Culture as rhetoric: patterning in the verbal interpretation of interaction between teachers and administrators in an American high school

Abstract

Six “texts” produced by the staff of an American high school are analyzed and shown to possess a common rhetorical structure that is independently constituted and that may determine what is being said. It is argued that this rhetoric of everyday talk signifies a set of social positions that are projected onto social reality without always representing it. It is suggested that in this rhetoric may lie the concrete impulse in the phenomenological world that has led anthropologists to talk of culture.