Narrative, Discourse, and Rhetoric
Over the years, Cultural Anthropology has published a wide range of essays that deal with the related themes of narrative, discourse, and rhetoric. Addressing subjects as seemingly far-flung as conspiracy theories, folklore, discursive regimes, and the constitution of publics, this body of work investigates the relation between modes of story-telling and the politics of everyday life and interrogates the changing social and technological conditions that mediate linguistic communication. Of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, folklore, rhetoric, literary theory, and history, the list maps out a rich intersection of methodological approaches, analytical tools, and thematic concerns that traverse disciplinary boundaries.
Cultural Anthropology essays can be accessed electronically through AnthroSource, http://www.anthrosource.net/, which is available through most research libraries and to all members of the American Anthropological Association.
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Journalists may request PDFs from Cultural Anthropology's editorial office: ea@culanth.org.
Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity
William Mazzarella
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2010, Vol. 25, No. 1: 1-39
Supplemental Material
Suicide, Risk, and Investment in the Heart of the African Miracle
Julie Livingston
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2009, Vol. 24, No. 4: 652-680
Supplemental Material
INCITEMENTS TO DISCOURSE: Illicit Drugs, Harm Reduction, and the Production of Ethnographic Subjects
Nancy D. Campbell
Susan J. Shaw
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 4: 688-717
Supplemental Material
EL CAMPO: Faciality and Structural Violence in Farm Labor Camps
Peter Benson
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 4: 589-629
Supplemental Material
"Survival is Your Business": Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America
Joseph Masco
Cultural Anthropology May 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2: 361-398.
Supplemental material
Editors’ Introduction to the "Coke Complex"
Kim and Mike Fortun
Cultural Anthropology Nov 2007, Vol. 22, No. 4: 616-620.
Supplemental material
Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence
Charles L. Briggs
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 3: 315-356.
Supplemental Material
Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia
Paul Manning
Cultural Anthropology May 2007, Vol. 22, No. 2: 171-213.
Supplemental Material
Governmentality, Language Ideology, and the Production of Needs in Malagasy Conservation and Development
Paul W. Hanson
Cultural Anthropology May 2007, Vol. 22, No. 2: 244-284.
Supplemental Material
Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone
Rosalind Shaw
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 1: 66-93.
Supplemental Material
Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India
Kaushik Ghosh
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 4: 501-534.
Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu
Laura Kunreuther
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 323-353.
Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication
Brian Keith Axel
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 354-384.
Streets Not Named: Discursive Dead Ends and the Politics of Orientation in Intercommunal Spatial Relations in Northern Greece
Olga Demetriou
Cultural Anthropology May 2006, Vol. 21, No. 2: 295-321.
Wandering Hero Stories in the Southern Lowlands of New Guinea: Culture Areas, Comparison, and History
Mark Busse
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 4: 474-473.
Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the Era of Globalization
Ritty Lukose
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 4: 506-569.
Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance
Carole McGranahan
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 4: 570-600.
Changing the Subject: Conversation in Supermax
Lorna A. Rhodes
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3: 388-411.
"Lipstick Girls" and "Fallen Women": AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in Papua, Indonesia
Leslie Butt
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3: 412-442.
Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Christopher Kelty
Cultural Anthropology May 2005, Vol. 20, No. 2: 185-214.
Supplemental Material
The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains
Bruce Grant
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 1: 39-67.
Recovering True Selves in the Electro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love
Nickola Pazderic
Cultural Anthropology May 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2: 196-225.
Multipartyism and Nostalgia for the Unified Past: Discourses of Democracy in a Dance Association in Cameroon
Clare A. Ignatowski
Cultural Anthropology May 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2: 276-298.
The Context of Diaspora
Brian Keith Axel
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 1: 26-60.
Violence and the Rhetoric of Images
Gregory Starrett
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2003, Vol. 18, No. 3: 398-428.
Supplemental Material
Material Consumers, Fabricating Subjects: Perplexity, Global Connectivity Discourses, and Transnational Feminist Research
Priti Ramamurthy
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2003, Vol. 18, No. 4: 524-550.
The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman
Miyako Inoue
Cultural Anthropology May 2003, Vol. 18, No. 2: 156-193.
Authorizing a Disability Agency in Post-Mao China: Deng Pufang's Story as Biomythography
Matthew Kohrman
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2003, Vol. 18, No. 1: 99-131.
Sincerity, "Modernity," and the Protestants
Webb Keane
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2002, Vol. 17, No. 1:65-92.
Languages of Sex and AIDS in Nepal: Notes on the Social Production of Commensurability
Stacy Leigh Pigg
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4: 481-541.
"Empty Cradles" and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy
Elizabeth L. Krause
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4: 576-611.
Ambiguous Narratives
Thomas Lyons
Cultural Anthropology May 2001, Vol. 16, No. 2: 183-201.
Civic Virtue and Religious Reason: An Islamic Counterpublic
Charles Hirschkind
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 1: 3-34.
