From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world.
Table of Content
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Aides Pensee: Tropology and Tropologic, An Introduction
James W. Fernandez
Chapter 1. Don Quixote: Icon of Rhetoric Culture Theory
Ivo Strecker
Chapter 2. A Trope of Time. Twilight Swings across the Central Himalayas
John H. Leavitt
Chapter 3. Dreams Inside-out: Some Uses of Dream in Social Theory and Ethnographic Inquiry
Marko Živković
Chapter 4. On Conversion: A Theory of Ruins
Joseba Zulaika
Chapter 5. Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer—“Witnessing a Shipwreck”: German Figurations in facing the Past to face the Future
Michael Carrithers
Chapter 6. An Apologia for Filthy Lucre
Gustav Peebles
Chapter 7. “Down the Garden Path.” On Path-ologies of Inquiry and of “Progress” in Understanding
James W. Fernandez
Chapter 8. “Sí Teanga na Muintire a Shlánós an Mhuintir”: Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence
Steve Coleman
Chapter 9. Parapraxis Today: The US Flag and the Mythopoesis of Self and Other in Post 9/11 New England
Bernard Bate
Chapter 10. Irony’s Arrow: Launching Contraria in Chinese Linguaculture
Mary Scoggin
Chapter 11. The Tropes of Music
William O. Beeman
Chapter 12. Tactics For Working Anyway
Dale Pesmen
Chapter 13. Tropes, Frames and Powers
Terence S. Turner
Conclusion: Imaginative Leaps in Rhetoric Culture
Jamin Pelkey and Marko Živković
Index
About the author
James W. Fernandez is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. He has published extensively on the rhetorical imagination including the prize winning ethnography, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton, 1982).