Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science by Risa Applegarth (review)

A recent cover of the Texas Christian University (TCU) magazine Endeavors showcasing faculty research bears a photograph of my colleague Richard Enos. He is wearing an Indiana Jones hat and proudly displaying a replica of a Bronze Age artifact to commemorate his searches to document Grecian women’s literacy. This is rhetorician as archaeologist. In Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science, Risa Applegarth takes up calls by Enos, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Carol Berkenkotter, and others for rhetoricians to expand their historiographic methodologies via literal and figurative excavation, seeking “buried” textual artifacts the way others might unearth ancient coins or flints. In her provocative book, Applegarth theorizes a methodology she calls rhetorical archaeology—a tracking of historical changes in genres, including retrieval of those discarded. Because genres are not fixed forms but “knowledge-making practices [that] . . . ‘encode’ epistemic traditions” as well as particular power hierarchies (17), rhetorical archaeology enables scholars to uncover past disciplinary struggles over who is authorized to produce legitimate knowledge, by what means, and for what purposes. Specifically, Applegarth’s study explores the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when anthropology transformed itself from a discipline that welcomed contributions from amateurs into one intent on securing its status as a scientific discipline by controlling the creation and distribution of anthropological knowledge. Via rhetorical archaeology, Applegarth excavates and illuminates abandoned anthropological genres written by women whose innovations contested the depersonalizing, exclusive form of scientific professionalism inscribed within dominant anthropologic discourse.

Applegarth begins by noting that anthropology is a “discipline founded upon epistemic domination” (8)—one that came of age during, and was integrated into, colonizing practices. Indigenous peoples were objects to be studied, their cultural heritages controlled—indeed—owned by the anthropologists who collected their stories and artifacts and who alone were authorized to produce knowledge about them. As anthropology worked to establish itself as rigorous academic science, along the model of the natural sciences, an additional layer of epistemic domination—scientist over amateur researcher—manifested itself through changes in what became anthropology’s dominant genre: the ethnographic monograph. Applegarth’s two opening chapters analyze these changes. Surveying scores of anthropological monographs, journal articles, conference presentations, as well as archival field notes and correspondence from before and after World War I, Applegarth demonstrates that nineteenth-century scholarship, particularly the monograph, reflected the field’s capacious identity, accommodating a wide range of subject matter, methods, authorial training and purposes, audiences, length, and levels of analysis and scientific terminology. Record numbers of women and people of color sought formal anthropological training, earned PhD degrees, and began publishing widely. Nevertheless, established amateurs and newly trained women found themselves increasingly marginalized due to the perceived threat they represented to anthropology’s disciplinary aspirations. Because anthropology is grounded on an essentially democratic (i.e., nonspecialist) form of knowledge production—first-hand observation—the field professionalized by building restrictions into the ethnographic monograph itself. This is what Applegarth calls rhetorical scarcity: a “manufactured situation of intense and increasing constraint within a genre that significantly restricts rhetors’ access to key rhetorical resources” (29). In anthropology’s case, this is the time and money needed for extended field work and book writing typically available only to faculty at institutions with graduate anthropology programs that almost exclusively hired white men. Applegarth analyzes at length the rhetorical scarcity enacted through the ethnographic monograph genre, arguing that these changes were “historical, not inevitable” (54); in other words, they resulted from human activity—the field’s accumulated decisions to address academic audiences who expected increased levels of analysis in ever-more technical language.

However, if rhetorical scarcity creates barriers to sanctioned knowledge production, then it also, Applegarth argues, prompts innovation. Hence, the remaining three body chapters of her book examine the “deviant textual practices” of women anthropologists—field autobiographies, folklore collections, and ethnographic novels—that “had been subjected to historical erasure” (9). Applegarth analyzes work by Ann Axtel Morris, Gladys Riechard, Ella Cara Deloria...