Sorry, but I can't help but point out Dr. Sackey's environmental rhetorical practices. He makes two key points here that I think are critical in environmental rhetoric:
This inclusion of the nonhuman is noted in at least one other prominent journal article which I can share once I can get my hands on it.
To me, this is a key element. Culture as a narrative, a series of stories filled with symbolism.
Not only does it deal in complex relationships but it is "an ongoing process" meaning that to analyze it statically is to misread it.
Complex relationships! Yes, that seems to be the more adroit way to think about culture.
Here again, the point that we treat culture as an object. Sometimes a process, and sometimes a combination of the two. But, it would seem primarily as an object.
A very rich history dating back now for decades. It is nice to see the research contextualized historically.
This need that Royster articulates reflects a complex system of relationality; that I think we don't often notice in our scholarship—the way our cultural community's practices shape and are simultaneously shaped by the multiple and shifting processes, habits, and artifacts within and without that community.
This could metaphorically be applied to climate change research as well.
Here's the thing I've learned about bodies—you can't look at one piece of it without seeing all the others, can't manipulate a part without having to negotiate every other aspect of that body too. You can try, but you can't do it. It just won't happen. It's not how bodies work.
And cultures are no different, you can't look at one piece in isolation from all the rest because when you do you are very likely misreading the data!
This emphasis on responsibility is deeply tied to a concern with relationality. When we work with groups of people, we are forming a relationship with them. As someone who studies rhetoric through the concept of place and place-making, I am consistently interested in the surroundings, the environment, the places and spaces of the communities I work with and within. Those places are not just physical and material, but also social, emotional, and intellectual. They are classed, raced, and gendered. And, most importantly, they are all in relationship with one another. Rather than demarcate these kinds of relationships away from one another (e.g. just focus on physical place or just focus on gendered place), I want to emphasize their connections, and a cultural rhetorics orientation and methodological foundation helps me attend to these relationships responsibly.
This is one element that makes me worry about doing ethnographic research. These relationships we make carry a great responsibility with them that we represent the people who are being studied fairly and accurately and that we understand when we need to alter names to safeguard a community. The do no harm mantra is intimately tied with this kind of research.
The way that many of us have heard this is through a question like "What does this (Native rhetorics, queer rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, etc.) do for the rest of us?" Our intention here is to intervene in this presumption, to insist that methodological practices like the ones Andrea is describing, can enable all rhetorics scholars to study all people, places, and spaces.
As scholars, how do they not see that the ability to look at these different perspectives only enriches us and our experiences?
In Research is Ceremony, Wilson builds an indigenous research paradigm using indigenous practices such as relationality and relational accountability. For Wilson, to enact relationality means to understand one's relationship: to land, people, space, ideas, and the universe as interconnected and fluid. Relational accountability is how one is respectful and accountable to those relationships (i.e.: practices). Under an indigenous research paradigm, Wilson understands epistemology, ontology, axiology, and methodology as relational concepts that are stronger as a whole and not the sum of its parts.
I believe indigeneous frameworks could indeed be one way that we could more affectively communicate about climate change. I think here of Robin Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass." Her work was an eye opening reading for me allowing me to see the effects of humans on the earth with different eyes and I am better for having read that and experienced it.
When Dolmage says that he "see[s] rhetorical history as the study not of just a selected archive of static documents or artifacts, but a study also, always of the negotiations, valences, shifting claims and refutations, canons and revisions that orbit any history" (p. 113), we hear him calling attention to how our discipline talks about the history of rhetoric as static and disembodied.
And why do we even think of it as static and disembodied? The history of rhetoric is ongoing so it is a living thing that is always evolving.
We have been taught to separate academia from real life, and that academia is not a cultural community. We have been told that what we do in academia doesn't have a substantial impact on the kinds of oppression brought about by colonization. That it's all in our heads. We put decolonial delinking at the center of our stories here as a way of addressing these misconceptions.
And maybe herein is why academia is under attack? When we separate ourselves from real life, from the larger culture, we open ourselves up to attacks by people who don't understand what we are trying to do? Unfair those attacks may be, they still have to be dealt with in the real world.
Why do we tell only one history of the discipline? Why do we claim some ancestors and not others?
