Can I Speak About the Ancients and Listen, Too?

What am I allowed to say about ancient rhetorics of the Americas? 

Nothing? Laurie Gries points to LuMing Mao early in her thesis ("Practicing Methods in Ancient Cultural Rhetorics"):

"As Mao explains, while we can certainly try to situate ourselves in the context of the 'other' and study their rhetorical practices on their own terms all the time, we cannot literally do so because our present location always impacts how knowledge is both produced and consumed" (Gries 90).

Gries could have stopped with that, because she points out a major dilemma: What am I allowed to say about ancient rhetorics of the Americas? Nothing? With that question in the air, Gries moves on to talk about the Moche burial rituals, for which we have no cultural context to support any interpretation of what was going on, because— well—we were not there to see those rhetorical practices being performed. She argues, however, that those rituals show "a rhetorical genre"—which incorporates the terms "duality, concealment, and inversion" (Gries 112). But how can she ground the burials within a genre and argue for using "restraint" (Gries 93) while studying the artifacts of the Moche people? How is that "listening to rather than speaking for [my emphasis]"? 

I see Gries's argument as a cautionary tale (I just now noticed Mikaela McShane used this term in her blog title) if anything, warning against trying to interpret things we do not (and cannot possibly know) about for sure. Her argument for restraint is not completely broken by her own Moche ritual genre argument. Her argument keeps going back to a grain-of-salt mentality, which allows her to say things without the reader taking her word solely on face value.

If I am trying to "listen" to an artifact, will it "hear" me when I speak back? 

Travis Maynard and I used Tracy Brandenburg's "In Search of the Invisible World" as the inspiration for our excavation/unveiling of a rhetorical practice. Brandenburg's text differs from Gries's text, because Brandenburg's main focus is towards artifacts for which we do have the cultural context to support interpretations. Brandenburg was able to speak directly to Nicéforo Urbieta about his portrait of the two Zapotec martyrs of Cajonos, Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Ángeles (the artifact we "excavated"). In our excavation, Travis and I wanted to reveal the exigence of Urbieta's portrait. We came up with the idea of a virtual tour of the cathedral of Oaxaca, where the portrait is on display. In this tour, the audience would be given the context of the painting (as given by Brandenburg on Page 161 via a quote from Urbieta) in order to see its exigence. The audience would be given external information about Mesoamerican symbolism in order to see where the overlap happens between the Mesoamerican images and the Catholic censorship. 

Brandenburg pointed out the Catholic church's attempts to blot out Mesoamerican images by replacing them with Christian images (in order to convert the Mesoamerican peoples to their ideals). But many Mesoamerican people were resistant to this replacement and, instead, kept their ancient gods while "[pretending] to be faithful to the church" (Brandenburg 158). Brandenburg sought to prove "the image, that is, the writing of the Mesoamerican peoples, continues to be used" (Brandenburg 155). She attempted to do so by going out into the artistic community of Oaxaca, Mexico and doing "fieldwork with Urbieta and the artists of the Center for Visual Thought" (Brandenburg 155).  She argues her point by presenting "a contemporary pictorial text" that uses Mesoamerican symbolism while presenting a Catholic image (the portrait of the martyrs of Cajonos).

Now, the reason why I chose the title for this section may not seem to add up to what I have presented with Brandenberg's goals in mind, but I have to explain. While it may seem that our excavation is merely a hermeneutic approach to presenting Urbieta's painting, I argue by presenting the portrait of the martyrs of Cojonos with its context, the virtual tour becomes more than just a way of preserving the meaning behind the painting; it brings the portrait into a discussion about the censorship, allowing the audience to see the portrait for what it is instead of guessing. Having them both together allows the audience to "speak" back to the exigence of the portrait.