Ethics in contact rhetoric: Communication and the dance of bodies and power

Reorienting communication theory: Religion as resource, contact as centre, dance as ur-artAs a field of contemporary scholarship, communication tends to focus on symbolism and media.Europe's Enlightenment tradition brackets, downplays or even denies spirituality to understand rhetors 'instrumentally' as individual symbolic actors using discursive means of persuasion on audiences.In centring on language and the ambiguities of representation, ethical questions can quickly become abstract and cerebral (disembodied).To provide a counter-balance, our new book looks to ancient wisdom traditions to develop an understanding of communication as embodied gift cycle.Contact, our simultaneous and immediate giving and receiving process of joint touch, displaces the abstract and mechanical notion of communication as a unilateral transmission of ideas from one mind to another.The contact perspective begins with embodied human beings sharing physically co-dependent lives in time and space, and with the ancient premise that moral human relationships operate within an inherently spiritual frame.Our book, Ethics in contact rhetoric (Lexington Books, 2025) is significant because religious, mythic and