune with the forked end. In general, concluded

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COMMENTS

Figure 1. Hamar woko stick.

Strecker, rhetoric, working like the woko stick, appears in social life whenever we wish to draw people and effects toward us or push them away and whenever we wish to convince and persuade or discourage and dissuade. It is easy enough to see how such an image - and likewise a theoria, a way of seeing could grow out of experiencing the Hamar: anyone who has read Strecker's ethnography (1988) or seen David Turton's films of the nearby Mursi can gain a sense of the give and take of everyday life in the circumstances of a politically acephalous society of horticulturalists and herders. Here vital decisions are the subject of frequent persuasion and negotiation en plein air, sometimes formally, often quite informally. But the universalizing usefulness of the image lies in bringing the matter of rhetoric, that is, persuasion, out of the grander political realms of the Classical world, where the study of rhetoric began, into everyday life and the face-to-face realm, the fireside, the homestead, the village street. The anthropolo? gists who are participating in the International Rhetoric Culture Project have found their contributions where rhetoric and the pragmatics of speech and gesture meet: desultory talk about relatives, politeness in the city street, joking over the dinner table, organizing and carrying out a divination session or a seance. This extension of rhetoric is fertile because it sets argumentation, persuasion, negotiation and therefore micropolitics to the fore, and discovers a dynamism in social life that an earlier anthropology tended to ignore. That dynamism has a particular pattern. Through the glass of rhetoric we can see that, in any moment of interaction, some act to persuade, others are the targets of persuasion; some work, others are worked upon. The eventfulness of life, the historicity, is moved by the rhetorical will, the energeia,of those who for the moment hold the floor and aim to realize a plan or intention through, and upon, others. As Fernandez expressed the bare bones of this idea, the rhetorical effort 'makes a movement [of mind] and leads to a performance' (1986: 8). This is not to say that persuasion is always

effective, or that plans are always realized, but rather that the motive force of historicity lies ultimately in the will to persuade. Moreover, as Billig (1996) and Nienkamp (2001) have shown, it is useful and illuminating to speak of people persuading themselves, using the same rhetorical means they would employ on others. Sociality penetrates us through and through; thought itself is an argument with yourself, like an argument with others, and the stuff of thinking is also the stuff of persuasion. Moreover, if some are necessarily persuaders while others are persuaded, then this relationship can be rewritten as that between ? agents and patients I take this second term from Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) to designate those who are the object, rather than the initiator, of action. This stress on the dyadic or plural character of social and rhetorical action - the fact that some do, while others are done to ? is an important adjustment of the idea of 'agency', whose salience in social science writing has soared in the last decade or so.3 We would do better to speak of 'agencycum-patiency', which recovers that funda? mentally mfcractive character that makes rhetoric integral to human sociality.

The human

cultural

and

character

distinctly of rhetoric

I want now to show how the force of rhetoric is bound together with its cultural significance and, to do so, I adduce two examples. Example 1. I was sitting on the verandaof a house near Elpitiya in Sri Lanka.It had just rained,and a boy of 2 or 3 yearsbegan playing intently in a mud puddle in the red laterite soil in front of the house.After a short while his mother shot from the back of the house and yelled,'Stop that!You'll be as filthy as an outcaste!'He stopped,began to cry,but grew and wanderedoff to the back of the distracted house. Example 2. Jean Lydallshowed us a video of a Hamarwoman,a young mother.She pounds

COMMENTS grainwhile singing a song full of vivid images with a strongmelodic line in a clear,pure,and penetratingsopranoto her baby,who is lying in front of her.The words of the song name variousrelatives, from both her husband's side and father's side, as well as certain other personswhose friendshipthe woman wants to The song tells how each is related encourage. to the baby and how each will care for it as it grows up. Each of these cases demonstrates, to begin with, clear rhetorical force and purpose. It is true that 'force' is a metaphor here, but a useful and necessary one which captures the effort, the energy expended, to bring about a desirable outcome in others' actions. In the first case, the mother's force is directed to the child and to altering its behaviour (who among us has not felt the effect of such rhetorical force, first from one side, then from the other?). In the second, the rhetorical force is directed through the child, so to speak, to certain people who fall within earshot and whom the woman wants to appeal to for support for her child and, by implication, for herself. In this particular case, the woman's husband was too feeble to activate kinship bonds within his own kindred; the people addressed were not her husband's kinsmen, but distant patrilineal relatives of her own, in whose vicinity she had built her house. This rhetorical force is cultural in two senses. In the first sense, conveyed most vividly in the Sri Lankan case, the rhetoric is intended to convey cultural matter. Here the matter comprises an aesthetic sense of per? sonal presentation and comportment which centres on bodily cleanliness. The importance of this aesthetic sense is gauged in the volume of the mother's voice and therefore in her expressed anger. Moreover, her rhetoric carries with it an aesthetic evaluation of third parties, 'outcastes', members of low-caste groups in this hierarchically ordered society. In fact this is quite an extraordinary and highly concentrated slice of rhetoric-cum-culture, for it conveys to the child, in one short hot virtuoso burst, at once a desired aesthetic of comportment (cleanliness), a classification of the social world (us vs outcastes), and a negative evaluation of the others (dirty in nature, even if not in actual appearance). If one were to ask how people in caste societies come by the idea that humans are naturally and obviously divided into different and unequal kinds, then this would be a splendid illustration.

