Culture Figures: A Rhetorical Reading of Anthropology

Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline’s self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of ’culture’ and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.

Michal Mokrzan is a member of staff at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wroclaw. He has received multiple laureates for the book Class, Capital, and Coaching in the Era of Late Capitalism: The Persuasion of Neoliberal Governmentality (Toruń Nicolaus Copernicus University Scientific Press, 2019), including the Bronislaw Malinowski Award (from the Polish Academy of Sciences).