Culture, Coherence, Conflict

Abstract

This book has discussed many of the complex relations and interactions between metaphor and culture. Rather than summarize all of these here, in this final chapter I proceed as follows: First, I briefly call attention to some of the relationships that I feel I have not emphasized enough but are clearly crucial in examining the role of metaphor in culture. Furthermore, I try to describe the relationship between metaphors, on the one hand, and embodiment, context, and cognitive preference, on the other. I suggest that the relationship is ideally that of coherence, but it may be just as important to take note of the possible conflicts between metaphor and the three systems in characterizing cultures. Finally in this chapter, I offer some thoughts concerning the issue of universality and variation in metaphor, as these emerge from the analysis of the data I have examined. METAPHOR AND CULTURE Let me begin with identifying some of the ways in which the study of metaphor and that of culture are intimately connected. I place them at the fore here because not all of them have received sufficient attention in the preceding chapters and yet they are important for a theory of (the relationship between) metaphor and culture. First, if we think of culture as, in the main, a set of shared understandings of the world, the question of the role of figurative understanding in culture immediately arises. Because our understanding of the world includes both concrete and abstract objects and events, naturally figurative thought should play some role in the case of abstract objects and events.