Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction

by George A. Kennedy

Comparative Rhetoric is the first book to offer a cross-cultural overview of rhetoric as a universal feature of expression, composition, and communication. It begins with a theory of rhetoric as a form of mental and emotional energy which is transmitted from a speaker or writer to an audience or reader through a speech or text. In the first part of the book, George Kennedy explores analogies to human rhetoric in animal communication, possible rhetorical factors in the origin of human speech, and rhetorical conventions in traditionally oral societies in Australia, the South Pacific, Africa, and the Americas. Topics discussed include forms of reasoning, the function of metaphor, and the forms and uses of formal language. The second part of the book provides an account of rhetoric as understood and practiced in early literate societies in the Near East, China, India, Greece, and Rome, identifying unique or unusual features of Western discourse in comparison to uses elsewhere. The
concluding chapter summarizes the results of the study and evaluates the validity of traditional Western rhetorical concepts in describing non-Western rhetoric.
Addressing both what is general or common in all rhetorical traditions and what is unique or unusual in the Western tradition, Comparative Rhetoric is ideally suited for courses in rhetoric, rhetoric theory, the history of rhetoric, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology, and comparative linguistics.

Paperback

First published August 21, 1997

Reviews

[Gary Bruff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that needed to be written. Unfortunately, I feel it needed to be written by somebody other than George Kennedy. Although a great classicist, the author of Comparative Rhetoric appears to have been caught poaching in the anthropological woods. Kennedy knows little about ethnology, and so he subjects his readers to ‘fresh ideas’ that were entirely discredited by sociocultural anthropologists more than a century ago.

The table of contents of Comparative Rhetoric follows a unilineal, evolutionary trajectory, starting with animal communication and human evolution, then inexplicably wading through a jumble of traditional/pre-literate societies. The second part of the book looks at cultures with writing: Ancient Near East and Egypt, China and India, then at last Greco-Roman civilization. Besides his tacit assumptions about cultural evolution, Kennedy in other ways adopts the rhetoric of Victorian anthropology, seeing timelessly conservative primitives enclosed in isolated and highly localized societies. And just as the Victorian anthropologist E B Tylor ranked societies according to how much culture they had, Kennedy seems to distinguish societies according to how much Aristotelian rhetoric they have. And like Tylor, Kennedy makes sweeping comparisons between cultures which fail to take into consideration how cultural context may make what appears to be the ‘same’ trait different in contrasted scenarios. For example, Kennedy points out the presence of metaphor nearly everywhere, but he fails to appreciate how metaphor will have different functions in differing cultural contexts of performance.

Although Kennedy’s treatment of rhetoric sandwiches Homo erectus between animals and aborigines, the book was clearly not written with racist intent. We get a sense that while the amount of rhetoric found in a culture varies, the cognitive hardware of speaking humans is everywhere the same. In other words, Comparative Rhetoric is not all bad. Taking the orality/literacy contrast as basic is a useful idea. And I appreciate Kennedy’s classicism, even though it does privilege the text over the enactment of the text, favoring philology above ethnography.

In the end, rhetoric should not be rendered into a typology according to an implicit evolutionary hierarchy. We learn much more through a deeper and more sophisticated exploration of a small sample of cultures. Unlike in the nineteenth century, anthropologists in the twenty-first have made context king, and the royal road to comprehending rhetoric is the craft of ethnography itself.

Comparative Rhetoric ends each chapter with a nice bibliography. But I have a different canon which I find useful for understanding rhetoric in and between cultures. Here are some sources for better sampling rhetoric around the globe:

Abedi: Debating Muslims [Iran]

Abu-Lughod: Veiled Sentiments [Egypt]

Bohannon, Paul: Justice and Judgment among the Tiv [Nigeria]

Bohannon, Laura: “Shakespeare in the Bush” [Nigeria]

Bolinger: Language--the Loaded Weapon [USA]

Cohn: “Command of Language and the Language of Command” [India]

Duranti: From Grammar to Politics [Samoa]

Fabian: Power and Performance [Zaire]

Frake: “Struck by Speech” [Philippines]

Lowie: “Some Aspects of Political Organization among the American Aborigines” [USA]

Silverstein: “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description” [Australia]

Thorton: “Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism”[South Africa]

Tyler, The Said and the Unsaid [India]