Rhetorics of Self-Making: - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520087984 ISBN 13: 9780520087989

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this highly original volume advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice of equating an individuated self with the Western world and a relational self with the non-Western world. Contributions cover a broad range of topics—from the development of the eccentric self to the ritual circumcision of Jewish males.

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Debbora Battaglia, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College, is the author of On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society (1990).

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"An exceptionally stimulating work. . . . Likely to become a classic."—Donald Brenneis, Pitzer College

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"An exceptionally stimulating work. . . . Likely to become a classic."Donald Brenneis, Pitzer College

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Rhetorics of Self-Making

By Debbora Battaglia, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 Debbora Battaglia, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520087984


One
Problematizing the Self:
a Thematic Introduction
Debbora Battaglia

There is no self alone at the start.
—PAUL RICOEUR

Inviting Ambiguity

This project began as an invitation to contributors to write on "the rhetoric of self-making" for annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association.1 The topic was, of course, ambiguous (which I think it fair to say was an issue for us all) owing entirely to the place and effect of "rhetoric" in the title—its unsettling influence on "self" and "making." For taken here as ideology's "signifying aspect" (Barthes 1977, 49), rhetoric alerts us that the "self" cannot appear within these pages as a natural object, unproblematically given, or as an essential, preexisting sense to be fashioned (Greenblatt's starting point in his seminal study of Renaissance self-fashioning [1980]). Likewise, "making" cannot straightforwardly be taken as determining a self (an experience or realization of self may bear little relation to a self "made"), or as invariably useful for understanding how selfhood emerges in cultural practice. Thus, under rhetoric's influence, the self cannot be the stable product of its own manufacture (e.g., as in the "self-made man"). Indeed, the production of some thing , or even a multiplicity or a sequence of unitary self-objects or coherent self-images (since this position implies a self there or invariably worked toward at the beginning) is likely to appear beside the point of how to represent the nonsteady state of selfhood in different cultural situations, and varying degrees and relations of determinancy. And the plot thickens. For the authors, all of us anthropologists, are seeking to privilege subjects' modes of knowledge and experience—our roots in ethnography insist upon this—meanwhile acknowledging that our efforts have our own rhetorical traditions as their wellsprings, and comprise only one dimension of the discriminating enterprise of anthropology.2

"Self" as a Representational Economy

A multiplicity of rhetorics shares, then, a place with a diversity of socialities as the only givens at the scene of writing. Hence our collective focus on rhetorical practices in contradistinction to finished products of rhetorical activity.3 If this volume contributes furthermore to what might be termed a critical anthropology of selfhood , an anthropology emergent, that is, in the off-centering effects of a (structurally) ironic self-distancing, it is because its proper subject is neither the self (as experienced) nor the "self" (as culturally figured) but the problematics of self-action in their relation to issues of power. One might say that a focus on rhetoric does not allow one to deny problematic relationships their profile in argumentation; does not allow us to oppose destabilizing the cultural constructs it investigates. Accordingly, whether readers prepare to "suspend disbelief" or to be suspicious (as in Ricoeur's two strategies of rhetorical reading [1992, 159 n. 23]), the rhetorical awareness prefigured in the title does not allow a passive reading of the ambiguities or the cultural mediations at hand.4

Too, this volume turns away from issues of textual eloquence; it is not about the "commanding dominance of the individual personality" in some consummate performance or text (Kant's observation in Kritik der Urteilskraft , reiterated by Nietzsche [1983, 97]). Instead, rhetoric is taken as an uncertain and provisional social project. Insofar as this project is characterized by a blurring of "the limit separating expression from disguise, but also [allowing] that oscillation succinct expression" (Barthes 1977, 57), its aesthetic has less to tell us about style in some pure form than about the political judgments it inscribes.

From this position there is no selfhood apart from the collaborative practice of its figuration. The "self" is a representational economy : a reification continually defeated by mutable entanglements with other subjects' histories, experiences, self-representations; with their texts, conduct, gestures, objectifications; with their "argument of images" (from Fernandez, as discussed by Ewing [1990, 265]), and so forth. Marilyn Strathern has described the "integratory capacity" (1991, 15) of such summary concepts—their effect (as with ethnography) of producing an experience or evoking an image of integration which nonetheless fails to encompass the diversity of possible experiences. Selfhood by this figuration is a chronically unstable productivity brought situationally—not invariably—to some form of imaginary order, to some purpose, as realized in the course of culturally patterned interactions.

From this perspective the "transcendent self" of ego psychology and some psychological anthropology, a self perduring, continuous, impermeable, uni-

tary, and universally sought after (for discussion, see Murray 1993, 3), is cast as a socially enacted agenda or ideology, a practical capacity of human culture rather than of human nature. We are left, then, to challenge any a priori valuation of transcendence on methodological grounds at least. Further, we come to appreciate the close relatedness of a unitary self-concept and rhetorics of individuality. For the ethnography makes it apparent that alternative constructs exist—different premises of self-experience—as practices that inscribe dividuality (Strathern's important insight [1988]) as a culturally valued capacity of persons. This is most apparent where the ethnographic focus shifts to exchanges of objects that, whether as gifts or as commodities, are seen to engender and concretize subjects' attributes (Battaglia, this volume)5 over the course of their social life. The cultural mechanisms of displacement, deferral, extension, projection or introjection, and so forth, by which this process operates, call to issue any ascription of inherent value to such objects, and analogously, any assertion that self-centeredness or a singular "self identity" is universally desirable. Instead, subjects may concern themselves with the social possibilities of attaching and detaching material self-objectifications; of maintaining a multiplicity of sources of self-influence in these concrete terms.6 The placedness of the subject is important in this context, as are the dispersed habitation of the self in various forms and the effect this has of ramifying or prescribing sites of self-encounter. From this critical recognition, possibilities present themselves for cross-cultural comparisons of the structuration and subversion of selfhood rather than of "selves."

An approach to selfhood as an embodied and historically situated practical knowledge, in other words, prompts a larger question of rhetoric, namely, what use a particular notion of self has for someone or for some collectivity. It is this question that separates the working premises of authors here from a narrowly textual, Aristotelian regard for rhetoric "as one finds it in books," to cite Nietzsche's critique, "just as [Aristotle] also thinks the effect of drama to be independent of the performance, and thus does not take up the physical presence on stage in its definition" (Nietzsche 1983, 100). And it gives this volume a positive relation to studies, such as certain studies of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520087984
• ISBN 13: 9780520087989
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 156
• Herausgeber: Battaglia Debbora
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar