The Anthropology of Metaphor?

May 19, 2006 6:22 PM

Where can I find more writing about metaphor? I vaguely remember reading something about how, when machines became ubiquitous, people began understanding their lives in terms of machines. I'm looking for that sort of thing.

I'm enjoying Nietzsche's discussion of metaphor in "Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense," de Man's discussion of metaphor in "Semiology and Rhetoric," Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. Any further recommendations would be nice. Cross-cultural examinations, such as how (or whether) different environments yield different metaphors which then yield different concepts and ideologies, would be especially helpful to me.

posted by Aghast. to society & culture (21 comments total)

I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind, but Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots is about natural selection and its influence on narratives. It's fantastic.
posted by josh at 6:38 PM on May 19, 2006

Roman Jakobson might be worth looking into. He has some observations about aphasia and the difference between metaphor & metonymy.
posted by juv3nal at 6:39 PM on May 19, 2006

"Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" By Jerry Mander. A gripping read for many reasons. Tons of stuff about the example you describe.
posted by hermitosis at 6:54 PM on May 19, 2006

There was a whole bunch of psychology based on the "steam engine" model. Which sounds pretty absurd now.
posted by callmejay at 7:00 PM on May 19, 2006

Two recs that make fit:

Culture and the Senses: Embodiment, Identity, and Well-Being in an African Community
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities
posted by Gyan at 7:01 PM on May 19, 2006

You may have luck with some of the things written about allegory, as opposed to metaphor. Walter Benjamin writes about this seemingly archaic form as being, in fact, the essence of modernity in its self-counscious artificiality and temporality. This notion informs his best known essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (found in the collection called Illuminations) in which he tries to explain how modernity, in the form of industrial capitalism and mass-market entertainments, is at odds with the unique aura the pertains to great art, whose existence is now threatened altogether. It's a way of thinking about how a mode of discourse--alllegory, metaphor, symbol--gives access to something more amorphous like "the modern condition."
posted by Toolshed at 7:15 PM on May 19, 2006

More Than Cool Reason.
posted by Succa at 7:20 PM on May 19, 2006

see Thomas Szasz's The Idea of Insanity or his other books which discuss the metaphorical nature of 'mental' illness. See also the paper by Howard Shaffer PhD from Harvard which discusses the conceptual crises in the addictions.
posted by madstop1 at 7:50 PM on May 19, 2006

Metaphor and Thought, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Andrew Ortony, (ed).

Here are a few of the articles:
George Lakoff, "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor"
Boyd, Richard, "Metaphor and Theory Change"
Donald Schon, "Generative Metaphor"
posted by Jeff Howard at 8:54 PM on May 19, 2006

Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
posted by Pigpen at 11:16 PM on May 19, 2006

oops. sorry, skim read your post.
posted by Pigpen at 11:17 PM on May 19, 2006

Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor by Richard Coyne is quite good, and densely packed. Full disclosure: I know him.
posted by milquetoast at 4:41 AM on May 20, 2006

From Benjamin, you also might check out "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," from Illuminations. He argues that Baudelaire's poetry only makes sense in the modern, crowded city, and uses the constant shock of recognition to explain the assembly line experience. Good stuff.

Also consider checking out the first volume, "Thinking," of Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind and the final chapter, "Chiasms," of Maurice Merleau-ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. They both argue that we use tropes derived from the visual field to formulate concepts and ideas in a communicable manner. In short, metaphysics is metaphorical.

I've only supplied a few examples from my recent reading. All post- Husserlian phenomenologists have some theory of operative-metaphor at play, so the list goes on and on. I never tire of Deleuze's book, The Logic of Sense, for instance.