Of Ships and Saints: History, Memory, and Place in the Making of Moreno Mexican Identity
Laura A. Lewis
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 1: 62-82.
On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany
Dominic C. Boyer
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2000, Vol. 15, No. 4, 459-491.
From Text to Context: How Anthropology Makes Its Subject
Allen Chun
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2000, Vol. 15, No. 4: 570-595.
The Poetics of "Madness": Shifting Codes and Styles in the Linguistic Construction of Identity in Matlab, Bangladesh
James M. Wilce
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2000, Vol. 15, No. 1: 3-34.
The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America
Casey Nelson Blake
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1999, Vol. 14, No. 3: 423-435.
At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns
Nicole Constable
Cultural Anthropology May 1999, Vol. 14, No. 2: 203-228.
"A Broke-Up Mirror": Representing Bajan in Print
Janina Fenigsen
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1999, Vol. 14, No. 1: 61-87.
Cultural Scripts of Language and Sexuality in Martinican Theater: The Improvisational Impasse
David A. B. Murray
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1999, Vol. 14, No. 1: 88-110.
Rimbaud's House in Aden, Yemen: Giving Voice(s) to the Silent Poet
Lucine Taminian
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 4: 464-490.
Beyond Textual Analysis: Practice, Interacting Discourses, and the Experience of Distinction in Botswana
Pnina Motzafi-Haller
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 4: 522-547.
Reporting from Jerusalem
Ulf Hannerz
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 4: 548-574.
Authorizing Voices: Going Public in an Indigenous Language
David W. Dinwoodie
Cultural Anthropology May 1998, Vol. 13, No. 2: 193-223.
"I Know All about Emma Lazarus": Nationalism and Its Contradictions in Congressional Rhetoric of Immigration Restriction
Dorothee Schneider
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 1: 82-99.
Doing Violence to Ethnography: A Response to Catherine Besteman's "Representing Violence and 'Othering' Somalia"
I. M. Lewis
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 1: 100-108.
Primordialist Blinders: A Reply to I. M. Lewis
Catherine Besteman
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 1: 109-120.
Modernist Discourse, Psychic Forms, and Agency: Aesthetic Subjectivities at IRCAM
Georgina Born
Cultural Anthropology Nov, 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4: 480-501.
Knowing One's Place: National Language and the Idea of the Local in Eastern Indonesia
Webb Keane
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1997, Vol. 12, No. 1: 37-63.
The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the "Invention of Tradition"
Charles L. Briggs
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1996, Vol. 11, No. 4: 435-469.
The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada
Julie Peteet
Cultural Anthropology May 1996, Vol. 11, No. 2: 139-159.
"These Are the Stories That the Dogs Tell": Discourses of Identity and Difference in Ethnography and Science Fiction
David Samuels
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1996, Vol. 11, No. 1: 88-118.
Representing Violence and "Othering" Somalia
Catherine Besteman
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1996, Vol. 11, No. 1: 120-133.
Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification
Robert Brightman
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1995, Vol. 10, No. 4: 509-546.
The Ethnographer's Textual Presence: On Three Forms of Anthropological Authorship
Haim Hazan
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1995, Vol. 10, No. 3: 395-406.
Language and the "Arts of Resistance"
Susan Gal
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1995, Vol. 10, No. 3: 407-424.
Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography
Elizabeth Enslin
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 4: 537-568.
Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media
Faye Ginsburg
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 3: 365-382.
Discourse and Discipline at the National Research Council: A Bureaucratic Bildungsroman
Donald Brenneis
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 1: 23-36.
Landlords and the Devil: Class, Ethnic, and Gender Dimensions of Central American Peasant Narratives
Marc Edelman
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 1: 58-93.
Telling about Whites, Talking about Indians: Oppression, Resistance, and Contemporary American Indian Identity
Theresa D. O'Nell
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 1: 94-126.
Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic Arguments in a New Guinea Village
Don Kulick
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1993, Vol. 8, No. 4: 510-541.
Whose History? Whose Voice? Myth and Resistance in the Rise of the New Left in Mexico
James H. McDonald
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1993, Vol. 8, No. 1: 96-116.
Representation and Politics: Contesting Histories of the Iroquois
Gail Landsman; Sara Ciborski
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4: 425-447.
Royal Words and Their Unroyal Consequences
Christine E. Gray
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4: 448-463.
Anthropology and Colonial Discourse: Aspects of the Demonological Construction of Sinhala Cultural Practice
David Scott
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 3: 301-326.
Living with Medea and Thinking after Freud: Greek Drama, Gender, and Concealments
Ayala H. Gabriel
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 3: 346-373.
Touring Arcadia: Elements of Discursive Simulation and Cultural Struggle at a Children's Summer Camp
Randal K. Tillery
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 3: 374-388.
