The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture

Christian Meyer, Felix Girke, Christian Meyer, Felix Girke

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780857451125
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857451132
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Social Sciences

"Just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric" - the first half of this central statement from the International Rhetoric Culture Project is abundantly evidenced. It is the latter half that this volume explores: how does culture emerge out of rhetorical action, out of seemingly dispersed individual actions and interactions? The contributors do not rely on rhetorical "text" alone but engage the situational, bodily, and often antagonistic character of cultural and communicative practices. The social situation itself is argued to be the fundamental site of cultural creation, as will-driven social processes are shaped by cognitive dispositions and shape them in turn. Drawing on expertise in a variety of disciplines and regions, the contributors critically engage  dialogical approaches in their emphasis on how a view from rhetoric  changes our perception of people's intersubjective and conjoint creation of culture.

Table of contents

• The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 — Intersubjectivity
• Chapter 1 — The Dance of Rhetoric: Dialogic Selves and Spontaneously Responsive Expressions
• Chapter 2 — Co-Opting Intersubjectivity: Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self
• Chapter 3 — Echo Chambers and Rhetoric: Sketch of a Model of Resonance
• Chapter 4 — Discourse Beyond Language: Cultural Rhetoric, Revelatory Insight, and Nature
• Chapter 5 — The Spellbinding Aura of Culture: Tracing Its Anthropological Discovery
• Chapter 6 — Tenor in Culture
• Part 2 — Emergence
• Chapter 7 — Attending the Vernacular: A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric
• Chapter 8 — Enhoused Speech: The Rhetoric of Foi Territoriality
• Chapter 9 — Transcultural Rhetoric and Cyberspace
• Chapter 10 — Jesuit Rhetorics: Translation Versus Conversion in Early-Modern Goa
• Chapter 11 — Evoking Peace and Arguing Harmony: An Example of Transcultural Rhetoric in Southern Ethiopia
• Part 3 — Agency
• Chapter 12 — In Defense of the Orator: A Classicist Outlook on Rhetoric Culture
• Chapter 13 — Rhetoric, Anti-Structure, and the Social Formation of Authorship
• Chapter 14 — Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning
• Chapter 15 — Emergence, Agency, and the Middle Ground of Culture: A Meditation on Mediation
• Notes on Contributors
• Index