But it depends: are you primarily interested in theories of metaphor or in the specific "metaphors we live by"? Some thinkers historicize and localize their arguments, and others argue that there are structurally-guaranteed metaphors which will pop up in every time and every locale. If you've already sided with the historicists, then you'll want to be reading one set of texts, whereas if you're up in the air it's a different set.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:29 AM on May 20, 2006

Evans-Pritchard's work on the Nuer (start with The Nuer) details the ways in which cattle are the organizing metaphor of Nuer life. I think a lot of anthropology from this period looked for organizing metaphors, but perhaps over emphasized the structural importance of them.
posted by carmen at 9:59 AM on May 20, 2006

After reading the pregnancy question, I'm reminded that Robbie Davis-Floyd does a whole lot of work on the "technocratic" metaphor and how it influences ideas about the biomedical interventions into pregnancy and birth.
posted by carmen at 10:21 AM on May 20, 2006

Thanks everyone.

Anotherpanacea: I'm leaning toward the historicists you mentioned but I'm somewhat open-minded. I'd like to read the localized arguments.

"How do physical environments inspire and constrain ideology?" is the question I'm aiming at but I am willing to be sidetracked.

gyan: The book about African communities looks extremely great. Just what I'm looking for.
posted by Aghast. at 2:42 PM on May 20, 2006

Heh. I just noticed that I framed the question as: historicist or not-yet historicist. There aren't many hard-core structuralists any more. :-)

Anyway, you might check out Foucault's The Order of Things. He sets up the major metaphors of Western philosophy, science, medicine, and economics in exactly the manner you describe. One wants to be careful not to focus too much on locale ("physical environments") over history: strange things happen in diaspora situations, when a culture finds itself in a new place, with metaphors uprooted from a space that the culture no longer inhabits. (This, of course, assumes that you're not an anthropologist studying a relatively stable, sitatued culture. But there aren't many of those left.)

I've given up linking to Amazon, but let me know via e-mail when and if you settle on a specific set of metaphors. De Certeau does good work in The Pratice of Everyday Life, focusing on metaphors derived from quotidian experiences like cooking and walking around. Jacques Derrida has done some amazing, earth-shattering work on religious metaphors: confession, forgiveness, conversion, etc. But you'll be disappointed if you don't start with a text of his for which you've prepared in advance, so don't just buy Of Grammatology and except to get it. Toqueville's Democracy in America argues that this country is so large that we've had to settled on non-localized forms of culture based precisely in that expansiveness.

Have you already worked through Marx's German Ideology?
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:23 PM on May 20, 2006

Someone else who writes thoughtfully about cross-cultural diversity in metaphor (strongly influenced by Benjamin and Arendt) -- anthropologist Michael Jackson.

You could try his At Home in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) [Amazon] -- a lucid meditation on 'home' and 'homelessness' as concept and metaphor in Australian Aboriginal and Western thought.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:08 PM on May 20, 2006

I haven't picked up the Marx work but I will. Of Grammatology I've picked up a few times and put it down, not disappointed, just aware I'm not prepared. I've been getting nudged toward Foucault over and over recently so I think its about time to dive in and that title you mentioned sounds like a good place to start.

I've been pretending the complications (diaspora, etc.) you mentioned could be ignored or left for someone else to talk about, partly because its complicated and partly because I wanted to keep my studies attached to the field of physical anthropology. Archaeologists struggle to piece together ideologies of ancient cultures and I have a mind to help them take on that challenge someday. Of course, they are becoming more and more historical themselves.
posted by Aghast. at 6:26 PM on May 20, 2006

Ah.. archeology: from a couple of potshards and some crumbling papyrus bill of sale, you're going to reproduce the great works of literature of a lost culture, eh? :-)

So far as I can tell, neither physical anthropologists nor archeologists feel very comfortable with the kind of texts we've been pointing you towards. Some primatologists will dabble in rhetorical analysis, but all of this is going to pull you towards the wacky cultural wing of anthropology.

Sonny Jim: Michael Jackson looks fascinating. Thanks for the reference!
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:42 PM on May 20, 2006

I learned so much from More than Cool Reason. I read it for a class but I think about the ideas in the book at least once a week since.
posted by frecklefaerie at 12:09 PM on May 22, 2006