COMMENTS
WHY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SHOULD
STUDY RHETORIC
Michael Carrithers
University of Durham
Because there is born in us the power to per-
suade each other and to show ourselves what-
ever we wish, … we have not only escaped
from living as brutes, but also coming together
have founded cities and set up laws and
invented arts, and speech has helped us attain
practically all of the things we have devised.
Isokrates1
Isokrates was a Sophist, and so comes down
to us clouded by the reputation of the
Sophists with their supposedly treacherous
and twisting skill of persuasion, rhetoric. But
in this brief essay I want to retrieve rhetoric
for anthropology. I argue that rhetoric is a
pervasive human character. It displays a feature
of our species that at once differentiates us
from other species and throws a revealing light
on our peculiar and mutable form of social-
ity. I also argue that attention to rhetoric
sharpens the ethnographic eye and lays open
to study that feature of social life that is
so difficult to capture, its historicity, its
eventfulness.
I base my case here on an earlier argument
set out in Why humans have cultures (Carrithers
1992), in which I tried to explain at some
length our character not so much as culture-
bearing beings, but rather as something more,
as culture-creating and -changing beings.
There I concentrated on the intensely inter-
active character of human social life. I pointed
out, for example, the human capacities to gen-
erate long connected skeins of actions and
reactions, to comprehend such complexity
through narrative thought, and to interpret,
simplify, and creatively reinterpret that com-
plexity into new forms. So in those capacities
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2005.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 11, 577-583
(and in others I will mention) I found our
ability both to deal with the intense eventful-
ness of social life and to adapt and create new
forms of social life.
It is in this territory that I wish to place
rhetoric – or at least an understanding of
rhetoric which is trimmed here and enhanced
there to fit anthropologists’ needs. Rhetoric
adds to that previous depiction of human
sociality a more vivid sense of (1) the moving
force in interaction, (2) the cultural and dis-
tinctly human character of that force, and (3)
the creation of new cultural forms in social
life. Let me take each of these in turn.
Rhetoric as a force in
interaction
At a recent meeting of the International
Rhetoric Culture Project2 – to which I owe
the impetus for this argument – Ivo Strecker
laid out for us a powerful image, an image
good to think with, of rhetoric as a moving
force. He showed us a metre-long woko stick
used by the Hamar of Ethiopia (Fig. 1). The
practical use of the stick is to gather with the
hooked end fearsome thorn bush to build
cattle kraals and to push with the forked end
the thorns into place. Hamar use the stick in
figurative work as well, in ceremonies of bless-
ing and cursing. The speaker draws good
fortune – rain, fertility, and increase – toward
himself and his fellows with the hooked end
and fends off enemies and bad fortune with
the forked end. In general, concluded
578 COMMENTS
Figure 1. Hamar woko stick.
Strecker, rhetoric, working like the woko stick,
appears in social life whenever we wish to
draw people and effects toward us or push
them away and whenever we wish to con-
vince and persuade or discourage and
dissuade.
It is easy enough to see how such an image
– and likewise a theoria, a way of seeing –
could grow out of experiencing the Hamar:
anyone who has read Strecker’s ethnography
(1988) or seen David Turton’s films of the
nearby Mursi can gain a sense of the give and
take of everyday life in the circumstances of a
politically acephalous society of horticultural-
ists and herders. Here vital decisions are the
subject of frequent persuasion and negotiation
en plein air, sometimes formally, often quite
informally. But the universalizing usefulness of
the image lies in bringing the matter of
rhetoric, that is, persuasion, out of the grander
political realms of the Classical world, where
the study of rhetoric began, into everyday life
and the face-to-face realm, the fireside, the
homestead, the village street. The anthropolo-
gists who are participating in the International
Rhetoric Culture Project have found their
contributions where rhetoric and the prag-
matics of speech and gesture meet: desultory
talk about relatives, politeness in the city
street, joking over the dinner table, organizing
and carrying out a divination session or a
seance.
This extension of rhetoric is fertile because
it sets argumentation, persuasion, negotiation
and therefore micropolitics to the fore, and
discovers a dynamism in social life that an
earlier anthropology tended to ignore. That
dynamism has a particular pattern. Through
the glass of rhetoric we can see that, in any
moment of interaction, some act to persuade,
others are the targets of persuasion; some
work, others are worked upon. The eventful-
ness of life, the historicity, is moved by the
rhetorical will, the energeia, of those who for
the moment hold the floor and aim to realize
a plan or intention through, and upon, others.
