Cultural Metaphors Research Articles

Expansion as a Culture-Creating Principle of Post-Modernity: Semantic Contexts and Aesthetic Practices

Aim. The purpose of the study is to analyse the structural aspects of expansion, which find expression in cultural metaphors and philosophical concepts, the transformation of the content of which is evidence of the emergence of new aesthetic practices. Methods. The research methodology involves the use of a systemic approach and such methods as analytical, comparative, axiological, and hermeneutic to understand the patterns of formation of paradigms of visual culture and contexts of expansion in postmodern culture. Results. The metaphor of glass during the 20th century loses its meaning as a source of the effects of refraction of reality in perception, the excessive complexity of which forms a tendency for simplifying and zeroing. The expansion becomes an important principle of cultural dynamics, extends to space and time, communication and identity in the world of the rapid circulation of information and its instant obsolescence. The patterns of expansion are observed in the processes of aestheticisation and aesthetic experience as the breaking out of form, perspective, perception and inclusion of the Self in the profound contexts of collective practices. Conclusions. Through mastering new sensual modalities in the photo, film reality, and the latest Internet technologies, there is an expansion of perception as an expansion of media. Therefore, at the level of identity the practices of focus, concentration, and slow contemplation gain importance. In the cultural aspect, the expansion enables a return to tradition in a new capacity.

Rubbish sick and the dancing devil

AbstractHow are the historically fraught contexts of alterity that define postcolonial settings generated and negotiated in the context of medical uncertainty? What role does narrative play in the lived experience of such uncertainty and alterity? Focusing on a single “diagnostic odyssey” of childhood illness, this article examines the relationship between chronic uncertainty, alterity, and narrative sensemaking in the highly dynamic and pluralistic healthcare setting of Vanuatu. It demonstrates how close examination of cultural metaphors relating to sickness can reveal deep insights into the lived experience of illness, health seeking, and caregiving. In doing so, it highlights the role of narrative in rendering otherwise unfathomable circumstances sensible on cultural and existential terms, including by engendering a sense of intersubjective stability in the face of trauma.

Towards the Post-Modern Art Week: Anthropophagic Reflexes in the Brazilian Larp Scenes

The Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922, a milestone in the Brazilian artistic avant-garde, completed its centenary last year. The intention of this text is to reflect on larp using the concept of anthropophagy: a cultural metaphor created by Oswald de Andrade, one of the members of the Art Week. Anthropophagy is characterized by the de-hierarchization of the hegemonic places of culture and by the critical digestion of the Other. Andrade’s reflections crossed time: they influenced literature, theater, painting, cinema and music, to name a few. Applied to larps, the concept of anthropophagy is discussed from the point of view of the communicology of Vilém Flusser, who was also influenced by Andrade’s thought. Finally, this essay seeks to reveal larp’s resonance with the Theatre of the Oppressed, proposed by Augusto Boal – also one of those influenced by anthropophagic thinking. With this resonance, I seek to highlight the transformative potential of anthropophagy, here considered inherent to larps, interpreting one Brazilian larp as a case study. Although this essay does not commit the naivety of treating larp as a panacea, its ultimate intention is to highlight the dialogical and social character of larps, as well as their potential to challenge power structures.

The Effects of Cultural and Creative Product Attributes on Consumers' Purchase Intention: Based on Customer Perception Value Theory

It is still unclear how cultural and artistic product characteristics affect customers purchase intention. Based on the comparative study of cultural and creative products in two typical museumsthe Palace Museum and the British Museumthis paper explores the influence mechanism of product characteristics on purchase intention according to the theory of customer perceived value and finds that tool properties could promote functional value, the cultural metaphor could facilitate spiritual value, social orientation could enhance social value, and the richness of media has the function of promotion and spreading. The contribution of this study is to enlighten the marketing strategies of cultural and creative products.

