Rhetoric and anthropology

Abstract

This essay deals with the relationship between rhetoric and anthropology, along three main lines of argument. The author offers reflections on the relationship between the two fields, highlighting contentious intersections, as in the case of the French anthropological tradition. He proposes to weigh the rhetorical definition of ‘figure’ or ‘trope’, and to revisit these rhetorical concepts. He then turns to a case of social performance, that of perpetrators of human rights abuses in South Africa, in an attempt to show how rhetoric engages with a seemingly non-rhetorical, social practice.