Jürg Gasché

WITOTO RHETORIC CULTURE

It appears to me that the "net", or conceptual frame, of RTC is too generously loose in two ways : (1) its wants the precision which we need to capture the specificity of human (rhetorical) actions and (2) it wants courage in its lacks of implication in a science which would also be action, and thence, social compromise.

I propose a more precise interpretative framework, therefore a "tighter" one, which both account for, and explain, phenomena of general rhetorics which are non specific to the western civilization and consider oral expression in its globality, in this uniting what Aristotle had separated into poetics and rhetorics, and more. To this end, I start back from some ideas of Bakhtin and elaborate them in the light of the traditional discourse among the Witoto indians of Amazonia.

Then I show how these concepts account for the difficulties the Witoto meet in coping with a model of social organization introduced from the outside. This is because doing so would demand acquiring a novel discursive rationality.

Such a diagnosis, by its practical implications, also manifests the political position of the researcher. From there it follows, according to my vision, that scientific discourse is always political (this is even clearer when the phenomena it deals with are social, what rhetorics certainly is). For scientific discourse to be scientific, it must take distance form our own culture and elaborate a language which plunges the latter in a broader set, encompassing the currently extant socio-cultural diversity.