What the fog hid(es)

Through the analysis of several cultural metaphors, this article reflects on the fractures, both social and personal, brought about by politics and violence in the Basque Country. The author suggests that – regardless of the optimistic public transcript concerning the new ‘democratic scenario’ opening after the end of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in 2018 – a thick ideological fog has still not burned off. In a landscape that has been profoundly impacted by violence, only the shadows and silhouettes goaded by the fog have been transformed.

The Architectonics of Hope: Fragments of Life and Text in Walter Benjamin and Hart Crane

Abstract This essay develops a comparative account of Walter Benjamin’s and Hart Crane’s architectonic metaphors for text, culture, and history. I argue that theorist and poet alike employ parallel conceptual frameworks that analogize the “building” of the text to the condensation and constellation of disjunctive historical materials, thereby resisting progressivist conceptions of literary and cultural tradition. I further highlight the ways in which, for both figures, experiences of built images are ever-mediated, in contrast to certain strains of extant scholarship that interpret Crane’s poetry and Benjamin’s philosophy as dependent on the fiction of immediate affective experience, as if sensory perception were not always-already conditioned by the mediating abstractions of cognition and memory. Motivated by the personal and political struggles both men faced as outcasts, their visions of the fragmented cityscape as imbued with a complex, compositional logic of form and history ground, at once, the possibility of textual communicability and the preservation and transmission of memory—personal, collective, historical, and cultural. It is by virtue of this shared formal-historical logic—and the faith in a better future persisting therein—that I develop and defend Benjamin’s and Crane’s “architectonics of hope.”

The Compositional Metaphors of Calligraphic Art in Contemporary Chinese Art as the Visual Element

As an essential and unique aesthetic element in Chinese art history, script art also has an influence on contemporary practices, which could not be overlooked. Practices making efforts to subvert or deconstruct the tradition of the calligraphy mechanism, or even the whole language system, have been given great attention in the international art field. However, there is a lack of analysis of the metaphorical structure behind the script. This paper aims to investigate the usage of Chinese characters in contemporary pieces of visual art from two artists and the cultural metaphors behind these literal components.This paper divides the use of Chinese characters as visual elements in contemporary Chinese art into two kinds - the practice of picturizing words and the deconstruction of textual mechanisms - and explores the metaphorical nature behind these two artistic means, using artists Xu Bing and Gu Wenda as representatives. The practice of picturing characters conveys the artists retracing of cultural origins and worship of nature in his Landscript and Living Words projects; the structuring of the mechanisms of characters, including Gu Wendas series of misspellings and Xu Bings The Book of Heaven, implies a rebellion or critique of the system of discourse and power.

“I told you all the time”: Revisiting the representation of Temple Drake’s traumatic abuse in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

This article examines William Faulkner's representation of traumatic abuse through his (anti)heroine Temple Drake (Sanctuary, 1931). First, I bring to the fore the material dimension of the character's traumatic rape, as opposed to its classical consideration as a multi-valent cultural metaphor (Patterson, 2002). Aided by insights from the field of trauma studies (Caruth 1995; Davis and Meretoja, 2020; Herman, 2015), I examine the clinical import the sexual assault had on the character's psyche through a close reading of her dissociation-induced traumatic memories. Second, I turn to the way in which the text deals with the representation of an event fraught with referential impasses. Specifically, in dealing with the elision of Temple's violation, disclosed not at the moment of its occurrence, but in the last scenes of the novel, I establish a parallelism between the aesthetic encoding of the traumatic event and its psychological processing. I argue that the purported narrative effacement of the abuse parallels the way in which the protagonist mentally absents herself from the scene of the attack, thus failing to adaptively integrate said attack into consciousness. Further, I posit that the author counters the narratorial silencing of the rape via metonymic indexes enmeshed in the textual fabric referencing the assault. Thus, the novel retains the same fragmentary reminiscing of the abuse as the character exhibits. Finally, I conclude that, in eliding the violation scene, Faulkner carries out a prima facie process of erasure of a traumatic event, only to reckon with its representational demands. 

"Sometimers, Alzheimer's? I love that! That's definitely me": Readers' Responses to Fictional Dementia Narratives.