To this I would respond why not tell both stories? I don't think we need to throw out rhetoricians just to make space for others. I personally believe the canon is capable of expanding to be more inclusive of all.
And although we do believe critique of our current disciplinary practices is important and necessary, we want to make sure that critique leads to something even more important—making. Critique is not the end of the process of decolonization—it's the beginning. We want to make something that people will use, rather than to take things apart only to show that they can be taken apart.
Critique is fine but when critique is merely used to destroy instead of build something better then what is its point? It makes me think of Latour's article on Critique and how critique has been misused.
Remember, we're not on a mission to convert everyone to decolonial practice, or to our version of cultural rhetorics practices. We're visibilizing options and making those options available for others to use, and doing so as part of an attempt to intervene in and enlarge the acknowledged practices of our disciplinary community.
Unlike some who really do try to force the dominant reading on others because that has been the traditional way we read rhetoric. It is an option that we as scholars can utilize in our disciplinary community.
Up to this point, the disciplinary culture of rhetoric has been built on the canonization of idealized Western (colonial) systems and worldviews (imperial). The story we're telling about cultural rhetorics invokes a different possibility for our disciplinary culture. Again, this is a decidedly decolonial possibility in that it theorizes a constellated web of systems, discourses, communities, and indeed, paradigms alongside those of Western imperialism.
The authors very adroitly make the point that this is not an approach to do away with western systems but is rather a web of interrelationships and paradigms that can operate alongside Western imperialism. It is additive rather than being reductive.
A constellation, however, allows for all the meaning-making practices and their relationships to matter. It allows for multiply-situated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive.
I love this concept of seeing meaning-making as a constellation. Just as constellations are drawn differntly by different cultures, so to should rhetoric be analyzed as a constellated web of interrelationships ever changing, capable of multiple interpretations, with each informing us of differences we would not see from a single dominant cultural standpoint.
For De Certeau, many practices that compose cultures are hidden by dominant (aka, established) rules and authorized practices. He argues that we "must determine the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of this collective activity" if we are to understand how the making of culture occurs through everyday practice instead of through official, sanctioned dominant acts of cultural installation (xiv). For us, the product and process of this "collective activity" is rhetorical, and offers a way to begin to understand how such everyday practices betray the instability of colonial/capitalist claims to dominance.
This is at the heart of decolonial approaches to rhetoric. Far too long, dominant western cultural rules and norms have been used rhetorically to reinforce that dominance never taking into account theh rich variety of cultures that have different things to show us as we analyze rhetoric, different was to see and to think about what we are communicating.
culture is often conceptualized and written about as a static object. This object-oriented approach is especially prevalent in mainstream scholarship from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and from the borrowings that folks in rhet/comp studies have initiated from these inter/disciplines. By "object-oriented,"8 we mean scholarship that identifies "culture" as an object of inquiry, one that can be isolated from other human, economic, political, geographical, historical frameworks that exist around and within it.
The static depiction of culture is one example of how a concept can be misused repeatedly. When culture is statIc it erases the very essence of what a culture represents, the people who embody it. Without the humans there is no culture. It is our interaction with each other that forms a culture. And culture cannot be defined in only one way but needs to encapsulate different cultures and not analyze solely from a dominant cultural perspectives.
the practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics. The way we say it—if you're not practicing story, you're doing it wrong.
This opening statement makes it clear why the narrative structure was chosen for this article. It was the perfect choice.
Working out a relationship to the land, to the lake, to the histories of this place. Building a space in which our work exists alongside those histories. Building a practice we can remember when we're not all together, not in this place/space. This is a cultural rhetorics practice.
I love this concept of working out a relationship with land, lake and the histories of the location. This concept of building a space to work in to build a practice that everyone can remember I think is relevant in much of research.
A collective interlocutor who brings the real questions we've experienced from disciplinary community4 into the performance into this story in a respectful way. In Anishinaabemowin—one of the indigenous languages of what is now the state of Michigan—"niij" is an informal term used to designate a friend.5
The use of the indigenous language to equate the narrator with the concept of friend is a nice turn in this narrative structure. The three act drama, in my opinion, is the perfect way to relate this concept, the narrative of cultural rhetorics.