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During the past decade, it has become commonplace to interpret social and cultural reality-the very groundwork of the social sciences-as linguistic constructions. Not only is society viewed as a text, but scientific texts themselves are seen as rhetorical constructions.This collection of scholarly essays begins with an overview of this emerging field, and covers the specific stylistic practices by which social scientists create "objective" or "true" representations of society. The volume closes with a consideration of the more telling challenges to the rhetorics of the social sciences and how these might be encompassed or overcome.
List of contents
I: Language/Power in the Social Sciences; 1: Poetics, Politics, and Truth: An Invitation to Rhetorical Analysis; 2: Text/Context: The Rhetoric of the Social Sciences; II: Rhetoric and Truth in the Social Sciences; 3: The Interpretation of Disciplinary Writing; 4: No Anthro-Apologies, or Der(r)iding a Discipline; 5: Textual Form and Social Formation in Evans-Pritchard and Lévi-Strauss; III: Social Science as a Political Discourse; 6: Communication, Persuasion, and The Establishment of Academic Disciplines: The Case of American Psychology; 7: Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic Texts: A View from the Colonial Ethnography of Afghanistan; 8: Listening for the Silences: The Rhetorics of the Research Field; 9: The Rhetoric of Efficiency: Applied Social Science as Depoliticization; 10: Fact, Fiction, and Factions: Scandal, Controversy, and "Filemaking" as Social Theory; IV: Challenges for the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences; 11: Human Needs and Control: A Foundation for Human Science and Critique; 12: Narration, Reason, and Community; 13: From Suspicion to Affirmation: Postmodernism and the Challenges of Rhetorical Analysis
About the author
Richard Brown
