Migration and Identity in Central Asia by Rano Turaeva

Author:Rano Turaeva [Turaeva, Rano]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317430070
Google: KYn4CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-19T02:50:42+00:00

Figure 4.3 We and They distinctions among Uzbeks.40

From rhetoric to identification

The ethnographic material presented so far has dealt with language attitude towards language varieties of Uzbek and paralinguistic features of everyday communication. Before indulging in further ethnographic examples of communicative practices, I will briefly highlight some important rhetorical aspects of communicating one’s identity and being identified as the Other.

When analysing linguistic practices in every day communicating of collective identities it was useful for my purposes to simplify the span of the process of communicating one’s identity through focusing on the following:

• individual or collective consciousness (‘being aware’) about their identities;42

• communicating this ‘awareness’ to the Other; and

• further perception of the communicated message by a receiver.

I am aware that there are other factors and aspects when explaining the phenomenon of identification process. These are considered in other parts of this book. Conscious knowledge about one’s identity (‘being aware’) influences the intention and strategies to be employed by an actor when communicating oneself to the Other.43 Certain ways of speaking, and intentionality while making a speech, has a long tradition in the field of the art of rhetoric. The basic principles and notions of how to organise and deliver speech in public were established more than two millennia ago by Greek and Roman rhetoric. An essential feature of this rhetorical tradition is the connection of the art of speech with wisdom and virtue. Mastering the skills of speaking in public and wisdom in philosophy were signs of good education and social status. Aristotle, for example, expressed his thoughts about the existence of power in certain learned ways of speaking when done with a special art of speaking. The special art of speaking included three main components: logos (logic reasoning), ethos (mastery of cultural heritage) and pathos (emotions, force and passion). These components were necessary for a true orator who could persuade the audience and who was a polymath of his time (Garver 1994).

The new rhetorical has switched the focus from a speaker to the relationships of the speaker with a listener. This significant turn in rhetorical theory was marked by a great philosopher and critic, Kenneth Burke. He extended the term persuasion to identification and distinguished them ‘by foregrounding the possibility of the unconscious, the dreamlike, and the nonspecific yearning in speaking subjects seeking to compensate for “real differences and divisions” that, in turn, prompt further identifications’ (Burke 1950). Another important volume in this regard is Rhetoricals of Selfmaking (Battaglia 1995). The authors in this volume problematise the self and argue that self is not given but ‘made’ (ibid.: 2), focusing on agency and performance and turning away from the traditional approach to rhetoric. The argument is that ‘[rhetoric] is not about the commanding dominance of the individual personality in some consummate performance or text’ but it ‘is taken as an uncertain, and provisional social project’ (ibid.: 2). This approach to studying identities, the authors argue, is ‘[a]n approach to selfhood as an embodied and historically situated practical knowledge in other

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