This article presents findings from an interdisciplinary project which invited readers to experience the impact of dementia via fictional characters' narratives. Combining methods from critical gerontology and literary linguistics-a field that examines the language of literature-we undertook an empirical reader response study of dementia fiction. We constructed a large corpus of dementia fiction; selecting 12 extracts, each containing first-hand, focalized accounts of fictional characters' experiences of living with dementia. Readers (31) were purposively sampled for 4 separate reading groups-student social workers (9); general public (9); family carers (6); and people with dementia (7). Over 6 weeks they engaged in separate, facilitated, on-line group discussions of extracts. Discussions were independently coded using ATLAS.ti. Although readers from all 4 groups reported that fictional characters drew them into the internal life of someone with dementia, some carers questioned whether fictional characters' experiences were plausible. Readers with dementia recognized themselves in the extracts; viewing fictional characters as eloquent envoys of their lived experiences of diagnosis, social isolation, loss of language, and use of humor. Fictional characters offer an entry point for understanding contrasts in caregiver and care-receiver experiences of dementia. Fictional characters are potentially useful for moving dementia narratives beyond monstrous cultural metaphors and onto a disability-based rights agenda.

Pluralistic Unity

Abstract This essay examines the term duoyuan yiti, ‘pluralistic unity’, in cultural and artistic contexts in China and its use in everyday speech in the form of cultural metaphors. It briefly introduces the history of this term and provides examples of its use in political speech, academic writing and grassroots communication. The article also analyses discourses, phrases and ideas that have been constructed around duoyuan yiti, noting their profound impact on social life in China, particularly in its ‘minority’ regions. The article seeks to fill in the gap between, on the one hand, research into the term in Chinese in line with China’s official views and, on the other hand, policy-focused critical approaches in English-language academic writing. Through examining a cluster of derivative terms and slogans, I illustrate how, in public discourse, ‘diversity’ is performed and articulated as subsidiary to ‘unity’ in contemporary China.

Feature fusion via multi-target learning for ancient artwork captioning

Image captioning has made consistent progress due to the development of computer vision and natural language processing techniques. Current research on image captioning commonly tends to the visual caption of natural images. However, these attempts are not applicable to ancient artwork captioning with different appearance attributes and complex cultural metaphors. In this work, we propose a Multi-target Learning Framework, called MLF, for generating captions for ancient artworks with ceramics as the case study. Our MLF contains three novel data-driven modules, including RTE, MTE, and MFD. To be specific, for a given image, the Regular Target Encoder (RTE) is first used to encode its regular targets related to color, textual, profile, and craftsmanship features. Second, a Metaphorical Target Encoder (MTE) is applied to encode its metaphorical targets related to cultural semantic features. Finally, a Multimodal Fused Decoder (MFD) is utilized to fuse the multimodal feature vectors from RTE and MTE separately, then decode them and generate detailed captions containing both regular and metaphorical information with the guidance by a word distribution map. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on our constructed dataset demonstrate the advantages of our work.

Conceptualizations of gratitude: A comparative analysis of English and Persian dissertation acknowledgements written by Persian authors

ABSTRACT The present study applies a cultural conceptualizations framework within the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics to the analysis of gratitude in dissertation acknowledgements (DAs), as a culturally-embedded genre written in Persian and English by native speakers of Persian. Benefitting from a corpus analysis approach to Cultural Linguistics, 185 English and 196 Persian DAs from language-related fields were selected randomly from DAs written in national universities in Iran as the corpus for the study. Grounded theory-driven analysis revealed a number of similar and different representations of Persian cultural schema and cultural metaphors between the sampled Persian and English DAs. Additionally, the unclosed cultural conceptualizations revealed a selective transfer of Persian cultural conceptualizations to the DAs written in English. The paper concludes with reference to the emergence of Persian English in the DAs. By complementing genre analysis with a Cultural Linguistics perspective, the study contributes to the literature on comparative genre analysis of DAs, moving it beyond move-step analysis to a more systematic in-depth cultural analysis. In addition, the findings advance the literature on Cultural Linguistics by revealing a relationship between cultural schema and cultural metaphor.

