Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resources for succeeding generations. Several of the contributions show how rhetorical cultural forms can themselves create emergencies. The contributors bring expertise from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and communications studies, underlining the volume's wider relevance as a reflection on the human condition.

Autorentext

Michael Carrithers is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University. He is author of a biography of the Buddha and of Why Humans Have Cultures (Oxford University Press, 1992). He has also written about Buddhist forest monks and of Jainism in India. At present he is researching rhetoric and public culture in East Germany.

Inhalt

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Inventions of hyperbolic culture
Ralph Cintron

Chapter 2. Medical rhetoric in the US and Africa: the oncologist as Charon
Megan Biesele

Chapter 3. The diffuse in testimonies
Stevan Weine

Chapter 4. Internal rhetorics: Constituting selves in diaries and beyond
Jein Nienkamp

Chapter 5. Ordeals of language
Ellen Basso

Chapter 6. 'As if Goya was on hand as a marksman': Foot and mouth disease as a rhetorical and cultural phenomenon
Brigitte Nerlich

Chapter 7. Story seeds and the Inchoate
Michael Carrithers

Chapter 8. The palaestral aspect of rhetoric
F.G. Bailey

Chapter 9. Rhetoric in the moral order: a critique of tropological approaches to culture
James Fernandez

Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index