A recent email request has got me thinking this week. This was from a site that monitors published articles, and they wrote to ask if I had written the paper ‘Listening to the Language, Listening to the Words and Listening to the Spaces between the Words, Rhetoric and Pragmatics in the Performance of Christian-Muslim Relations’ (not one of my shortest titles). This paper analysed the rhetoric at work in an interreligious conference I attended in Iran almost ten years ago. In my opening speech, transmitted live on Iranian television, I had to speak to numerous audiences simultaneously and, in the light of the recent controversy over the cartoons of the Prophet, I had to tread a very careful path if we were not to be arrested on the spot. That paper made the point that it was not what was said that was most significant. Rather, it was what was not said, what was implied, the spaces between the words, that were just as important as what was said.
Some months ago, another web site asked to interview me about my work as a PVC. At the end of the interview, they asked a few general questions, including ‘what book has been most influential?’ I think my answer surprised the interviewer as I immediately said Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Ever since Taussig came to speak to the anthropology department at Manchester when I was doing my PhD, way back in the mid 1980s, and I began to read his work, this book has lived with me, informed almost everything that I have written and continues to haunt me today.
The immediate use I made of the book related to the second half of the text where Taussig develops the Brechtian understanding of montage to understand and engage with drug induced healing rites in Columbia. Taussig draws particular attention to the way in which montage breaks up reality and allows us to look into the spaces between the parts and to recreate new perspectives. There are other elements within this second half, including the different ways in which the narrative structure of the dreams/visions of different racial groups play out in their lives, and this is something I will explore further in my current book on myth.
However, it is the first half of the book that I was particularly thinking of when I answered that question. This begins with the horrors inflicted by the British subjects who owned rubber plantations along the Putumayo River in Columbia. The way in which the native peoples were treated was truly horrific and one of the most shameful episodes of British colonial history. The point Taussig draws out, however, is the way in which different commentators at the time related this horror to the people of England. Roger Casement, a civil servant, wrote a government report, with a coldly factual account of the numbers killed, and the methods of torture used. Joseph Conrad wrote a novella. Each had impact, but each used a different kind of rhetoric to make their point, and for Taussig it was Casement’s cold factuality that was the most devastating and ultimately led to a change in policy.
Interestingly, I have also been reading Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums, a work about the restitution of African art, and particularly the Benin bronzes, written by a senior curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The book has some very interesting and important things to say, but it is not the content that I wish to pick up at this point (I will no doubt come back to that in other blogs), but the tone of the book, or rather the choice of rhetoric that is used. Hicks is just so angry. He makes a point of expressing his outrage and offence at the horrors that, in his view, the museums of the West are still perpetrating on the people of Nigeria by exhibiting the looted items from the sack of Benin. This is a choice. He is clearly angry and that is an appropriate response. He chooses, however, to use an excessive rhetoric of anger and outrage in his book, and to pile that language on top of itself in long purple passages, creating and manipulating words, not to say anything in particular, but rather to get across to the reader just how angry he is and just how outraged and offended he has become (the second half of the book does, however, set out the facts in a very clear and factual manner, that is particularly helpful).
Hicks’ opening rhetoric is part of a common approach used in social media, and in society more generally, where the language of offense, and the taking of offense is used to make an emotional point that almost negates the need to argue a case. It is well attested in so many areas, not least those that certain sections of society call ‘woke’. We constantly live with this heightened, excessive use of language that simply closes down any response and all reasonable conversation. At one level, such language appears to demand a response, but the only response that is acceptable, at least to the speaker, is to share the offence. To disagree is to put yourself into the world that is being condemned, the world of the colonial, the racist, the capitalist, whatever the particular bug bear actually is.
Of course, as with rubber plantation owners referenced by Taussig, there was real violence and horror in the way in which the British expeditionary force planned, sacked, and looted the royal palace at Benin, with the death of many local people (a number that is never recorded) and the destruction of a culture. However, what Taussig is asking and what I am asking in my paper, is what rhetorical response to such horror generates the most favourable response, and how best to express that in written (or oral) texts.
Hicks follows neither Casement or Conrad. He simply choses to shout and to express his outrage and his offence. My first response, on reading the first few pages of Hicks’ book, was that this was a perfect example of what some have called ‘cultural appropriation’. What right does Hicks, a white, western educated, curator of a British museum have to be outraged and offended to such a heightened level? That offence belongs, if that is the right word, to the people of Nigeria. The response of the western academic should, perhaps, be one of humble apology, remorse, the seeking of forgiveness. By taking offense Hicks effectively distances himself from those of his predecessors who perpetrated the crime. However, one of his points is that the crime continues to be perpetrated just as long as these items are displayed, and he is implicated in that as much as any of his predecessors, however much he chooses to express his outrage and offence.
However, to come back to my own article, and to the interview and the choice of a book that has been so influential for me. It is the attention to language, to what is said, and to what is not said, to how we say what we choose to say, and the tone and attitudes we adopt as we say it, particularly in the written text, that still says important things to me. This is particularly important in relation to the difficulties we face as Universities in the culture wars and the concerns over free speech. It is suggesting that the written text is also a performance, just as much as the speech I gave at the opening of the Iranian conference. Of course, it is a performance, and we can always choose how we perform the text through the words we choose and the tone we set in our writing. We can choose to perform ‘offence’ or ‘outrage’, we can choose to perform the objective setting out of the horrors we witness or experience, or we can choose to perform the horror through other voices, playing out through fiction, through narrative structures, and the appealing to emotions, seeking empathy as opposed to expressing offence or outrage. These are all choices, and they are all part of what free speech actually means in practice.
Martin Stringer Quartet 