Kennedy, George A.
Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction
Chapter Eight, “Rhetoric in Ancient India”
Pages 171-189
For the most part Kennedy marches through the history of India and presents the reader with his highlights of Indian rhetoric. Indian rhetoric, I assume through the chapters position right before Kennedy’s chapter on the rhetoric of Greece and Rome, is something Kennedy finds interesting and worthy of examination; or at least more advanced than say, the rhetoric of social animals or the rhetoric of Aboriginal Australian culture (notice the proximity there; chapters one and three respectively).
While the book itself provides a quick, albeit Eurocentric, overview of varying rhetorical practices from around the world, I find myself more interested in the arrangement of chapters within Kennedy’s book. If we take for granted that reality is messy and difficult to make sense of, then writing is one way to create the illusion of order and control (to borrow from Cintron directly and Foucault more indirectly). Kennedy’s book is arranged, by my reckoning, as an evolution of rhetoric. At one end of Kennedy’s spectrum are social animals, at the other (and in a teleological sense, more advanced) end is the rhetoric of Greece and Rome, and therefore as Bernall has made clear, the rhetoric of Western Europe and the culture of power within the United States. As readers move, left to right, they move with this imagined evolutionary timeline. Once the reader finishes, she is closer to the present moment, which is, of course, dominated by the “Western” rhetorical practices of Greece and Rome (and therefore the rhetoric of Wester…oh just look a couple lines back) through the ideological weapons of language, capitalism, globalization, and military might. The book, in its own subtle way, reifies the current geopolitical order since it makes an essentialist argument for rhetoric as energy, and employs the strategy of strategic chapter arrangement to create this idea that Hellenistic rhetoric is the most advanced and suasive rhetoric in the world. In this way, the book leaves the impression with the reader that rhetoric of Greece and Rome is the best due to some innate quality, and therefore, any one culture which uses those practices is more advanced and deserving of all the things the world has to offer.
Interesting things from the chapter:
Contact with Mesopotamia and the “imitation” of Mesopotamian writing in India (171).
Writing (literacy?) as Kennedy’s qualifier for abstract thought (172)
Aryans (173)
Brahmin rhetoric (175)
The Bhagavad Gita as addition to The Mahabharata (176)
Sophistry in India (179)
Buddhism (180)
India Legal practices (184)
