carrithers why rhetoric

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Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric

Author(s): Michael CarrithersReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp.577-583Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804319 .

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COMMENTS

WHY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SHOULDSTUDY RHETORIC

Michael CarrithersUniversity of Durham

Becausethere is born in us the powerto per?suade each otherand to show ourselveswhat?ever we wish, ... we have not only escapedfromlivingasbrutes,but alsocoming togetherhave founded cities and set up laws andinventedarts,and speech has helped us attainpracticallyall of the thingswe have devised.Isokrates1

Isokrates was a Sophist, and so comes downto us clouded by the reputation of theSophists with their supposedly treacherousand twisting skill of persuasion, rhetoric. Butin this brief essay I want to retrieve rhetoricfor anthropology. I argue that rhetoric is apervasive human character. It displays a featureof our species that at once differentiates usfrom other species and throws a revealing lighton our peculiar and mutable form of social?ity. I also argue that attention to rhetoricsharpens the ethnographic eye and lays opento study that feature of social life that isso difficult to capture, its historicity, itseventfulness.I base my case here on an earlier argumentset out in Why humans have cultures Carrithers1992), in which I tried to explain at somelength our character not so much as culture-bearing beings, but rather as something more,as culture-creating and -changing beings.There I concentrated on the intensely inter-active character of human social life. I pointedout, for example, the human capacities to gen-erate long connected skeins of actions andreactions, to comprehend such complexitythrough 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. nst. (N.S.) 11, 577-583

(and in others I will mention) I found ourability both to deal with the intense eventful-ness of social life and to adapt and create newforms of social life.

It is in this territory that I wish to placerhetoric ? or at least an understanding ofrhetoric which is trimmed here and enhancedthere to fit anthropologists' needs. Rhetoricadds to that previous depiction of humansociality a more vivid sense of (1) the movingforce in interaction, (2) the cultural and dis-tinctly human character of that force, and (3)the creation of new cultural forms in sociallife. Let me take each of these in turn.

Rhetoric as a force ininteraction

At a recent meeting of the InternationalRhetoric Culture Project2 - to which I owethe impetus for this argument - Ivo Streckerlaid out for us a powerful image, an imagegood to think with, of rhetoric as a movingforce. He showed us a metre-long woko stickused by the Hamar of Ethiopia (Fig. 1). Thepractical use of the stick is to gather with thehooked end fearsome thorn bush to buildcattle kraals and to push with the forked endthe thorns into place. Hamar use the stick infigurative work as well, in ceremonies of bless?ing and cursing. The speaker draws goodfortune ? rain, fertility, and increase ? towardhimself and his fellows with the hooked endand fends off enemies and bad fortune withthe forked end. In general, concluded


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Figure 1. Hamar woko stick.

Strecker, rhetoric, working like the woko stick,appears in social life whenever we wish todraw people and effects toward us or pushthem away and whenever we wish to con-vince and persuade or discourage anddissuade.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 thenearby Mursi can gain a sense of the give andtake of everyday life in the circumstances of apolitically acephalous society of horticultural-ists and herders. Here vital decisions are thesubject of frequent persuasion and negotiationen plein air, sometimes formally, often quiteinformally. But the universalizing usefulness ofthe image lies in bringing the matter ofrhetoric, that is, persuasion, out of the granderpolitical realms of the Classical world, wherethe study of rhetoric began, into everyday lifeand the face-to-face realm, the fireside, thehomestead, the village street. The anthropolo?gists who are participating in the InternationalRhetoric Culture Project have found theircontributions where rhetoric and the prag-matics of speech and gesture meet: desultorytalk about relatives, politeness in the citystreet,joking over the dinner table, organizingand carrying out a divination session or aseance.

