ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to sketch the necessary pre suppositions for a rhetorical account of social relations in general, and it follows with a brief discussion of how this approach can be used to examine even those kinds of social relationships that in the conventional sense of rhetoric might appear to lack it altogether. The ironic convergence of hostility to language and the tendency to place it on a remote pedestal has historically been a peculiarly Eurocentric phenomenon and can be traced to the power of the printed word. It has progressively and repeatedly frozen poetics into a stiflingly linguistic formality and has represented its implicit orientation to action as a synchronic study of literary structure. Language-derived models are more acceptable because they do not predetermine the structural characteristics that different semiotic modes employ. The ethnographic literature on Greece contains extensive discussions of the concept of filotimo.