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The rhetoric is also cultural in the sense that it demonstrates specific traits of humans in distinction to other species. Culture here does not refer to learned behaviour tout court since we now know and accept that many other species do learn behaviour of some kind, notably techniques of food acquisition. It refers, rather, to a specific human behaviour, in this case pedagogy of the young, to convey a social aesthetic. This, I argued in Why marks us off sharply from humans have cultures, other social primates, who simply do not possess, or teach, particular styles of social acting.4 This sense of a social aesthetic is quite wide-ranging among us. Indeed it encompasses everyday politeness, which itself can usefully be understood as a matter of rhetor? ical force, the effort to achieve a desired outcome with others in smooth social rela? tionships. As Isokrates might have said, we are quintessentially the rhetorical animal; we even exert ourselves rhetorically to teach ourselves to succeed by rhetoric in the micropolitics of everyday life. The second example, the singing Hamar mother, captures another dimension of distinctly human culture. In this I follow Robin Dunbar (1996), who has argued forcibly that human language evolved as the functional equivalent of grooming behaviour among other social primates. Grooming behaviour forms bonds among other social primates, and through such bonding the individual, say a young mother who grooms a dominant male, gains advantages for herself and for the sur? vival of her offspring. The human equivalent is speaking to one another, and indeed, Dunbar stresses, speaking about one another: gossiping, in short. Since speaking can reach many more than one person at a time, such social grooming by speech can help to create the much larger groups with much more interaction which characterize our species. So far so good, but I would suggest an amendment. It is not only gossiping which creates bonds, but also the rhetorical edge in speech. In the case of the Hamar mother the speech is sweet as honey: poetry and song. True, the Hamar mother is in just the stereotypical situation of many other primate mothers, trying to gain the support of impor? tant males, but she has an art that can draw many of them to her at once, like the hooked end of the woko stick. That art goes well beyond gossip, and certainly well beyond the possession of the grammar and lexicon of her language for it includes figures and imagery which give her words a life even before they

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COMMENTS thereby given previously German lands to Poland in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war. Pursuing a policy he called lWandel durch Annaherung, 'change through approach', Brandt attempted to ameliorate the enmities left behind by the war and further cultivated in the Cold War, and began signing new treaties with states across the Iron Curtain. The signing of the Warsaw Treaty with Poland in 1970 was hotly contested in West Germany since it accepted the Oder-Neisse line and so thwarted the aspirations of those Germans driven from the eastern lands who had kept an irredentist claim alive in the Federal Republic. The photograph shows Brandt during his visit to Warsaw to sign the treaty.As is routine on such state visits, a wreath-laying was arranged according to the meticulous code of an internationally recognized diplomatic culture. The monument with its honour guard was approached by a motorcade of Polish and German dignitaries. In due, careful, and slow procession, the dignitaries stepped out of their ears and arranged themselves while the press crowded about to record the routine event. An elaborate wreath was produced for Brandt to place before the monument. He stepped forward to lay the wreath, arranged its ribbons carefully, then stepped back and, facing the monument, bowed his head solemnly for a

are enhanced by melody. This is rhetorical mastery which is easily recognized as such and can be recognized, too, from a cultural anthropological perspective, as mastery over the mental treasure, the schemas and imagery, available in Hamar culture.

The

creation forms

of new in social

cultural life

However, as I argued in Wliy humans have cul? tures,the mark of distinctly human sociality is not the possession of one culture or another as such but the capacity to change and create new cultures. I turn now to a third example to show how the glass of rhetoric allows us to see both culture and creativity more clearly. The example is contained neatly in a pho? tograph taken in Warsaw on 7 December 1970 (see Fig. 2). After his election in 1969 Willy Brandt, the first Social Democratic Chancellor of the Federal Republic, began vigorously to prosecute a new policy toward Eastern Europe. Previous West German gov? ernments had taken a stiff stance, refusing, for example, to recognize East Germany's exis? tence as a state, or to accept the Oder-Neisse boundary settled by the Allies, who had

Figure 2. Willy Brandt before the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (? 2002 Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung).