As Fernandez expressed the bare bones of this
idea, the rhetorical effort ‘makes a movement
[of mind] and leads to a performance’ (1986:
8). This is not to say that persuasion is always
effective, or that plans are always realized, but
rather that the motive force of historicity lies
ultimately in the will to persuade. Moreover,
as Billig (1996) and Nienkamp (2001) have
shown, it is useful and illuminating to speak
of people persuading themselves, using the
same rhetorical means they would employ on
others. Sociality penetrates us through and
through; thought itself is an argument with
yourself, like an argument with others, and the
stuff of thinking is also the stuff of persuasion.
Moreover, if some are necessarily per-
suaders while others are persuaded, then this
relationship can be rewritten as that between
agents and patients – I take this second term
from Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) to designate
those who are the object, rather than the ini-
tiator, of action. This stress on the dyadic or
plural character of social and rhetorical action
– the fact that some do, while others are done
to – is an important adjustment of the idea of
‘agency’, whose salience in social science
writing has soared in the last decade or so.3
We would do better to speak of ‘agency-
cum-patiency’, which recovers that funda-
mentally interactive character that makes
rhetoric integral to human sociality.
The cultural and distinctly
human character of rhetoric
I want now to show how the force of rhetoric
is bound together with its cultural significance
and, to do so, I adduce two examples.
Example 1. I was sitting on the veranda of a
house near Elpitiya in Sri Lanka. It had just
rained, and a boy of 2 or 3 years began playing
intently in a mud puddle in the red laterite
soil in front of the house. After a short while
his mother shot from the back of the house
and yelled, ‘Stop that! You’ll be as filthy as an
outcaste!’ He stopped, began to cry, but grew
distracted and wandered off to the back of the
house.
Example 2. Jean Lydall showed us a video of
a Hamar woman, a young mother. She pounds
 COMMENTS
grain while singing a song full of vivid images
with a strong melodic line in a clear, pure, and
penetrating soprano to her baby, who is lying
in front of her. The words of the song name
various relatives, from both her husband’s side
and father’s side, as well as certain other
persons whose friendship the woman wants to
encourage. The song tells how each is related
to the baby and how each will care for it as
it grows up.
Each of these cases demonstrates, to begin
with, clear rhetorical force and purpose. It is
true that ‘force’ is a metaphor here, but a
useful and necessary one which captures the
effort, the energy expended, to bring about a
desirable outcome in others’ actions. In the
first case, the mother’s force is directed to the
child and to altering its behaviour (who
among us has not felt the effect of such
rhetorical force, first from one side, then from
the other?). In the second, the rhetorical
force is directed through the child, so to
speak, to certain people who fall within
earshot and whom the woman wants to
appeal to for support for her child and, by
implication, for herself. In this particular case,
the woman’s husband was too feeble to acti-
vate kinship bonds within his own kindred;
the people addressed were not her husband’s
kinsmen, but distant patrilineal relatives of her
own, in whose vicinity she had built her
house.
This rhetorical force is cultural in two
senses. In the first sense, conveyed most vividly
in the Sri Lankan case, the rhetoric is
intended to convey cultural matter. Here the
matter comprises an aesthetic sense of per-
sonal presentation and comportment which
centres on bodily cleanliness. The importance
of this aesthetic sense is gauged in the volume
of the mother’s voice and therefore in her
expressed anger. Moreover, her rhetoric
carries with it an aesthetic evaluation of third
parties, ‘outcastes’, members of low-caste
groups in this hierarchically ordered society. In
fact this is quite an extraordinary and highly
concentrated slice of rhetoric-cum-culture, for
it conveys to the child, in one short hot vir-
tuoso burst, at once a desired aesthetic of
comportment (cleanliness), a classification of
the social world (us vs outcastes), and a
negative evaluation of the others (dirty in
nature, even if not in actual appearance). If
one were to ask how people in caste societies
come by the idea that humans are naturally
and obviously divided into different and
unequal kinds, then this would be a splendid
illustration.
579
The rhetoric is also cultural in the sense
that it demonstrates specific traits of humans
in distinction to other species. Culture here
does not refer to learned behaviour tout court
since we now know and accept that many
other species do learn behaviour of some
kind, notably techniques of food acquisition.
