RHETORICS

James W. Fernandez

On Persuading Practical People: The Rhetorical Approach to Understanding in

In reputedly or reportedly practical minded societies such as the ones most of us now live in in the modern world, focused as they are on bottom lines and measurable inputs and outputs, any interest taken in rhetoric, not to speak of ritual, has to be recurrently explained and justified to ‘street smart’ and skeptical men and women of that world. Of what use are they? What do they have to do with every- day problem solving? In taking up our topic we find ourselves imme- diately in the contestedness that constantly characterizes human relations and that the rhetorical perspective takes as primary in the human condition. The answers to these hard headed questions in this case almost all have to do with the place of culture in creating those ‘definitions of situation’ in which practice takes place and obtains any meaning at all and which set the ‘conditions of possibility’ in which the ‘purely practical’ can be exercised and its effects judged. Attendance to these ‘definitions’ and these ‘conditions’ has been the cultural anthropo- logist’s way of responding to this persistent skepticism. It has been his or her way of seeking to persuade the practical minded that beyond pragmatics lies culture itself, which in final analysis and in so many ways is the presentation and putting into effect of a per- suasive view of the world with its accompanying evaluations of what should be taken as normal in behavior and experience. Culture, one might say, is a complexly interesting form of persuasion. And one of the most interesting and powerful forms of persuasion is ritual itself. Indeed, in ritual we find, as Roy Rappaport argued,1 the mak- ing of our humanity. And rhetoric plays an important role in that ‘making’.

1 Rappaport 1979; Rappaport 1999. 648 james w. fernandez

If rhetoric, as practically any dictionary tells us, is “the art and science of persuasion which effectively influences thought and con- duct”, we want to understand ritual in these terms. How does it per- suade and what are the effects of its persuasions? The argument of , or at least , with the realities apparent to practical mindedness in the utilitarian sense has ancient roots. In the Western tradition the argument goes back to the Sophists’ argument with the Platonists. The Sophists understood society and culture as something in constant negotiation and saw how funda- mental argument itself and public debate was to the foundations and dynamics of community; they pursued the understanding of those dynamics through the study of rhetoric, that is, through understanding the arts of persuasion in social situations of constant contestedness. For the Platonists, understanding aimed beyond contestedness to the grasp of formal and enduring truths. This argument between those who seek to understand the dynamics of community in terms of human argumentativeness and persuasiveness and those who pursue enduring formal truths has persisted. After centuries of prejudices against the ‘reality’-creating potential and, indeed, everyday ‘truth value’ of rhetoric, in the late twentieth century there was a resurgence of the relevance of the rhetorical dis- ciplines to the understanding of the dynamics of social life and also of ritual. This was confirmed through the work of structural linguists interacting with . Roman Jakobson was influential with his emphasis on the poetics, which is to say the imaginative play of figurative thought expressed in language which accompanied and both expressed and influenced social life and social interaction.2 This suggested that ritual should itself be treated as a kind of poetics of persuasion. In interaction with Jakobson and other linguists, the struc- turalist Claude Lévi-Strauss from the 1950s on laid emphasis on the fabulations, the mythological background of social life,3 which could be deployed as narrative accompaniments in shamanic curing , for example, so as to suggest other and more convincing and accommodating orders of reality to the patient.4 In

2 R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (Berlin, New York, 1971). 3 C. Lévi-Strauss et al., Results of the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists (Baltimore, 1953). 4 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1966); C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York, 1963).