The Anthropology of Argument

Cultural Foundations of Rhetoric and Reason

Christopher W. Tindale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000335194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This innovative text reinvigorates argumentation studies by exploring the experience of argument across cultures, introducing an anthropological perspective into the domains of rhetoric, communication, and philosophy.

The Anthropology of Argument fills an important gap in contemporary argumentation theory by shifting the focus away from the purely propositional element of arguments and onto how they emerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds, demonstrating how argumentation can be understood as a means of expression and a gathering place of ideas and styles. Confronting the limitations of the Western tradition of logic and searching out the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative, and audience, it examines the nature of multi-modal argumentation. Tindale analyzes the impacts of colonialism on the field and addresses both optimistic and cynical assessments of contextual differences. The results have implications for our understanding of contemporary argumentative discourse in areas marked by deep disagreement, like politics, law, and social policy.

The book will interest scholars and upper-level students in communication, philosophy, argumentation theory, anthropology, rhetoric, linguistics, and cultural studies.

1
EARLY ENCOUNTERS AND THE BLENDING OF ARGUMENTATIVE CULTURES

Introduction: Situations and Their Borders

The history of argumentation theory is a history of metaphors—journeys, conflicts, fields, and divisions. In this chapter, I want to add to this series the metaphor of the “border.” This itself is a rich metaphorical space, ripe for exploitation and recovery. The ideas captured in “the frontiers of thought,” for example, where perspectives collide, and assumptions are challenged are ideas common to the aims of argumentation, of opposition, modification, and advocacy. And this raises the question of what marks such frontiers, identifying limits and terms of engagement. Where difference raises its head and establishes perimeters, there the tools of argumentation are brought into play. Where those differences are real and deep, the tools are stretched to their limits and sometimes fail to find a shared ground on which to build.¹ And borders have their margins to which ideas, perspectives, and entire value systems can be relegated, creating occlusions that stem communication and provoke duress (Stoler 2016).

Argumentation succeeds most within the social confines of communities that share ideas and values; it is most challenged when required to cross borders, when taken into cross-cultural environments where the stock of what is shared can be limited and cloaked in unfamiliar terms. In such circumstances, argumentation needs the complementary support of rhetoric, with its repertoire of strategies and skills and insights into the ways meaning is concealed and revealed.

Rhetoric takes us inside human experience, suffusing, disrupting, and modifying. Rhetorical argumentation draws on rhetoric’s opportunities to provide a more complete understanding of the argumentative experience, adding depth and thickness to what I will call the “argumentative situation.” Lloyd Bitzer (1968) brought rhetoric back to its contextual roots, insisting on its situational nature. Even logical threads of argumentation² have processed this insight, observing the shift between informal logic and its formal cousins, recognizing in context the conditions for “normal” argument that separate resolvable disagreements from those that are deep (Fogelin 1985). For Bitzer, rhetoric does something: it brings into existence a discourse that alters reality, called forth by a situation to which it responds, an exigence (4–5).

Certain discourses, like those expressing extreme positions, throw this into disarray, marking boundaries of consensual response across which it is difficult to traverse. While not all such discourse is negative and much of it reflects the healthy diversity of opinions on which societies thrive, its presence still invites a fundamental rethinking of how rhetorical argumentation operates in circumstances characterized by dissensus (Kock 2007). Understood as positions of a radical nature that resist the status quo, extremist positions underlie many of our social and political debates and characterize the boundary lines that emerge between cultures. How are we to argue constructively with people who hold radical views in uncompromising ways?

Many of the problems entangled in this question, problems of incommensurability and deep disagreement, are anticipated in the encounters that have occurred between peoples, societies, and cultures meeting for the first time. I adopt the concept “encounter rhetorics”³ to describe the rhetorical and argumentative experiences characterizing these first-contacts. This chapter introduces the concept in a provisional way by distinguishing it from some recent innovations to which it has affinity and by describing some of its features. Assuming that humans are rhetorical by nature and that peoples develop rhetorically on their own terms, these early encounters are between rhetorics or rhetorical systems or codes (Angenot 2006).

If they represent rhetorical situations, they do so on a deeper level than Bitzer’s analysis anticipated. But they offer the promise of showing us how rhetorical beings have overcome problems of communication in fostering mutual cognitive environments in which constructive argumentation can flourish as argumentation cultures blend.

For Bitzer, rhetoric impacts communication in a fundamental way. In a perfect world, he muses, there would be communication but no rhetoric, since the exigencies that provoke rhetorical responses would not arise (Bitzer 1968, 13). First encounters might seem to involve exigencies as Bitzer employs the term (6) in the shape of modifiable obstacles of an urgent nature. But events (I choose this term carefully to avoid “situation,” and I will elaborate on this further in Chapter 4) in which peoples meet for the first time inaugurate a rhetorical encounter of a specific kind, a juxtaposing of rhetorics, beyond what Bitzer envisages. Consider his delimitation of “audience,” for example: “a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (8).⁴ If we try to extend this idea to events of the first encounter, then we need to stretch the sense of “capable” that is involved. Because, clearly, at the moment of encounter any capability the participants possess is potential rather than actual.⁵

