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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.
“…a fine collection of essays illuminating situation uses of narratives, images and tropes that are not contemplated as ‘explanations’ but as cultural resources mobilized to impart meaning and order when facing concrete circumstances…a great variety of excellent analyses going beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology…this book is a welcome contribution and the project I belongs to offers one of the most important shifts in European anthropology in the coming decade.” • Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
Preface
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