It refers, rather, to a specific human behaviour,
in this case pedagogy of the young, to convey
a social aesthetic. This, I argued in Why
humans have cultures, marks us off sharply from
other social primates, who simply do not
possess, or teach, particular styles of social
acting.4 This sense of a social aesthetic is quite
wide-ranging among us. Indeed it encom-
passes everyday politeness, which itself can
usefully be understood as a matter of rhetor-
ical force, the effort to achieve a desired
outcome with others in smooth social rela-
tionships. As Isokrates might have said, we are
quintessentially the rhetorical animal; we even
exert ourselves rhetorically to teach ourselves
to succeed by rhetoric in the micropolitics of
everyday life.
The second example, the singing Hamar
mother, captures another dimension of dis-
tinctly human culture. In this I follow Robin
Dunbar (1996), who has argued forcibly that
human language evolved as the functional
equivalent of grooming behaviour among
other social primates. Grooming behaviour
forms bonds among other social primates, and
through such bonding the individual, say a
young mother who grooms a dominant male,
gains advantages for herself and for the sur-
vival of her offspring. The human equivalent
is speaking to one another, and indeed,
Dunbar stresses, speaking about one another:
gossiping, in short. Since speaking can reach
many more than one person at a time, such
social grooming by speech can help to create
the much larger groups with much more
interaction which characterize our species.
So far so good, but I would suggest an
amendment. It is not only gossiping which
creates bonds, but also the rhetorical edge in
speech. In the case of the Hamar mother the
speech is sweet as honey: poetry and song.
True, the Hamar mother is in just the stereo-
typical situation of many other primate
mothers, trying to gain the support of impor-
tant males, but she has an art that can draw
many of them to her at once, like the hooked
end of the woko stick. That art goes well
beyond gossip, and certainly well beyond the
possession of the grammar and lexicon of her
language for it includes figures and imagery
which give her words a life even before they
580 COMMENTS
are enhanced by melody. This is rhetorical
mastery which is easily recognized as such –
and can be recognized, too, from a cultural
anthropological perspective, as mastery over
the mental treasure, the schemas and imagery,
available in Hamar culture.
The creation of new cultural
forms in social life
However, as I argued in Why humans have cul-
tures, the mark of distinctly human sociality is
not the possession of one culture or another
as such but the capacity to change and create
new cultures. I turn now to a third example
to show how the glass of rhetoric allows us
to see both culture and creativity more clearly.
The example is contained neatly in a pho-
tograph taken in Warsaw on 7 December
1970 (see Fig. 2). After his election in 1969
Willy Brandt, the first Social Democratic
Chancellor of the Federal Republic, began
vigorously to prosecute a new policy toward
Eastern Europe. Previous West German gov-
ernments had taken a stiff stance, refusing, for
example, to recognize East Germany’s exis-
tence as a state, or to accept the Oder-Neisse
boundary settled by the Allies, who had
Figure 2. Willy Brandt before the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (© 2002
Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung).
thereby given previously German lands to
Poland in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war.
Pursuing a policy he called ‘Wandel durch
Annäherung’, ‘change through approach’,
Brandt attempted to ameliorate the enmities
left behind by the war and further cultivated
in the Cold War, and began signing new
treaties with states across the Iron Curtain.
The signing of the Warsaw Treaty with Poland
in 1970 was hotly contested in West Germany
since it accepted the Oder-Neisse line and so
thwarted the aspirations of those Germans
driven from the eastern lands who had kept
an irredentist claim alive in the Federal
Republic.
The photograph shows Brandt during his
visit to Warsaw to sign the treaty. As is routine
on such state visits, a wreath-laying was
arranged according to the meticulous code of
an internationally recognized diplomatic
culture.The monument with its honour guard
was approached by a motorcade of Polish and
German dignitaries. In due, careful, and slow
procession, the dignitaries stepped out of their
cars and arranged themselves while the press
crowded about to record the routine event.
An elaborate wreath was produced for Brandt
to place before the monument. He stepped
forward to lay the wreath, arranged its ribbons
carefully, then stepped back and, facing the
monument, bowed his head solemnly for a
 COMMENTS
while, obeying the tempo and code of such
affairs. Then, suddenly, he fell gracefully to his
knees and, still obeying the guiding tempo,
remained there silently for perhaps a minute.
As the present German Chancellor said (on a
recent visit to Warsaw to join in naming a
square after Brandt), ‘we held our breath’.
