For my final project, I am looking closely at the idea of identification. Part of its process seems to be "identifying," or understanding both the material conditions that a certain person or group faces, plus the way they see themselves positioned in the social world. I get the feeling that there Burke is giving us a way to address these issues. In fact, he describes the rhetorical motive of "portraying" as "biography" or even "portraiture":

We can conceive of biography in the most minute sense: detailed
information regarding some particular taxpayer at some particular
time and place. Or, at the other extreme, we can think of the given
work’s “personality” as the snapshot of some one posture that is at least
momentarily typical of “mankind” in general. (43)

The example here, of the "taxpayer" is particularly apt. The taxpayer feels her "material condition" yearly, particularly if she is a landowner. The taxpayer also has a very particular social status. She is a "contributing" (at least in terms of capital) member of society, not (generally) a recipient of programs like welfare. A "portrayal" of the taxpayer would have, as its primary goal, demonstrating the taxpayer's identity, perhaps in a more individual sense than the basic way I've just described.

I find it interesting that there is actually an empirical research method called "portraiture"; I'm not sure where it originated from or if Burkean theory was invovled in its genesis, but you can find an example of it in "Writing and Motivation" a 2007 collection of research on the topic. The method involves collecting demographic and qualitative data about a particular group of people, then "coding" coordinating data into categories of "types" of people. The researchers then put together a brief "portrait" of a hypothetical (fictional) person representing the each group. The goal is a kind of identification, an understanding of the basic exigencies and motives of each "kind" of person in a given situation (say, a writing classroom situation).

I think this is a really useful idea, though there are obvious problems with using portraiture in research. Most people would probably (possibly rightly) protest that portraiture amounts to stereotyping. In fact, that's what it is, on some level. And I'm not sure that this is exactly what Burke had in mind with his idea. However, it is one way that folks in composition research are trying to put this idea into practice, even if they don't realize Burke thought it too!