As seminal as the idea of the rhetorical situation has become, its limitations and presuppositions have also been well catalogued (Garrett and Xiao 1993; Vatz 1973; Biesecker 1989). Among the concerns, those of principal relevance to my deliberations involve the question of whether the kinds of events Bitzer describes with the term “exigencies” do in fact inaugurate rhetoric rather than actually respond to it. Tying rhetoric to its relationship with meaning (a move with which I am in fundamental agreement), Richard Vatz (1973, 160) argues that rhetoric is a cause of meaning, rather than an effect, thus reversing the relationship in Bitzer. On these different terms, what rhetoric does is more fundamental than Bitzer believes. Once this displacement is accepted, the question of the origin of rhetorical discourse becomes important. Is it the situation, or the speaker, or even the audience that is the source? Criticisms of the Bitzer account push us in the direction of the third of these choices. Barbara Biesecker approaches the problem through the perspective of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction and his concept of différance. Suggestive in interesting ways, she worries that Bitzer “limits what we can say about discourse which seeks to persuade” (110, my emphasis), and focuses much of her energy on the text as a constituent element of the rhetorical situation. It is when her attention turns to the role of audience that she provides conclusions that still resonate as important. I have discussed elsewhere the concept of différance with its valuable notion of the trace, interconnecting meanings in complex ways (Tindale 1999). Biesecker observes of différance that it allows us to read rhetoric as productive of audiences and rhetorical events “as sites that make visible the historically articulated emergence of the category ‘audience’” (126). Setting aside the question of whose history is in play here, this rethinking of what is entailed by the rhetorical situation invites an expansion of the concept that encounter rhetorics would welcome, while also shifting the focus from exigency to audience.

If any vestigial belief that Bitzer’s account describes a concept that is universal and cross-cultural should linger, Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao’s study of the rhetoric around China’s two opium wars puts that belief to rest. They also bring into question the role that exigency plays in prompting rhetorical discourse (by detailing some serious failures on this front). While Bitzer’s understanding of exigency remains a focus of their critique, they make the crucial assertion (almost as an aside!) that we “perhaps … need to distinguish differing types of rhetorical situations” (39), and they register the importance of audience in the ways in which any discourse tradition can participate in a rhetorical situation.

Indeed, in this spirit, one central type of rhetorical situation in which a more evolved notion of audience is prominent is the “argumentative situation,” as I will unpack this idea in the chapters ahead. In fact, the idea that should be developed is that prompted by a suggestion of philosopher J.L. Austin, namely the total argumentative situation.

In his seminal work, How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin drew attention to what he termed the “speech situation,” and in particular “the total speech situation.” As he insisted: “The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating” (Austin 1962, 147). This builds on his earlier observation that we cannot just concentrate on the propositions involved. Rather, “We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act” (1962

, 52).

The parallels with this project on argumentation are striking. A long tradition of associating arguments with propositions has influenced ways in which both “argument” and “argumentation” are understood (and taught) in the modern academy. But this tradition, while important in numerous ways, is insufficient for the tasks at hand. As Austin insists for speech acts, so we can echo for arguments: to be fully understood and appreciated, they need to be approached in situ, as it were. We need to uncover the total argumentative situation with all the contextual elements involved. Now, Austin is frustratingly vague on what elements constitute the total speech situation. One assumes that for the speech act, it will involve more than just the locution and will bring into play the illocution and the perlocution. But Austin’s lack of detail is a lesson from which we might learn. In unpacking the details of the total argumentative situation, we understand it first as a type of rhetorical situation, in the tradition Bitzer inaugurated but with the necessary emendations that commentators have suggested. And therein we identify the audience as a central component. Other obvious elements are the source of the argument (the arguer) and the argument itself, which may involve propositions, but also may not (see Chapter 6). Beyond this, we will learn to pay careful attention to other features of the situation that might easily be overlooked, contextual features like the timing of an event and also the place of its occurrence (Chapter 4), and also the mode by which it is expressed (Chapter 5). It is by highlighting the concept of the total argumentative situation in the context of this last element—the mode—that I will contribute to the development of multi-modal argumentation, as this idea is discussed in the next chapter.

Before moving on to explore these matters, more needs first to be said about the idea introduced earlier: encounter rhetoric. Other treatments of rhetoric in the context of differences might be seen to be adequate to the concerns that have stimulated this inquiry, thus limiting its value or even its necessity. Accordingly, I will consider two of these—comparative rhetoric, as developed by George Kennedy and others, and Wayne C. Booth’s rhetorology—before addressing a third—Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991, 1987) contact zone. I focus on these because I take them to be the strongest candidates for comparison with encounter rhetorics and because of their influence in the field.⁶ My intention is not to suggest that encounter rhetoric is in any way an alternative to these and the insights they disclose. My claim, rather, is that for all that they contribute to our understandings of how rhetoric operates on a deep level, they are not sufficient conceptual tools to explore the questions that interest me, and that the concept of encounter rhetorics involves things that they were never designed to manage.

Comparative Rhetorics

For George Kennedy, comparative rhetoric is “the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world” (1998, 1). This flourishing and fertile field of inquiry carries with it some risks, chief of which, as I anticipated in my Introduction, regards the point of view from which any such study is conducted. There will be a natural tendency to favour the “established” tradition as the standard against which others should be measured. Kennedy is alert to this: while he acknowledges that “[t]he only fully developed system of rhetorical terminology we have is that derived from Greco-Roman rhetoric” (6), and that comparative rhetoric affords the opportunity to test the applicability of Western rhetorical concepts in non-Western contexts, he wants to avoid the kind of imperialism that was discussed in the Introduction and that is similar to what LuMing Mao has termed “euroamerican-centrism” (2013, 211). Kennedy writes: “I have no intention of trying to impose Western assumptions about rhetoric on exotic cultures. Quite the opposite, I hope to encourage the development of a standard cross-cultural rhetorical terminology by modifying Western concepts to describe what is found everywhere” (5–6). And he reiterates this point in his conclusion (217). But if the Greco-Roman is the only fully developed system of rhetorical terminology, and the goal is standard cross-cultural terminology, it is difficult to see how other rhetorics could find their own voices except through the terms of that standard, with all the possibilities for distortion that might follow.

Then again, as Scott Stroud (2019) insists, even speaking of a “tradition” may favour an unwarranted ontological assumption of commonalities. “Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of ...