The Efficacy of a Logotherapy Educational Program Based on Rumi’s Thoughts on the Mental Well-being of Chronic Mental Patients’ Families

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a logotherapy educational program based on Rumi’s thoughts on the mental well-being of chronic mental patients’ families. Methods: This study employed a semi-experimental controlled pretest-posttest design. The statistical population comprised families of all chronic mental patients (aged 18 to 60) who lived in Kermanshah’s rehabilitation and care facilities in 2020. One facility was randomly selected as the research sample, and 32 eligible individuals were randomized to experimental (n = 16) and control (n = 16) groups. Upon assignment, both groups completed the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being scale (2007) as the pretest. Subsequently, the experimental group participated in ten 90-minute sessions of logotherapy based on Rumi’s thoughts. At the conclusion of the intervention, the posttest was administered to both groups. The data were analyzed using an analysis of covariance. Results: The findings revealed a statistically significant difference between the two groups, indicating that the logotherapy educational program based on Rumi’s concepts increased the experimental group’s mental well-being compared to the control group (P < 0.001). In other words, families who participated in the Rumi-inspired logotherapy program experienced improved mental well-being. Conclusions: Families of chronic mental patients in our culture have a greater acceptance and comprehension of them. Furthermore, these cultural metaphors and allegories have increased the ability of chronic mental patients’ families to make sense of their sufferings, demonstrating its effectiveness as an intervention.

Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model

Abstract The metaphor of culture as a space or environment of meaning is widely employed. Going beyond metaphor, we present a model of culture as a 3-dimensional Euclidean space, using data from Brazil on cultural models of life goals. The dimensions of this space are defined by degree of sharing of culture (cultural competence); alternate configurations of that shared meaning (residual agreement); and social practice (cultural consonance). A cultural distance metric calculated within those dimensions identifies an individuals’ proximity to prototypical goals; greater distance from these goals is associated with higher psychological distress. Cultural distance is in turn influenced by one’s sense of personal agency. Finally, in a set of open-ended interviews, the more individuals employ spatial metaphors in talking about culturally defined life goals, the higher their sense of personal agency and cultural consonance. This model moves the discussion of culture as a space of meaning from metaphor to measurement.

Characteristics of the image and decor of stone lions in the ancient Chinese subject-spatial environment

The stone lion played an important role in ancient Chinese architectural decoration and was often used in traditional Chinese architecture in different Chinese dynasties. China is not the natural habitat of the lion, but this animal has long been revered by the Chinese. The stone lion is a metaphor of the Chinese culture. The stone lions are one of the most important artistic expressions in various arts. As the stone lion culture emerged, developed and matured, its artistic image has become a unique spiritual and cultural symbol in China. This article consists of three parts: the historical status and symbolic significance of stone lions; the characteristics and evolution of the stone lion image in different dynasties of China; and the decorative characteristics of stone lions in different subject-spatial environments. The article is devoted to research and interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the Chinese stone lion, its decorative characteristics in different subject-spatial environments; analysis of its characteristics and evolution of its image in different historical epochs. Using various examples the article shows how culture and ideology have influenced the evolution of the characteristics of the image of the Chinese stone lion.

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

An Analysis of Cultural Metaphors in Translation from a Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

Metaphor has been studied for centuries, but traditionally it has been confined to the field of rhetoric, and seen as a rhetorical method. However, with the development of modern society and the advancement of cognitive linguistics, some cognitive linguistics researchers believe that metaphor is no longer just a rhetorical and linguistic phenomenon, but also a mode of thinking. The conceptual system of metaphor contains rich and sufficient cultural information, which makes the cognitive activity of metaphor very complex and the translation of cultural metaphors extremely difficult. Therefore, although many Chinese scholars are keen on the study of metaphor and the translation theories of Western metaphor, few of them have applied them in practice, which has led to the lack of guiding translation principles for metaphor.

