Melancholia and Rhetorical Heroism. The Forms of Anthropological Objectification
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52610/rhs.v10i40.201Keywords:
Objectification, rhetoric, anthropology, melancholia, psychoanalysisAbstract
The paper examines how anthropology makes its object in four historical periods since the scientific revolution. Each period lays down rules for the identification of prototypical anthropological objects and provides models for the construction of valid anthropological texts. A rhetorical analysis reveals how identical figures of thought structure anthropology, psychoanalysis and the historiography of science, and show that their common rhetorical structure can be attributed to the melancholy sensibility which inspires them. Although there has been a resurgence of rhetorical studies of science in recent years, it is argued that such studies often serve an anti-rhetorical goal, implicitly advocating liberation from rhetorical constraints. However, changes in the anthropological vocabulary over the past 50 years testify to the importance of attending to “the rhetorical situation”in order to understand how anthropological knowledge is produced. Not least the subjectification of “primitive man” (replacing the objectifications of the past) reflects changing relations between the communities which produce anthropologists and those subjected to anthropological scrutiny.
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