This extension of rhetoric is fertile becauseit sets argumentation, persuasion, negotiationand therefore micropolitics to the fore, anddiscovers a dynamism in social life that anearlier anthropology tended to ignore. Thatdynamism has a particular pattern. Throughthe glass of rhetoric we can see that, in anymoment of interaction, some act to persuade,others are the targets of persuasion; somework, others are worked upon. The eventful-ness of life, the historicity, is moved by therhetorical will, the energeia,of those who forthe moment hold the floor and aim to realizea plan or intention through, and upon, others.As Fernandez expressed the bare bones of thisidea, 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, butrather that the motive force of historicity liesultimately in the will to persuade. Moreover,as Billig (1996) and Nienkamp (2001) haveshown, it is useful and illuminating to speakof people persuading themselves, using thesame rhetorical means they would employ onothers. Sociality penetrates us through andthrough; thought itself is an argument withyourself, like an argument with others, and thestuff of thinking is also the stuff of persuasion.Moreover, if some are necessarily per-suaders while others are persuaded, then thisrelationship can be rewritten as that betweenagents and patients ? I take this second termfrom Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) to designatethose who are the object, rather than the ini-tiator, of action. This stress on the dyadic orplural character of social and rhetorical action- the fact that some do, while others are doneto ? is an important adjustment of the idea of'agency', whose salience in social sciencewriting has soared in the last decade or so.3We would do better to speak of 'agency-cum-patiency', which recovers that funda?mentally mfcractive character that makesrhetoric integral to human sociality.

The cultural and distinctlyhuman character of rhetoric

I want now to show how the force of rhetoricis bound together with its cultural significanceand, to do so, I adduce two examples.

Example 1. I was sittingon the verandaof ahouse near Elpitiya n Sri Lanka.It hadjustrained,anda boy of 2 or 3 yearsbeganplayingintently in a mud puddle in the red lateritesoil in front of the house. After a shortwhilehis mother shot from the back of the houseand yelled, Stop that!You'll be as filthy as anoutcaste!'He stopped,began to cry,but grewdistracted ndwanderedoff to the backof thehouse.Example2. Jean Lydallshowed us a video ofa Hamarwoman,a young mother.She pounds


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COMMENTS 579grainwhile singinga song full of vivid imageswith a strongmelodic line in a clear,pure,andpenetrating opranoto her baby,who is lyingin front of her.The words of the song namevariousrelatives,rom both her husband's ideand father's side, as well as certain otherpersonswhose friendship he womanwants toencourage.The song tells how each is relatedto the baby and how each will care for it asit grows up.

Each of these cases demonstrates, to beginwith, clear rhetorical force and purpose. It istrue that 'force' is a metaphor here, but auseful and necessary one which captures theeffort, the energy expended, to bring about adesirable outcome in others' actions. In thefirst case, the mother's force is directed to thechild and to altering its behaviour (whoamong us has not felt the effect of suchrhetorical force, first from one side, then fromthe other?). In the second, the rhetoricalforce is directed through the child, so tospeak, to certain people who fall withinearshot and whom the woman wants toappeal to for support for her child and, byimplication, for herself. In this particular case,the woman's husband was too feeble to acti-vate kinship bonds within his own kindred;the people addressed were not her husband'skinsmen, but distant patrilineal relatives of herown, in whose vicinity she had built herhouse.

This rhetorical force is cultural in twosenses. In the first sense, conveyed most vividlyin the Sri Lankan case, the rhetoric isintended to convey cultural matter. Here thematter comprises an aesthetic sense of per?sonal presentation and comportment whichcentres on bodily cleanliness. The importanceof this aesthetic sense is gauged in the volumeof the mother's voice and therefore in herexpressed anger. Moreover, her rhetoriccarries with it an aesthetic evaluation of thirdparties, 'outcastes', members of low-castegroups in this hierarchically ordered society. Infact this is quite an extraordinary and highlyconcentrated slice of rhetoric-cum-culture, forit conveys to the child, in one short hot vir-tuoso burst, at once a desired aesthetic ofcomportment (cleanliness), a classification ofthe social world (us vs outcastes), and anegative evaluation of the others (dirty innature, even if not in actual appearance). Ifone were to ask how people in caste societiescome by the idea that humans are naturallyand obviously divided into different andunequal kinds, then this would be a splendidillustration.

