{"id":1624,"date":"2013-07-03T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T09:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=1624"},"modified":"2025-06-10T12:22:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T12:22:47","slug":"the-turn-of-the-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/the-turn-of-the-title","title":{"rendered":"The Turn of the Title"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology<\/a><\/em>, published last month, addresses the rhetorical turn in the study of human and social sciences, with emphasis on the human reaction to and interaction with the magic of media and art. Below, co-editor Ivo Strecker spellbinds the reader with a discussion of this rhetorical turn in the study of culture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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_____________________________<\/p>\n

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I returned home from attending Ronald Soeteart and Kris Rutten\u2019s exciting conference on \u201cRhetoric as Equipment for Living: Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education\u201d (Ghent, 22-25 May 2013) and find (in my dream-mail) news that a grand book launch of Astonishment + Evocation. The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology<\/i><\/b> is imminent with the press, television, authors, editors and staff of Berghahn Books present.<\/p>\n

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Of course, I am all for it. Let\u2019s do it. Let\u2019s indulge in a bit of hyperbole! Let\u2019s have a real, crashing launch, with Marion Berghahn smashing a bottle of champagne at the bough of our book, exclaiming: \u201cHerewith we celebrate the fifth volume of our series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture<\/i><\/b> known for spearheading the rhetorical turn in the study of culture!\u201d<\/p>\n

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Herbert Simons and I were asked to speak at the first plenary session of the conference in Ghent about \u201cThe rhetorical turn in the human and social sciences.\u201d When it was my turn (sic) to speak, I pointed out that, according to Kenneth Burke, the poet is a medicine man who immunizes us by stylistically infecting us. I added that Burke too was a medicine man, which explains the spell he was able to cast \u2013 and still casts \u2013 on his audiences: His imaginative ways of identifying and naming particular topics of discourse; his ingenious use of figuration; his labeling, sizing things up, identifying and finding key terms \u2013 a process he calls \u201centitlement\u201d; his Faustian ability to \u201cconceal or reveal,\u201d as one commentator says, \u201cmagnify or minimize, simplify or complexify, elevate or degrade, link or divide\u201d; and last but not least his great delight in puns, paradoxes, contradictions, irony and the whole realm of the comic.<\/p>\n

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More than anyone else Kenneth Burke has drawn attention to the rhetorical nature of \u201centitlement\u201d as he called it, of \u201csizing up\u201d and finding the right names for particular issues and situations.\u00a0 So I used him in Ghent to answer the question why contemporary scholars have abandoned the once so attractive term revolution and now have begun to favor \u201cturn\u201d for their titles.<\/p>\n

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Burke would explain the success of \u201cturn\u201d using what he called the \u201cperspective by incongruity.\u201d First he would probably point up the more provocative and comical aspects of the term:<\/p>\n

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(1)\u00a0 He would say that \u201cturn\u201d means to \u201cmove in a circular direction,\u201d and nod his head saying, \u201cYes, that\u2019s right, human scholarship moves in circles.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(2)\u00a0 Then he might top this up, saying, \u201cLike the weather cock, the human and social sciences turn with the wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(3)\u00a0 Or he would mock, \u201cThe \u2018Rhetorical Turn\u2019 gives me quite a turn.”<\/p>\n

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After indulging in the comic he would go on to explain that when we perceive \u201cturn\u201d not as rotation around a fixed position but as part of movement in space and particularly in time, the notion would positively influence our mental and emotional attitude towards the ventures of science.<\/p>\n

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When I first read of the linguistic, the symbolic, the rhetorical turn, etc., I responded very positively in my mind and immediately thought of the long and short \u201cturns\u201d I have taken on the Baltic Sea and in the coastal waters of northern Germany. Yes, I said to myself \u2013 and heard my friend Stephen Tyler say \u2013 study is a journey; It is a voyage into the unknown.<\/p>\n

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Also, I thought of the two different roles that \u201cturn\u201d plays in sailing. First there is \u201ctacking,\u201d sailing against the wind and performing turns to make headway. This, I think, is what Herbert Simons and his crew of the Rhetoric of Enquiry Movement<\/i> do. They have decided to sail against the winds of what they mockingly call \u201cobjectivist pretensions,\u201d and their volume \u201cThe Rhetorical Turn\u201d (1990) was particularly provocative because, for natural science, rhetoric was \u2013 and to a large extent still is \u2013 anathema.<\/p>\n

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To stay with the metaphors of movement, journey and sailing the seas, we can say that culture and rhetoric follow the same wind. This is why Stephen Tyler and I, with our crew of the Rhetoric Culture Project<\/i>, do not need to \u201ctack,\u201d but can perform a different kind of turn. We \u201cjibe,\u201d we change course by simply swinging our fore-and-aft sails across the following wind.<\/p>\n

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For quite some time, the study of culture has involved explorations of eloquence. As the work of anthropological linguistics, especially the ethnography of speaking attest, scholars were well aware of the fact that much can be gained by studying the different forms of rhetoric that exist in different cultures. By the 70s, anthropologists discovered figuration as a promising new topic of research.<\/p>\n

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So, in the 70s and 80s the winds of anthropology began to blow, as it were, already towards a study of rhetoric as produced in different cultures. This island of research lay in my mind ahead of us to starboard. But then, from the 90s onwards, when the Rhetoric Culture Project <\/i>got moving, and we saw ever more clearly that just as culture produces rhetoric, rhetoric produces culture, the situation changed, and I began to visualize the research of rhetoric producing culture lying on an island somewhere ahead of us to port, and somewhat closer to the wind.\u00a0 So in my imagination we swung our fore-and-aft sails across the following wind, thus performing a \u201cjibe.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But as I tell of these fanciful associations, my wife, anthropologist Jean Lydall, points out: Bound in a chiasmus – rhetoric structures culture, culture structures rhetoric \u2013 both inhabit the same island, so you better set the sails to \u201cbutterfly\u201d!<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Butterfly\"<\/p>\n

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__________________________________<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ivo Strecker <\/strong>is Emeritus Professor of cultural anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He did and still does research with the Hamar in southern Ethiopia and has published widely about them. His film Father of the Goats<\/em> (1984) received the \u201cPrix Nanook\u201d at the Bilan<\/em> in Paris, and his theoretical study The Social Practice of Symbolization<\/em> (1988) was selected by Choice<\/em> as one of the \u201coutstanding academic books of the year.\u201d Together with Stephen Tyler and Robert Hariman he is editor of the Berghahn Books series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Markus Verne <\/strong>is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. From 2010 to 2012, he was Marie Curie Experienced Researcher at the Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California Los Angeles, and the Department of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth. For his book on consumption and scarcity in a Sahelian village (Der Mangel an Mitteln<\/em>, 2007) he received the \u201cResearch Sponsorship Award\u201d of the Frobenius Society<\/em> and the \u201cJunior Scientists Award\u201d of the Association of African Studies in Germany.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, published last month, addresses the rhetorical turn in the study of human and social sciences, with emphasis on the human reaction to and interaction with the magic of media and art. Below, co-editor Ivo Strecker spellbinds the reader with a discussion of this rhetorical… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,168],"tags":[107,111,1971,109],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1624"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21164,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624\/revisions\/21164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}