Culture Catastrophe And Rhetoric

This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

Departing from 9/11’s spectacularity and aesthetical appeal, its eskatastrophic dimension, this book takes up the task of studying 9/11 as a mnemonic singularity, i.e. a catastrophic event that evokes or mimics, albeit in a renewed situation, the structure of past catastrophes. It investigates how 9/11 has been represented/remediated and how it has reintroduced catastrophic thinking into our conceptual framework.

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.

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.

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.

Bringing a new conceptual framework and valuable historical perspective to various approaches to public management, this study uses cultural theory to show why ideas about how to manage government are inherently plural and contradictory.

This book focuses on one of the most successful photography exhibitions in history, The Family of Man. With The Family of Man as its reference point, this collection of essays takes a closer look at visual and material objects. It examines their relevance for educational issues and exhibition designs. We understand these issues in their broadest sense to encompass processes of citizenship and identity formation and the adoption and/or preservation of ethical and political values with effects that range from the micro to the macro, from the national to the international level. The overall hypothesis of this volume is that images, objects and designs were created and employed as performers and performances that interacted with and attracted mass audiences. This book not only looks at how the presentational, representational and social power of images, objects and designs was deliberately used by political and cultural stakeholders during the mid-1950s, but also how these technologies of display travelled through time and space and, as historical objects, interacted-and continue to interact-with new contexts and audiences.