The rhetoric is also cultural in the sensethat it demonstrates specific traits of humansin distinction to other species. Culture heredoes not refer to learned behaviour tout courtsince we now know and accept that manyother species do learn behaviour of somekind, notably techniques of food acquisition.It refers, rather,to a specific human behaviour,in this case pedagogy of the young, to conveya social aesthetic. This, I argued in Whyhumanshave cultures,marks us off sharply fromother social primates, who simply do notpossess, or teach, particular styles of socialacting.4This sense of a social aesthetic is quitewide-ranging among us. Indeed it encom-passes everyday politeness, which itself canusefully be understood as a matter of rhetor?ical force, the effort to achieve a desiredoutcome with others in smooth social rela?tionships. As Isokrates might have said, we arequintessentially the rhetorical animal;we evenexert ourselves rhetorically to teach ourselvesto succeed by rhetoric in the micropolitics ofeveryday life.The second example, the singing Hamarmother, captures another dimension of dis-tinctly human culture. In this I follow RobinDunbar (1996), who has argued forcibly thathuman language evolved as the functionalequivalent of grooming behaviour amongother social primates. Grooming behaviourforms bonds among other social primates, andthrough such bonding the individual, say ayoung mother who grooms a dominant male,gains advantages for herself and for the sur?vival of her offspring. The human equivalentis speaking to one another, and indeed,Dunbar stresses, speaking about one another:gossiping, in short. Since speaking can reachmany more than one person at a time, suchsocial grooming by speech can help to createthe much larger groups with much moreinteraction which characterize our species.So far so good, but I would suggest anamendment. It is not only gossiping whichcreates bonds, but also the rhetorical edge inspeech. In the case of the Hamar mother thespeech is sweet as honey: poetry and song.True, the Hamar mother is in just the stereo-typical situation of many other primatemothers, trying to gain the support of impor?tant males, but she has an art that can drawmany of them to her at once, like the hookedend of the woko stick. That art goes wellbeyond gossip, and certainly well beyond thepossession of the grammar and lexicon of herlanguage for it includes figures and imagerywhich give her words a life even before they


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580 COMMENTSare enhanced by melody. This is rhetoricalmastery which is easily recognized as such -and can be recognized, too, from a culturalanthropological perspective, as mastery overthe mental treasure,the schemas and imagery,available in Hamar culture.

The creation of new culturalforms in social life

However, as I argued in Wliy humans have cul?tures,the mark of distinctly human sociality isnot the possession of one culture or anotheras such but the capacity to change and createnew cultures. I turn now to a third exampleto show how the glass of rhetoric allows usto see both culture and creativity more clearly.The example is contained neatly in a pho?tograph taken in Warsaw on 7 December1970 (see Fig. 2). After his election in 1969Willy Brandt, the first Social DemocraticChancellor of the Federal Republic, beganvigorously to prosecute a new policy towardEastern Europe. Previous West German gov?ernments had taken a stiff stance, refusing, forexample, to recognize East Germany's exis?tence as a state, or to accept the Oder-Neisseboundary settled by the Allies, who had

thereby given previously German lands toPoland in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war.Pursuing a policy he called lWandel durchAnnaherung, 'change through approach',Brandt attempted to ameliorate the enmitiesleft behind by the war and further cultivatedin the Cold War, and began signing newtreaties with states across the Iron Curtain.The signing of the WarsawTreaty with Polandin 1970 was hotly contested in West Germanysince it accepted the Oder-Neisse line and sothwarted the aspirations of those Germansdriven from the eastern lands who had keptan irredentist claim alive in the FederalRepublic.

The photograph shows Brandt during hisvisit to Warsaw to sign the treaty.As is routineon such state visits, a wreath-laying wasarranged according to the meticulous code ofan internationally recognized diplomaticculture.The monument with its honour guardwas approached by a motorcade of Polish andGerman dignitaries. In due, careful, and slowprocession, the dignitaries stepped out of theirears and arranged themselves while the presscrowded about to record the routine event.An elaborate wreath was produced for Brandtto place before the monument. He steppedforward to lay the wreath, arranged its ribbonscarefully, then stepped back and, facing themonument, bowed his head solemnly for a

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


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COMMENTS 581while, obeying the tempo and code of suchaffairs.Then, suddenly, he fell gracefully to hisknees and, still obeying the guiding tempo,remained there silently for perhaps a minute.As the present German Chancellor said (on arecent visit to Warsaw to join in naming asquare after Brandt), 'we held our breath'.Brandt then rose gracefully and turned awaytoward the cars. It was done. A year later hewas to be given the Nobel Prize for peace,not least because of what he did before themonument in Warsaw.He had achieved a mas-terstroke of political rhetoric and with it hadcreated a new item of German, indeed inter?national, culture.