Myth, History, and Political Identity
Jonathan Friedman
Cultural Anthropology May 1992, Vol. 7, No. 2: 194-210.
The Postmodern Crisis: Discourse, Parody, Memory
Vincent Crapanzano
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 4: 431-446.
Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's "Inquest in the Andes" Reexamined
Enrique Mayer
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 4: 466-504.
Hubert Fichte as Ethnographer
Klaus Neumann
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 3: 263-284.
Cultural Pastiches: Intertextualities in the Moncrabeau Liars' Festival Narratives
Vera Mark
Cultural Anthropology May 1991, Vol. 6, No. 2: 193-211.
Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings
Fred Myers
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 1: 26-62.
Challenge to Authority: Bakhtin and Ethnographic Description
Wendy A. Weiss
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1990, Vol. 5, No. 4: 414-430.
The HRAF as Radical Text?
Joseph Tobin
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1990. Vol. 5, No. 4: 473-487.
Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
Talal Asad
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1990, Vol. 5, No. 3: 239-269.
Visions of the Archipelago: Michel Leiris, Autobiography, and Ethnographic Memory
Marc Blanchard
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1990, Vol. 5, No. 3: 270-291.
Montaigne and the Cannibals: Toward a Redefinition of Exoticism
Roger Celestin
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1990, Vol. 5, No. 3: 292-313.
The Dialectics of Deeds and Words: Or Anti-the-Antis (And the Anti-Antis)
Robert F. Murphy
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1990, Vol. 5, No. 3: 331-337.
Bombay Talkies, the Word, and the World: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
Michael M. J. Fischer; Mehdi Abedi
Cultural Anthropology May 1990, Vol. 5, No. 2: 107-159.
Voices around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem
Jonathan Boyarin
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1989, Vol. 4, No. 4: 399-421.
Just Writing: Paradox and Political Economy in Yemeni Legal Documents
Brinkley Messick
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1989, Vol. 4, No. 1: 26-50.
Language Conflict: Transactions and Games in Kenya
David Laitin; Carol M. Eastman
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1989, Vol. 4, No. 1: 51-72.
Analyzing a Speech Event: The Bush-Rather Exchange a (Not Very) Dramatic Dialogue
George L. Dillon; Anne Doyle; Carol Eastman; Harold Schiffman; Sandra Silberstein; Michael Toolan; Susan Kline; Gerry Philipsen
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1989, Vol. 4, No. 1: 73-94.
The Art of Being Indirect: Talking about Politics in Brazil
Teresa Pires do Rio Caldeira
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1988, Vol. 3, No. 4: 444-454.
Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in "Living History"
Richard Handler; William Saxton
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1988, Vol. 3, No. 3: 242-260.
Ambiguity in the Oral Exegesis of a Sacred Text: Tirukkovaiyar (Or, the Guru in the Garden, Being an Account of a Tamil Informant's Responses to Homesteading in Central New York State)
Margaret Trawick
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1998, Vol. 3, No. 3: 316-351.
"Speaking with Names": Language and Landscape among the Western Apache
Keith H. Basso
Cultural Anthropology May 1988, Vol. 3, No. 2: 99-130.
On the Syntactic Structure of Myth, or the Yukuna Invention of Speech
Pierre-Yves Jacopin
Cultural Anthropology May 1988, Vol. 3, No. 2: 131-159.
Parody and the Parodic in Polynesian Cultural History
George E. Marcus
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1988, Vol. 3, No. 1: 68-76.
Genre, Motive, and Metaphor: Conditions for Creativity in Ritual Language
Thomas J. Csordas
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1987, Vol. 2, No. 4: 445-469.
On Listening for Edifying Conversations: Resonant Discourses within and between Departments
George E. Marcus
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1987, Vol. 2, No. 1: 3-4.
Is Language a Prisonhouse?
Bradd Shore
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1987, Vol. 2, No. 1: 115-136.
Transformations of Disciplines through Their Texts: An Edited Transcription of a Talk to the Seminar on the Diversity of Language and the Structure of Power and an Ensuing Discussion at the University of Pennsylvania
Dan Rose
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1986, Vol. 1, No. 3: 317-327.
On Being out of Words
Stephen Tyler
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 131-137.
Oral Hermeneutics during the Transition to Literacy: The Contemporary Debate
C. Jan Swearingen
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 138-156.
How Hunter-Gatherers' Stories "Make Sense": Semantics and Adaptation
Megan Biesele
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 157-170.
Pima Swallow Songs
Donald Bahr
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 171-187.
Understanding a Mandi Story
Robbins Burling
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 182-202.
Tradition and the Collective Talent: Oral Epic, Textual Meaning, and Receptionalist Theory
John Miles Foley
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 203-222.
Complicity and Imitation in Storytelling: A Pragmatic Folklorist's Perspective
Roger D. Abrahams
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 223-237.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The Discourse of Training in Family Therapy
Martha G. Tyler; Stephen A. Tyler
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2: 238-256.
