Beschreibung
The essays assembled in this volume are shaped by conditions – both
enabling and constraining – that can perhaps best be described as an
“ethnographic chiasmus”. This expression refers to the surprise and
reversal of position that are characteristic of fieldwork, and it attends
to the fact that trans-cultural understanding comes about as a meeting,
touching, or “crossing”.
Chiasmus also pertains to the relationship between culture and rhetoric in
general. Culture structures rhetoric, rhetoric structures culture. Both
are co-emergent. In order to elucidate this process, ethnography has to
focus on the manifold modes of rhetoric through which culture-specific
patterns of thought and action are created.