An item of culture in what sense?Well, theevent straightawaybecame a topos,a common?place, an event discussed, interpreted andre-interpreted, especially in Germany but else?where in the world as well. That year Timemagazine in the USA made Brandt 'Man ofthe Year' with a picture of the event on itscover. In German it can be referred to in theright context just as derKniefall, the falling on[his] knees'. The Kniefall has endured as anitem of culture. An account of it appeared inthe recent collection of Deutsche Erinnerung-sorte ('German Sites of Memory', Francois &Schultze 2001), a multivolume collection ofwhat the editors call 'paradigmatic events' -events which are defming in themselves andbecome a yardstick for evaluating or com-menting on other events. So it became, toecho Goodenough's famous defmition ofculture, something that every German mustknow to count as a competent member ofsociety. It is today part of the school curricu?lum and is still discussed on Internetforums.

What is its culturalsignificance?At the time itwas taken to be either a sign of a new Ger?many's willingness to reconcile itself with itsneighbours and with its catastrophic past or asign of Brandt sweakness or wrong-headedness.A poll for Der Spiegelshowed that 41 per centof Germans polled at the time found it anappropriate gesture while 48 per cent found itinappropriate. In the longer run, the Kniefallbecame one of a series of admired and heroictopoi,exemplary events, on the way to Germanycreating an extraordinary national culture ofregret and commemoration for the crimescommitted during the SecondWorldWar, espe?cially the Holocaust. Other such events were theFrankfurttrialsof concentration camp guardsin1963-4 in Frankfurt and, more recently, thebuilding of a Holocaust memorial in the heartof Berlin.

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 isthe diplomatic protocol, the minutely orches-trated procedure for state visits and wreath-laying. Behind that protocol lie a series ofmetaphorical, narrative,and temporal schemas.One such schema is acted out in the funerealsolemnity of expression and the tempo.Another is a metaphorical play upon thevertical and the horizontal, high and low.The prescribed posture is stiffly upright, theembodiment of dignity, but shows respect andhonour to the imagined other by a slightdeparture toward the horizontal, a slightbowing of the head. Even by falling to one'sknees - or, to put it another way, by playingforte rather than pianissimoon the high to lowkey - one only shifts the attention to another,but related, set of schemas, ones perhaps notso much actively practised but still well under?stood. A quick poll of German sources, verbal,electronic, and written, yields the followingassociations with such an act: Demut or humil-ity; Abbitte, apology; Reue, remorse; Bufie,repentance; and then Versohnungor Aussoh-nung, appeasement and/or reconciliation. Allthese rhetorical effects are understood wellbeyond Germany, of course, and well beyondthat earlier European Christian hierarchicalsociety in which such gestures would havebeen more routinely practised. So from onepoint of view all Brandt did was to marrytogether two sets of schemas that were alreadyclosely related to one another.And indeed, if I were writing without theperspective of rhetoric and historicity, I couldgive an anthropologists account of thesetypical schemas and social relations thatwould make them seem entirely routine andstereotypical of German, or indeed WesternEuropean, society and culture. So what doesthe rhetorical perspective add? It shows, first,that the schemas of culture are not in them?selves determining, but are tools used bypeople to determine themselves and others.Then it places agency-and-patiency to thefore; the tools of culture are used by peopleon one another, to persuade and convince,and so to move the social situation from onestate to another. Finally, the rhetorical per?spective shows us the timing, the flow ofevents in a narrative, such that just this set ofschemas, informing a solemn diplomatic cer?emony, when combined with that set ofschemas, informing ceremonies of remorse,repentance, and reconciliation, took on a par?ticular weight and rhetorical force when


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582 COMMENTSexpressed at that particular time. Only in thatperspective can we achieve a full understand?ing of the Kniefall and why it came to beunderstood as an exemplary act of visionarypolitical rhetoric and an innovation inGerman culture.

Finale

I have argued that the notion of rhetoricin culture faces in two directions, towardunderstanding human sociality against thesociality of other species, and toward a morepenetrating practice in sociocultural anthro?pology, an understanding that would allow usto see historicity and cultural creativity in amore straightforward way. Let me concludeby concentrating on this latter facet ofrhetoric-in-culture.

The rhetorical perspective on culture worksto some extent on the analogy of speech.Through speech, spoken or written, we canproduce endlessly creative utterances. Thissentence that I am writing now for example,is made entirely of known lexical items andplainly transparent grammar, yet it is entirelyoriginal because it has a purple feather dan-gling from the end. A full understanding of itrequires, yes, a competent knowledge of thestructures of grammar and lexicon, but that isnot enough. The competent reader must alsounderstand its place in a flow of thought andaction. And so a rhetorical perspective requiresthe ethnographer to attend not just to thestructures of culture, but also to the flow ofevents.