Samuel Hearne, The Denesuline, and The Beaver

Recent scholarship on Samuel Hearne's A Journey to the Northern Ocean (1795) has highlighted how Hearne's journey of exploration functioned to demonstrate the Hudson's Bay Company's strategic geopolitical worth, obscure the violence of its colonialist enterprise, and generate images of an empty North conducive to colonial settlement. Drawing on such scholarship, this essay attempts to nuance statements regarding Hearne's complicity in “emptying” the North by showing how the Journey establishes images of the Canadian North as neither completely barren nor fertile enough for settlement. Applying a natural-cultural contact zone perspective on Hearne's old text, I argue that the anthropocentric bias of the Journey's reception has impeded the realization that Hearne's zoological descriptions and sometimes sophisticated ecological contemplations owe much to the Denesuline who guide his travels. In part through his “beaver science”, Hearne deliberately opposes prospects of further colonization based on ideas of systemic expansion of the fur trade detached from the realities of local environmental conditions. His concern regarding the anthropomorphism and uncritical use of cultural metaphors in the emerging science of zoology nevertheless causes Hearne's “beaver science” to consolidate the distinctly anthropocentric and objectifying qualities of natural science that ultimately facilitate the exploitative activities of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Metaphors of Spanish Culture in Flamenco, Gender Roles and Gender Issues: Modern Metaphors to Understand Some Traditional Flamenco Movements and Steps

The art of Flamenco dance teaches Spanish culture through the dance steps and the metaphors they communicate. Some metaphors from the past are hard to understand, especially when referring to women’s role and social status, as women of the 21st century in Spain have democratic rights women from past centuries did not have. Expressing some of those metaphors through the movements of flamenco is very hard, unless you understand the patriarchal society of then. I will analyze some metaphors flamenco teachers use to explain concepts and gender roles from the past that are hard to understand by younger generations who live in a democratic Spain. By studying the meaning of what flamencas perform on stage, and the role of musicians on stage, we find gender issues and tensions between the female and male artist. Writers like Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, or Lorca perceived flamenco differently in the past, and their views helped recognize flamenco as a refined art. El arte del baile flamenco enseña la cultura española a través de los pasos de baile y las metáforas que comunican. Algunas metáforas del pasado son difíciles de entender, especialmente cuando se refieren al rol y estatus social de la mujer, ya que las mujeres del siglo XXI en España tienen derechos democráticos que las mujeres de siglos pasados no tuvieron. Expresar algunas de esas metáforas a través de los movimientos del flamenco es muy difícil, a no ser que entiendas la sociedad patriarcal de entonces. Analizaré algunas metáforas que usan los maestros flamencos para explicar conceptos y roles de género del pasado que son difíciles de entender para las generaciones más jóvenes que viven en una España democrática. Al estudiar el significado de lo que las flamencas interpretan en el escenario y el papel de los músicos en el escenario, encontramos problemas de género y tensiones entre el artista femenino y masculino. Escritores como Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos o Lorca percibieron el flamenco de otra manera en el pasado, y sus puntos de vista ayudaron a reconocer el flamenco como un arte refinado.

Economic Ideas of the Quaid-i-Azam

The present paper consists of four parts. First, it is argued why the Quaid-i- Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), concentrated for the most part on political issues and political freedom, why he went in for Islam as the cultural metaphor in arguing the case for Pakistan, and why he opted for couching his marathon (1937-47) discourse in Islamic terms. Second, the legacy in terms of the primacy of economic factors in propelling a colonised people towards political emancipation Jinnah had received from the historic realm and his own background— in particular, the economic bias in his family background, in Bombay’s mercantile culture which was almost at the centre of the most formative influences in his early life, and in the pronouncements of, and proposals mooted by, Muslim leaders from Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) down to Iqbal (1877-1938) on the one hand, and by the Mohammedan Educational Conference (f.1836) to the All India Muslim League (1906-47), on the other. These proposals were essentially aimed at exhorting the intelligentsia to work for the social, economic and political uplift of the masses. Third, the stress on economic emancipation and the rise of Muslim economic nationalism in the 1940s, in the wake of the Lahore Resolution (1940), has been discussed and delineated briefly.