COMMENTS while, obeying the tempo and code of such affairs.Then, suddenly, he fell gracefully to his knees and, still obeying the guiding tempo, remained there silently for perhaps a minute. As the present German Chancellor said (on a recent visit to Warsaw to join in naming a square after Brandt), 'we held our breath'. Brandt then rose gracefully and turned away toward the cars. It was done. A year later he was to be given the Nobel Prize for peace, not least because of what he did before the monument in Warsaw.He had achieved a masterstroke of political rhetoric and with it had created a new item of German, indeed inter? national, culture. An item of culture in what sense? Well, the event straightaway became a topos,a common? place, an event discussed, interpreted and re-interpreted, especially in Germany but else? where in the world as well. That year Time magazine in the USA made Brandt 'Man of the Year' with a picture of the event on its cover. In German it can be referred to in the right context just as der Kniefall,'the falling on [his] knees'. The Kniefall has endured as an item of culture. An account of it appeared in the recent collection of Deutsche Erinnerungsorte ('German Sites of Memory', Francois & Schultze 2001), a multivolume collection of what the editors call 'paradigmatic events' events which are defming in themselves and become a yardstick for evaluating or commenting on other events. So it became, to echo Goodenough's famous defmition of culture, something that every German must know to count as a competent member of society. It is today part of the school curricu? lum and is still discussed on Internet forums. What is its cultural significance? At the time it was taken to be either a sign of a new Ger? many's willingness to reconcile itself with its neighbours and with its catastrophic past or a sign of Brandt s weakness or wrong-headedness. A poll for Der Spiegel showed that 41 per cent of Germans polled at the time found it an appropriate gesture while 48 per cent found it inappropriate. In the longer run, the Kniefall became one of a series of admired and heroic topoi,exemplary events, on the way to Germany creating an extraordinary national culture of regret and commemoration for the crimes committed during the SecondWorldWar, espe? cially the Holocaust. Other such events were the Frankfurttrials of concentration camp guards in 1963-4 in Frankfurt and, more recently, the building of a Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

581

What is new or creative about the KniefalP. In one sense, nothing; it is made from mate? rials which were lying to hand. First, there is the diplomatic protocol, the minutely orchestrated procedure for state visits and wreathlaying. Behind that protocol lie a series of metaphorical, narrative, and temporal schemas. One such schema is acted out in the funereal solemnity of expression and the tempo. Another is a metaphorical play upon the vertical and the horizontal, high and low. The prescribed posture is stiffly upright, the embodiment of dignity, but shows respect and honour to the imagined other by a slight departure toward the horizontal, a slight bowing of the head. Even by falling to one's knees - or, to put it another way, by playing forte rather than pianissimo on the high to low key one only shifts the attention to another, but related, set of schemas, ones perhaps not so much actively practised but still well under? stood. A quick poll of German sources, verbal, electronic, and written, yields the following associations with such an act: Demut or humility; Abbitte, apology; Reue, remorse; Bufie, repentance; and then Versohnungor Aussohnung, appeasement and/or reconciliation. All these rhetorical effects are understood well beyond Germany, of course, and well beyond that earlier European Christian hierarchical society in which such gestures would have been more routinely practised. So from one point of view all Brandt did was to marry together two sets of schemas that were already closely related to one another. And indeed, if I were writing without the perspective of rhetoric and historicity, I could give an anthropologists account of these typical schemas and social relations that would make them seem entirely routine and stereotypical of German, or indeed Western European, society and culture. So what does the rhetorical perspective add? It shows, first, that the schemas of culture are not in them? selves determining, but are tools used by people to determine themselves and others. Then it places agency-and-patiency to the fore; the tools of culture are used by people on one another, to persuade and convince, and so to move the social situation from one state to another. Finally, the rhetorical per? spective shows us the timing, the flow of events in a narrative, such that just this set of schemas, informing a solemn diplomatic cer? emony, when combined with that set of schemas, informing ceremonies of remorse, repentance, and reconciliation, took on a par? ticular weight and rhetorical force when

