When Rhetoricians Become Accessories to Archeaology

I’d like to open this blog post with a continuation of the discussion we just dug into (excavation pun intended) at the end of class on Tuesday, particularly in regards to how the artifact Andrew and I made attempts to put into motion the principles that Brandenberg puts forth in her chapter. 

Dr. Graban asked if we might be doing rhetorical hermeneutics, a big no-no according to Gries, and a point I will contend with below; however, that question was quickly resolved as we came to realize that Brandenberg isn’t concerned with restraint as much as preservation, preservation of indigenous symbols and meanings in an ongoing “war of images” in which indigenous culture is suppressed and subsumed into the Catholic church. Brandenberg offers a narrative of a counter-offensive (to carry the war metaphor) in the form of Niceforo Urbieta’s painting of the Martyrs of Cajonos. Based on Urbieta’s rationale for his use of imagery, Andrew and I conducted secondary research to learn more about the elements of Mesoamerican religion referenced in his portrait. By overlaying that secondary information onto the Catholic imagery housed within the Cathederal at Oaxaca, our artifact preserves the imagistic history of Mesoamerica, highlighting how the two cultures have blended and how indigenous Mesoamerican culture persists via imbuing Christian imagery with Mesoamerican meaning and reverence; after all, the Black Christs of Central and South American are so popular because of their verisimilitude to indigenous peoples. The interface we imagined and proposed peels back the layers of Christian meaning that suggest “oh, that’s just a crucifix”; sure, it is, but the excavation shows how it also resonates with indigenous religion. In this way, our artifact provides another entry into the war on images Brandenberg proposes.

Of course, Gries would dispute the validity of our project since we are offering interpretations of the artifacts in the Oaxaca Cathedral. I framed it in class as a rhetorical “look, but don’t touch” and I’d like to extend that. According to Gries, rhetoricians act as archaeologists and curators of meaning, but not interpreters—in other words, they do everything but be a rhetorician. First, a rhetorician uncovers the artifacts of study and allows them to speak for themselves, careful not to make any interpretations of them. Second, the rhetorician curates them, and by that I essentially mean put on display for other rhetoricians to listen to—in an edited collection, museum display, virtual reconstruction, etc.—and they mustn’t make any interpretations either. I think there are a lot of problems with this model, one of which is that it might cease to be rhetorical study at all, but I think the most dissonant facet of Gries’ chapter is that she wants to restrain us from relying on our secondary commentary but relies on secondary commentary herself. Using metavocabulary like genre or medium does exactly what she says we shouldn’t. So, either the project is flawed from the beginning, or we have to trust her to use this vocabulary and still listen to the artifacts, which could set up an unintended positioning of the curator as more capable of touching than the audience. So rather than rhetorical “look, but don’t touch,” it becomes “look, but don’t touch; but I can.” This latter attitude would be fine if, as rhetoricians, we weren’t also in the position to curate, but she seems to implicitly separate herself from the rest of the pack, as it were, admonishing us for wanting to interpret material artifacts.

For all the grief I’m giving Gries, I think she does offer two useful turns to the material and ritual as genre, opening up recent theoretical developments of the field to a new class of archaeological artifacts. We have been turning our attention more and more to the materiality of writing, opening up our theory to all modalities to better understand how they can be used rhetorically, so it makes sense to look at material artifacts. So, who cares what Gries is doing? We’re already doing this. Well, sure, but Gries turns us to ancient artifacts, which I think can be a useful site of inquiry; if only we could interpret these archeological artifacts! I think without the act of interpretation, we are just becoming thick describers of artifacts, and we aren’t really doing rhetoric anymore. We’ve just become an accessory to archaeology (good band name). But Gries doesn’t just point us in the direction of materiality, she also points us to genre. Evoking Spinuzzi evoking Bakhtin, we see how genre can be routinized or even ritualized, which aligns with how we’ve come to understand genre as texts that respond to recurrent rhetorical situations. Its through this repetition that genre becomes transparent to writers; we write a resume because that’s just how it is; we sacrifice to the Sun God because that’s just how it is. The big reason Gries cautions us against interpretations is because we might fixate those rituals the same way we come to fix genres or genre conventions. She wants us to have more wiggle room so our initial interpretations don’t become the only ones. Which in the end, I can get behind. But to restrain ourselves completely seems unrealistic. If we keep in mind that rituals, like genre, can be fluid, we should be able to interpret. Its what rhetoricians do.