![]() ![]() In recent years a great deal of evidence has been amassed to suggest that the human body is indeed a very important source for language or linguistic expressions. ‘Cultural models, then, and cultural conceptualizations enable us to share understanding within a culture, founded in common frameworks and categories. This has been elaborated on by Toril Swan ‘most human concepts are defined and understood only within conceptual frameworks that depend on the nature of human experience in given cultures’. However, there are differences that are found in different cultural contexts. What we find is that from a transcultural perspective, the idea of emotions, especially anger as a liquid under pressure within a vessel, is common in both western and eastern cultures. In my last post I looked at the specific example of the heart as a container-metaphor. This is a thematic form of apophenia, were we see patterns in random data. This is called pareidolia – were we see faces in patterns. This can be reversed with this anthropocentric vision also affecting the way that we interpret what we see in the world. So much of our use of this metaphor is reflexive and unconscious that it is invisible in many ways that we look at the world. Symptoms and the sense of reality are built out of the reified metaphors of the body.įrom an open ear to an open mind from a penetrating penis to a penetrating argument from a receptive vagina to a receptive community from a unified body and a unifiedĬulture to the construction of monotheism from excretion to repudiation from urination to getting pissed off from the naval to the center of the world from dismemberment to postmodernity, over and over again the metaphors of the body are projected onto and into the world In a brilliant summation Daniel Benveniste states: “The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body.” It’s how we make sense of the world from childhood. This makes sense given how psychologically aware of a sense of self and our bodies. This is a rich field of human enquiry and there are many studies that look at how we understand the world through our bodies. We can easily take a quick tour around our body to see how it influences how we conceptualise our reality though figures of speech: I’ve discussed this collective imagery as metaphors for social groups, cities and nations more extensively in an earlier post Hobbes Leviathan is a famous example of this collective being envisioned as a whole persona. On the other hand, when we talk about a collective of people, we tend to refer to them as a body or persona. ![]() This term is where one thing is used to refer to a related thing, e.g. It might be a generalisation but when we use the human body as a metaphor for an individual, these tend to be synecdochal in function. Probably, since we first became self-aware, we have been fascinated with our bodies: psychologically and culturally. One of the primary metaphoric resources is the human body. ![]() Metaphors are the cognitive tools through which we understand ourselves and the world ( Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi).
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