Ethnographic Chiasmus: Essays on Culture, Conflict and Rhetoric

The essays assembled in this volume are shaped by conditions - both enabling and constraining - that can perhaps best be described as an ethnographic chiasmus . This expression refers to the surprise and reversal of position that are characteristic of fieldwork, and it attends to the fact that transcultural understanding comes about as a meeting, touching, or crossing . Chiasmus also pertains to the relationship between culture and rhetoric in general. Culture structures rhetoric; rhetoric structures culture. Both are coemergent. In order to elucidate this process, ethnography has to focus on the manifold modes of rhetoric through which culture-specific patterns of thought and action are created.