Brandt then rose gracefully and turned away
toward the cars. It was done. A year later he
was to be given the Nobel Prize for peace,
not least because of what he did before the
monument in Warsaw. He had achieved a mas-
terstroke of political rhetoric and with it had
created a new item of German, indeed inter-
national, culture.
An item of culture in what sense? Well, the
event straightaway became a topos, a common-
place, an event discussed, interpreted and
re-interpreted, especially in Germany but else-
where in the world as well. That year Time
magazine in the USA made Brandt ‘Man of
the Year’ with a picture of the event on its
cover. In German it can be referred to in the
right context just as der Kniefall, ‘the falling on
[his] knees’. The Kniefall has endured as an
item of culture. An account of it appeared in
the recent collection of Deutsche Erinnerung-
sorte (‘German Sites of Memory’, François &
Schultze 2001), a multivolume collection of
what the editors call ‘paradigmatic events’ –
events which are defining in themselves and
become a yardstick for evaluating or com-
menting on other events. So it became, to
echo Goodenough’s famous definition of
culture, something that every German must
know to count as a competent member of
society. It is today part of the school curricu-
lum and is still discussed on Internet
forums.
What is its cultural significance? At the time it
was taken to be either a sign of a new Ger-
many’s willingness to reconcile itself with its
neighbours and with its catastrophic past or a
sign of Brandt’s weakness or wrong-headedness.
A poll for Der Spiegel showed that 41 per cent
of Germans polled at the time found it an
appropriate gesture while 48 per cent found it
inappropriate. In the longer run, the Kniefall
became one of a series of admired and heroic
topoi, exemplary events, on the way to Germany
creating an extraordinary national culture of
regret and commemoration for the crimes
committed during the Second World War, espe-
cially the Holocaust.Other such events were the
Frankfurt trials of concentration camp guards in
1963-4 in Frankfurt and, more recently, the
building of a Holocaust memorial in the heart
of Berlin.
581
What is new or creative about the Kniefall?
In one sense, nothing; it is made from mate-
rials which were lying to hand. First, there is
the diplomatic protocol, the minutely orches-
trated procedure for state visits and wreath-
laying. Behind that protocol lie a series of
metaphorical, narrative, and temporal schemas.
One such schema is acted out in the funereal
solemnity of expression and the tempo.
Another is a metaphorical play upon the
vertical and the horizontal, high and low.
The prescribed posture is stiffly upright, the
embodiment of dignity, but shows respect and
honour to the imagined other by a slight
departure toward the horizontal, a slight
bowing of the head. Even by falling to one’s
knees – or, to put it another way, by playing
forte rather than pianissimo on the high to low
key – one only shifts the attention to another,
but related, set of schemas, ones perhaps not
so much actively practised but still well under-
stood. A quick poll of German sources, verbal,
electronic, and written, yields the following
associations with such an act: Demut or humil-
ity; Abbitte, apology; Reue, remorse; Buße,
repentance; and then Versöhnung or Aussöh-
nung, appeasement and/or reconciliation. All
these rhetorical effects are understood well
beyond Germany, of course, and well beyond
that earlier European Christian hierarchical
society in which such gestures would have
been more routinely practised. So from one
point of view all Brandt did was to marry
together two sets of schemas that were already
closely related to one another.
And indeed, if I were writing without the
perspective of rhetoric and historicity, I could
give an anthropologist’s account of these
typical schemas and social relations that
would make them seem entirely routine and
stereotypical of German, or indeed Western
European, society and culture. So what does
the rhetorical perspective add? It shows, first,
that the schemas of culture are not in them-
selves determining, but are tools used by
people to determine themselves and others.
Then it places agency-and-patiency to the
fore; the tools of culture are used by people
on one another, to persuade and convince,
and so to move the social situation from one
state to another. Finally, the rhetorical per-
spective shows us the timing, the flow of
events in a narrative, such that just this set of
schemas, informing a solemn diplomatic cer-
emony, when combined with that set of
schemas, informing ceremonies of remorse,
repentance, and reconciliation, took on a par-
ticular weight and rhetorical force when
582 COMMENTS
expressed at that particular time. Only in that
perspective can we achieve a full understand-
ing of the Kniefall and why it came to be
understood as an exemplary act of visionary
political rhetoric and an innovation in
German culture.
