Creating, Sustaining, and Contesting Definitions of Reality: Marcus Tullius Cicero as a Pragmatist Theorist and Analytic Ethnographer

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.6.2.01

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.6.2.01

Keywords:

Cicero, Pragmatism, Ethnography, Reality, Activity, Persuasion, Symbolic interaction, Oratory, Rhetoric, Aristotle, Roman, Kenneth Burke

Abstract

Although widely recognized for his oratorical prowess, the collection of intellectual works that Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) has generated on persuasive interchange is almost unknown to those in the human sciences.

Building on six texts on rhetoric attributed to Cicero (Rhetorica ad Herennium, De Inventione, Topica, Brutus, De Oratore, and Orator), I claim not only that Cicero may be recognized as a pragmatist philosopher and analytic ethnographer but also that his texts have an enduring relevance to the study of human knowing and acting.

More specifically, thus, Cicero's texts are pertinent to more viable conceptualizations of an array of consequential pragmatist matters. These include influence work and resistance, impression management and deception, agency and culpability, identity and emotionality, categorizations and definitions of the situation, and emergence and process.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist at the University of Waterloo. A symbolic interactionist, pragmatist ethnographer, and social theorist, his publications include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. Working as an ethnohistorian and theorist, Robert Prus has been tracing the developmental flows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c700-300BCE) to the present time. Focusing on the nature of human knowing and acting, this venture has taken him into several areas of western social thought -- including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, history, education, politics, and philosophy. Questing for the articulation and assessment of generic social processes pertaining to the study of community life, this project also is informed by comparative analysis of these transhistorical and transcontextual materials.

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