Yet rhetoric is more than just speech. First,the tools of persuasion are not reducible tospeech alone, as the entirely mute, but veryeloquent, Kniefall demonstrates. More to thepoint, attending to the rhetorical dimensionof life requires attending to the rhetorical will,the work on social situations that the per-suading agent intends. There is no escapingthe attribution of intention here, whateverinterpretative difficulties the idea of intentionbrings with it: for without an idea of inten?tion, we might as well imagine that WillyBrandt suffered merely a momentary physio?logical weakness in the knees before theWarsaw monument. Moreover, the intentionis only intelligible in terms of the mutable sit?uation itself, which we must likewise under?stand. So the required existents in therhetorical perspective - the ontology, if you

will - include the rhetor/agent (singular orplural), the patients or audience, and theflowing, changing situation. These elementsare printed at quite high contrast in therhetorical picture, as Brandt appears in rela?tively high contrast in the Kniefallphoto. Nec?essary,but printed more faintly and at lowercontrast in the background (like the distantbackground in the photo) of this ontologicalperspective, are the 'structures', the schemas,which the rhetor may apply in the situationto sway the audience.This rhetorical perspective is fruitful bothin a narrowly ethnographic sense, and in awider theoretical sense. For ethnographers, itsets a high standard of achievement, therequirement to rest not with the specificationof the characteristic organizations and schemasof a society, but to go beyond that to theirskilled use in one situation or another. Foranthropological theory in general, it proposesa way to deal with the pervasive but troubledmetaphor of structure'.Two eminent theoristsof social life, Marshall Sahlins and AnthonyGiddens, have struggled mightily with, andagainst, that metaphor. Giddens, for example,has been driven to coin the desperate verbalsubstantive 'structuration' in order to retainthe metaphor of'structure', while still makingit applicable to a world shot through withhistoricity and constant metamorphosis. Isuppose this to be an effect of the (rhetorical)will in sociology and anthropology to producewholly encompassing explanations. The per?spective from rhetoric-in-culture, on the otherhand, would counsel more modest ambitions,and a more flexible way with our metaphors.We might, for example, think sometimes ofour 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 tothe ancient Greeks, to the poet Antilochus,and act as the fox, 'who knows many tricks',rather than the hedgehog, 'who knows only

NOTES11 have taken this from the website of the

International Rhetoric Culture Project:http://www.rhetoric-culture.org/outline. tm.2The International Rhetoric CultureProject was initiated by Ivo Strecker andStephen Tyler, and has been fmanced by the


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Volkswagen Foundation. Scores of anthropol?ogists, rhetoricians, psychologists, and othershave taken part. A series of volumes from itswork is to be published by Berghahn, begin?ning in 2006.3This was kindly pointed out to me, withquantitative support, by Michael Brumann ata recent seminar in Durham.

4In this I follow the primatologist DavidPremack (1984).

REFERENCESBerdahl, D. 1999. Wherethe world ended:re-uni-

fication and identity in the German border-land. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.Billig, M. 1996. Arguing and thinking:a rhetor?icalapproacho socialpsychology.Cambridge:

University Press.Carrithers, M. 1992. Wliy humans have cultures:explaining anthropologyand social diversity.Oxford: University Press.

Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, ossip,and the evo?lution of language.London: Faber & Faber.Fernandez,J. 1986. Persuasionsandperformances:the play of tropesin culture.Bloomington:

University of Indiana Press.Francois, E. & H. Schultze (eds) 2001. DeutscheErinnerungsorte,vol. 1. Munich: VerlagCH. Beck.

Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and experience:hereligion of the Dinka. Oxford: UniversityPress.

Nienkamp, J. 2001. Internal rhetorics:owardahistory and theory of self-persuasion.Carbondale, 111.:Southern Illinois StatePress.

Premack, D 1984. Pedagogy and aesthetics assources of culture. In Handbookof cognitivescience(ed.) M. Gazzaniga, 1-22. London:Plenum Press.Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and truth: the re-

making of social analysis. Boston: BeaconPress.Strecker, I. 1988. The socialpracticeof symbol-ization: an anthropologicalnalysis.London:Athlone Press.

Michael Carrithers is Professor of Anthropol?ogy at Durham University. He has done field?work in Sri Lanka, India, and Germany. Atpresent he is working on how Germans dealwith the East German past, and on the ideaof culture as rhetoric.Departmentof Anthropology,Durham University,43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, [email protected]

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