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COMMENTS will - include the rhetor/agent (singular or plural), the patients or audience, and the flowing, changing situation. These elements are printed at quite high contrast in the rhetorical picture, as Brandt appears in rela? tively high contrast in the Kniefallphoto. Nec? essary, but printed more faintly and at lower contrast in the background (like the distant background in the photo) of this ontological perspective, are the 'structures', the schemas, which the rhetor may apply in the situation to sway the audience. This rhetorical perspective is fruitful both in a narrowly ethnographic sense, and in a wider theoretical sense. For ethnographers, it sets a high standard of achievement, the requirement to rest not with the specification of the characteristic organizations and schemas of a society, but to go beyond that to their skilled use in one situation or another. For anthropological theory in general, it proposes a way to deal with the pervasive but troubled metaphor of structure'.Two eminent theorists of social life, Marshall Sahlins and Anthony Giddens, have struggled mightily with, and against, that metaphor. Giddens, for example, has been driven to coin the desperate verbal substantive 'structuration' in order to retain the metaphor of'structure', while still making it applicable to a world shot through with historicity and constant metamorphosis. I suppose this to be an effect of the (rhetorical) will in sociology and anthropology to produce wholly encompassing explanations. The per? spective from rhetoric-in-culture, on the other hand, would counsel more modest ambitions, and a more flexible way with our metaphors. We might, for example, think sometimes of our cultural schemas as no more than 'tools', and of our existential situation not as 'struc? tured', but perhaps as 'plastic', or as 'flowing', or even as a constantly mutable 'borderland' of contention, as suggested by Rosaldo (1989; see also Berdahl 1999). We might go back to the ancient Greeks, to the poet Antilochus, and act as the fox, 'who knows many tricks', rather than the hedgehog, 'who knows only

expressed at that particular time. Only in that perspective can we achieve a full understand? ing of the Kniefall and why it came to be understood as an exemplary act of visionary political rhetoric and an innovation in German culture.

Finale

I have argued that the notion of rhetoric in culture faces in two directions, toward understanding human sociality against the sociality of other species, and toward a more penetrating practice in sociocultural anthro? pology, an understanding that would allow us to see historicity and cultural creativity in a more straightforward way. Let me conclude by concentrating on this latter facet of rhetoric-in-culture. The rhetorical perspective on culture works to some extent on the analogy of speech. Through speech, spoken or written, we can produce endlessly creative utterances. This sentence that I am writing now for example, is made entirely of known lexical items and plainly transparent grammar, yet it is entirely original because it has a purple feather dangling from the end. A full understanding of it requires, yes, a competent knowledge of the structures of grammar and lexicon, but that is not enough. The competent reader must also understand its place in a flow of thought and action. And so a rhetorical perspective requires the ethnographer to attend not just to the structures of culture, but also to the flow of events. Yet rhetoric is more than just speech. First, the tools of persuasion are not reducible to speech alone, as the entirely mute, but very eloquent, Kniefall demonstrates. More to the point, attending to the rhetorical dimension of life requires attending to the rhetorical will, the work on social situations that the persuading agent intends. There is no escaping the attribution of intention here, whatever interpretative difficulties the idea of intention brings with it: for without an idea of inten? tion, we might as well imagine that Willy Brandt suffered merely a momentary physio? logical weakness in the knees before the Warsaw monument. Moreover, the intention is only intelligible in terms of the mutable sit? uation itself, which we must likewise under? stand. So the required existents in the rhetorical perspective - the ontology, if you

NOTES 11 have taken this from the website of the Culture Project: International Rhetoric htm. org/outline. http:/ /www.rhetoric-culture. 2The International Rhetoric Culture Project was initiated by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, and has been fmanced by the

COMMENTS Volkswagen Foundation. Scores of anthropol? ogists, rhetoricians, psychologists, and others have taken part. A series of volumes from its work is to be published by Berghahn, begin? ning in 2006. 3This was kindly pointed out to me, with quantitative support, by Michael Brumann at a recent seminar in Durham. 4In this I follow the primatologist David Premack (1984).

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REFERENCES Berdahl, D. 1999. Where the worldended:re-unification and identity in the German borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Billig, M. 1996. Arguing and thinking:a rhetor? to socialpsychology.Cambridge: ical approach University Press. Carrithers, M. 1992. Wliy humans have cultures: explaining anthropologyand social diversity. Oxford: University Press.

Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, gossip, and the evo? lution of language.London: Faber & Faber. Fernandez,J. 1986. Persuasionsand performances: the play of tropes in culture.Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Francois, E. & H. Schultze (eds) 2001. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1. Munich: Verlag CH. Beck. the Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and experience: religion of the Dinka. Oxford: University Press. toward a Nienkamp, J. 2001. Internal rhetorics: and self-persuasion. theory of history Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois State Press. Premack, D 1984. Pedagogy and aesthetics as sources of culture. In Handbook of cognitive science (ed.) M. Gazzaniga, 1-22. London: Plenum Press. Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and truth: the remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Strecker, I. 1988. The social practiceof symbolization: an anthropological analysis. London: Athlone Press.

Michael Carrithers is Professor of Anthropol? ogy at Durham University. He has done field? work in Sri Lanka, India, and Germany. At present he is working on how Germans deal with the East German past, and on the idea of culture as rhetoric. Department of Anthropology,Durham University, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK. m.b.carrithers@durham.ac.uk