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Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline’s self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of ‘culture’ and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.
“This is a valuable monograph that presents a very detailed analysis of how anthropological narrative is constructed using various rhetorical tools.” • Krzysztof Jaskułowski, SWPS University
“The book is not only very insightful on a theoretical and conceptual level, but its main strength lies in the application of a rhetorical reading of anthropology of specific works by anthropologists.” • Kris Rutten, Ghent University
Michał Mokrzan is a member of staff at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wrocław. He has received multiple awards for the book Class, Capital, and Coaching in the Era of Late Capitalism: The Persuasion of Neoliberal Governmentality (Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Scientific Press, 2019), including the Bronisław Malinowski Award (from the Polish Academy of Sciences).
Foreword
Ivo Strecker
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Chiasmus of Rhetoric and Anthropology
Chapter 2. Root Metaphors for ‘Culture’ and Social Life
Chapter 3. Enargeia, Metonymy and Synecdoches: Videocentrism in Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Chapter 4. Varieties of Rhetoric in Kazimiera Zawistowicz-Adamska’s Społeczność Wiejska (Rural Community)
Chapter 5. Persuasive Engrams: The Work of Memory in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques
Chapter 6. Coercive Script and Innocent Speech: Re-Thinking Jacques Derrida’s of Grammatology
Chapter 7. Artful Speakers and Willful Listeners: The Quandaries of Irony Prejudice and Pre-Texts
Chapter 8. Paronomasia and Complexity of Parody: A Rhetorical Reading of Stephen Tyler’s ‘a Post-Modern in-Stance’
Chapter 9. Accusation and Defence: The Rhetorics of ‘Moral’ and ‘Objective’ Anthropologies
Conclusion
References
Index