Finale
I have argued that the notion of rhetoric
in culture faces in two directions, toward
understanding human sociality against the
sociality of other species, and toward a more
penetrating practice in sociocultural anthro-
pology, an understanding that would allow us
to see historicity and cultural creativity in a
more straightforward way. Let me conclude
by concentrating on this latter facet of
rhetoric-in-culture.
The rhetorical perspective on culture works
to some extent on the analogy of speech.
Through speech, spoken or written, we can
produce endlessly creative utterances. This
sentence that I am writing now, for example,
is made entirely of known lexical items and
plainly transparent grammar, yet it is entirely
original because it has a purple feather dan-
gling from the end. A full understanding of it
requires, yes, a competent knowledge of the
structures of grammar and lexicon, but that is
not enough. The competent reader must also
understand its place in a flow of thought and
action. And so a rhetorical perspective requires
the ethnographer to attend not just to the
structures of culture, but also to the flow of
events.
Yet rhetoric is more than just speech. First,
the tools of persuasion are not reducible to
speech alone, as the entirely mute, but very
eloquent, Kniefall demonstrates. More to the
point, attending to the rhetorical dimension
of life requires attending to the rhetorical will,
the work on social situations that the per-
suading agent intends. There is no escaping
the attribution of intention here, whatever
interpretative difficulties the idea of intention
brings with it: for without an idea of inten-
tion, we might as well imagine that Willy
Brandt suffered merely a momentary physio-
logical weakness in the knees before the
Warsaw monument. Moreover, the intention
is only intelligible in terms of the mutable sit-
uation itself, which we must likewise under-
stand. So the required existents in the
rhetorical perspective – the ontology, if you
will – include the rhetor/agent (singular or
plural), the patients or audience, and the
flowing, changing situation. These elements
are printed at quite high contrast in the
rhetorical picture, as Brandt appears in rela-
tively high contrast in the Kniefall photo. Nec-
essary, but printed more faintly and at lower
contrast in the background (like the distant
background in the photo) of this ontological
perspective, are the ‘structures’, the schemas,
which the rhetor may apply in the situation
to sway the audience.
This rhetorical perspective is fruitful both
in a narrowly ethnographic sense, and in a
wider theoretical sense. For ethnographers, it
sets a high standard of achievement, the
requirement to rest not with the specification
of the characteristic organizations and schemas
of a society, but to go beyond that to their
skilled use in one situation or another. For
anthropological theory in general, it proposes
a way to deal with the pervasive but troubled
metaphor of ‘structure’.Two eminent theorists
of social life, Marshall Sahlins and Anthony
Giddens, have struggled mightily with, and
against, that metaphor. Giddens, for example,
has been driven to coin the desperate verbal
substantive ‘structuration’ in order to retain
the metaphor of ‘structure’, while still making
it applicable to a world shot through with
historicity and constant metamorphosis. I
suppose this to be an effect of the (rhetorical)
will in sociology and anthropology to produce
wholly encompassing explanations. The per-
spective from rhetoric-in-culture, on the other
hand, would counsel more modest ambitions,
and a more flexible way with our metaphors.
We might, for example, think sometimes of
our cultural schemas as no more than ‘tools’,
and of our existential situation not as ‘struc-
tured’, but perhaps as ‘plastic’, or as ‘flowing’,
or even as a constantly mutable ‘borderland’
of contention, as suggested by Rosaldo (1989;
see also Berdahl 1999). We might go back to
the ancient Greeks, to the poet Antilochus,
and act as the fox, ‘who knows many tricks’,
rather than the hedgehog, ‘who knows only
one’.
NOTES
1
I have taken this from the website of the
International Rhetoric Culture Project:
http://www.rhetoric-culture.org/outline.htm.
2
The International Rhetoric Culture
Project was initiated by Ivo Strecker and
Stephen Tyler, and has been financed by the
 COMMENTS
Volkswagen Foundation. Scores of anthropol-
ogists, rhetoricians, psychologists, and others
have taken part. A series of volumes from its
work is to be published by Berghahn, begin-
ning in 2006.
3
This was kindly pointed out to me, with
quantitative support, by Michael Brumann at
a recent seminar in Durham.
4
In this I follow the primatologist David
Premack (1984).
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Michael Carrithers is Professor of Anthropol-
ogy at Durham University. He has done field-
work in Sri Lanka, India, and Germany. At
present he is working on how Germans deal
with the East German past, and on the idea
of culture as rhetoric.
Department of Anthropology, Durham University,
43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK.
m.b.carrithers@durham.ac.uk