21 - Oratory, rhetoric, politics

Summary

This chapter examines the concept of rhetoric within anthropological studies of oratory and political practice. In making appeals to rhetoric, anthropologists and others find themselves deploying concepts taken from a vast corpus of language theorizing and usage categorization produced since at least the European re-appropriation of Greek and Roman rhetoric sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. The language ideology model focuses specifically upon notions of strategic language use that inform people's actions, agencies, and the emergence of new sociocultural and political forms. The extraordinary Michele Zimbalest Rosaldo was among the first anthropologists of rhetoric and oratory to come to this understanding, but not without first falling under the spell of a narrow view of rhetoric. The ethno-epistemology of the new megarhetorics of political language that characterize so much of modern political practice around the world was quite otherwise in the Tamil twentieth century.