When Imaginaries Forge Ethos: The Hidden Sociocultural Forces Of Political Argumentation

Ethos is a complex and crucial element in political discourse. Its complexity is evident in the construction process, which requires the speaker to consider the social imaginaries and cultural context of the audience. Building ethos based on one or more imaginaries allows a politician to secure the audience’s adherence, as the imaginary “is based on judgments, ideas, even images, propagated without being examined or critically appropriated by the subjects who receive them” (Lamizet, 2011: 28). This paper aims to analyze a set of imaginaries mobilized by political figures within a media corpus of Moroccan televised political debates. Specifically, we examine how ethos, imaginaries, and culture intersect through an analysis of several episodes of the televised debate series Daïf Al Aoula.