In Roberta Binkley's essay "The Rhetoric or Origins and the Other: Reading the Ancient Figure of Enheduanna", I was immediately intrigued by the Other stated in the title. My first experience learning about the Other was in my sophomore English class in high school. We were reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and our teacher described Frankenstein’s monster as “the Other”—something alien to us and un-relatable to our idea of identity. Because the monster had human-like qualities but was out of proportion and visually unappealing he was viewed as below human and then labeled as such. It has since then fascinated me about what else is considered the Other in books or even in life.
Binkley describes how the Other in rhetoric could be “of another period, place, culture, gender, and spiritual tradition” (47). He uses the princess Enheduanna's writing, which is considered "Other" according to traditional Athenian rhetoric, and he takes a closer look at her geographical position, gender, and religion to determine why she is considered the Other.
According to Binkley, the “civilizations of the ancient world were deeply interconnected” (54), but I think it is interesting that now they seem so separate. All the civilizations influenced each other’s rhetoric, but as we study it they all are categorized into their specific places according to the map. Mesopotamia reminds me a lot of the island Rhodes, the rhetoric seems to be focused externally for communication. However, even though the civilizations were interconnected through trade and war, Mesopotamia and other places, such as Egypt, were still the Other—not Greek.
Another factor that Binkley contributes to the label of “Other” with Enheduanna’s writing is her gender. In ancient Mesopotamia, the people looked “outside the system of binary gender” (56), unlike the Greeks. It doesn’t surprise me that this view of gender would separate the Greeks from Mesopotamia. Gender opinions can be linked with personal beliefs, even in today’s society, so for two different cultures to have completely different views makes sense that they could not relate on that issue, and, therefore, saw one another as the Other.
From this essay, Binkley reminds me to look out for what is considered the Other in rhetoric. He prompts readers and rhetoricians to be aware of non-traditional Athenian rhetoric and to examine why it is considered “Other” and to even take it a step further and argue that it isn’t the Other just because it doesn’t fit into the “tradition” of rhetoric. As I move forward in the readings in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks I truly hope to examine the before and beyond, because Greek rhetoric is only one small aspect of all there is.
I like how you bring in Frankenstein when talking about The Other, or as H.P. Lovecraft would say, the Unnamable. It's a nice comparison to how we just write off things that we can't explain, or that don't fit with reality.
ReplyDeleteIn that light, could Mesopotamian rhetoric be called supernatural? Of course anyone who reads this comment will tell me no because supernatural implies something devoid of natural qualities, and is normally reserved for horror fiction.
However, Mesopotamian rhetoric is not taken seriously, it is written off as "The Other", and does not fit into the valued "tradition" that rhetoricians pay so much attention to. So, does it even have a place in this rhetorical reality that rhetors have pigeon-holed themselves into, or at least popular rhetoricians?
I'll leave that question unanswered because it seems kind of farfetched to attempt a relation between the supernatural and the rhetorical. Nonetheless, one must question how we come about knowing things, and how this knowledge in turn influences our actions.
Mesopotamian rhetoric is not a part of the dominated rhetorical culture, and its existence as "Other" has marred its credibility, but does that make it supernatural?
“We know things, he said, through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact” (Lovecraft).
That's from a horror fiction piece called The Unnamable, but it applies well to the dominating definition of Mesopotamian rhetoric. What fact in the grand scheme of the rhetorical does Mesopotamian rhetoric hold onto?
Unanswered questions, and a strange correlation, but you made me think of it with that Frankenstein stuff so I'm not to blame.
Good job Annie!
ReplyDeleteI think you really bring more to the table by including personal experience in your blog post. As Ross suggests, Frankenstein is an interesting comparison.
Ultimately I think our discussions in class as well as here have centered around this very Western tradition of categorizing and classifying. In class Levi referred to the very masculine need to determine who is first, second, third for everything (this was Monday when we were talking about Enheduanna being the first named author). Theorist Bruno Latour talked about this, saying that Westerners have this need to draw a line between what is human and what is not (typically this is seen as human vs. nature or culture vs. nature), and I think it applies to rhetoric as well in the sense that we westerners draw a line between what we are familiar with and what we are not, the latter of which becomes "the Other."
So based on these very strict lines dividing what is and what is not familiar, I think we could relate Mesopotamian/Sumerian rhetoric with Frankenstein and the supernatural. By correlation though, this also means that early rhetoric is misunderstood (Frankenstein was, right?), and we see elements of that in how you talk about the interconnectedness of early rhetorics and the way they influenced each other. What this means for our class is that we need to break the traditional view that Mesopotamian rhetoric is indeed "the Other."