Metaphor For Life Research Articles

Review of Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya by Jon Holtzman

This book unexpectedly frustrated me and at the same time delighted me which is not unlike what the author, Jon Holtzman, wants to convey about Samburu food, that is, its ambivalence and contradictions. The book is a compendium of several years of research in Samburu, and some of the materials have been taken from journal articles, reassembled into a book. Those interested in understanding more about pastoral diet intake and nutritional status will be disappointed however. This book is not about that, though there is a short mention to it in Chapters 2 and 9 (without references). Rather, this book is about the Samburu way of viewing their world as seen through food. We see broad cultural patterns and changes in those patterns through the mundane daily experience of food and eating. For those people who are food insecure, food is perhaps an excellent metaphor for life as Samburu becomes socialized into their culture of hunger. The book is thus about the cultural significance surrounding food and how people of various ages and gender socially manipulate its production (livestock and the superiority of a diet of milk, meat, and blood), its processing (raw versus cooked), its consumption (who consumes what types of food), and its changes. Food possesses values, practices, and social relations and reveals cultural changes, and Holtzman nicely navigates this realm of understanding.

Poesia auto-móvel

Este texto comenta poemas que tratam do tema do automóvel de várias maneiras, tendo em vista uma possível alteração do olhar do poeta na cidade contemporânea. Os meios de transporte podem ser metáforas da vida na metrópole atual, simbolizando aspectos das experiências fugazes que o poeta configura como testemunho

The maritime imagination and the paradoxical mind in Old English poetry

AbstractThe specifically maritime imagination of Anglo-Saxon poets resolves the potentially incongruous metaphorical models of the mind in this culture as both an enclosure and a wandering entity. The dual containing and travelling aspects of the ship provide a suitable model for the embodied yet metaphysical mind, and act in conjunction with the widespread metaphor of life as a sea voyage to produce a coherent means of imagining how the mind operates in relation to the body. The Wanderer and The Seafarer illustrate how acutely this conventionalized way of representing physical and mental experience relies on the sea voyage as both the setting for and metaphorical representation of a human consciousness that is both enclosed in the body and also able to transcend the physical.

Metaphors in Happy and Unhappy Life Stories of Russian Adults

The present study analyzes metaphors of life, self, emotional states, and relationships in forty life stories that differ in their communicative situations and narrative goals. Twenty interviews were conducted with people who were seeking psychological help. Another twenty interviews were conducted with Russian celebrities for publication in popular psychology magazines. Metaphors in happy stories were more numerous and diverse than in unhappy stories. Some conceptual metaphors (e.g., “LIFE IS A CONTAINER,” “LIFE IS A JOURNEY,” and “EMOTION IS A PHYSICAL IMPACT”) were found in both happy and unhappy narratives. More specific metaphors demonstrated significant differences between the two types of narratives. The metaphors of life as a “purposeful journey,” self as “alive and flexible object,” and emotional states as “internal and controlled forces” were used more often in happy narratives. This may reflect higher levels of activity, responsibility, and awareness of the authors of happy narratives. Specific for unhappy stories were metaphors “LIFE IS DEATH” and “SELF IS A DEAD OBJECT,” which may indicate a low level of personal well-being and serve as specific markers of personal unhappiness. The results of our study suggest that metaphors may help to construct the subjective reality of happy and unhappy life. By telling their life stories people are able to redefine their past experiences and future perspectives. Specific metaphors play an important part in defining subjective happiness or unhappiness.

Transforming practice: reflections on the use of art to develop professional knowledge and reflective practice

What would healthcare look like if we used artistic activities and reflective practice to better understand our clients, and to develop our own professional knowledge and clinical practice? This paper explores one healthcare practitioner’s engagement in the reflective practice process, as catalyzed by the use of an artistic activity – river drawings as a metaphor for life – in professional practice. Insights gained about professional knowledge development and about transforming practice are anchored in the lived practice experience of one occupational therapist working in mental health practice. Connections between reflective practice and implications for clinical practice are made, with a focus on the reflective mutuality and reciprocity of arts‐use in healthcare practice.

A Metaphor Made in Public

The preliminary results of human genome research have become widely known as “drafts of the human genome.” Drawing on the interaction theory of metaphor, this article shows that take-up of the notion of a draft and its elaboration as a scientific metaphor was contingent on interactions with broader audiences.The notion of a draft was thus not merely a metonym of the popular but often-criticized Book of Life metaphor for the human genome.

Hermeneutics by the Living

The chapters of this volume can be seen as being overarched by a single topic: that of the dance, play and self-presentation of the living. One pillar of the arch is rooted in the chapter by A. Koubova, who speaks about living appearances not pointing towards anything yet also revealing meaning. Its second pillar presents the image of singing humpback whales, graciously flipping their huge “wings” while levitating above the oceanic abyss (D. Martinelli). The arch is punctuated by such topics as psychophysical dualism, body, linguistic metaphors of life, mimicry and interpretation. Why complicate the fermentation occurring at the borderland of life sciences and humanities by introducing hermeneutics? After all, semiotics has already colonized the field, and biosemioticians of different “denominations” flourish at their annual meetings. Is not, after all, hermeneutics but an older and almost abandoned branch Biosemiotics (2011) 4:119–125 DOI 10.1007/s12304-010-9096-7

Management Insights

Management Insights

Deconstructing Sport: When Philosophy and Education Meet in Derrida's Thought

Deconstructing Sport: When Philosophy and Education Meet in Derrida's ThoughtJacques Derrida (1930-2004), master of the deconstructionist method and recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of our time, was in his youth, before beginning his career as a philosopher, a footballer who played this game with the Italian prisoners in Algiers, his birthplace, during World War II. In a 1991 interview, when he was 60, Derrida narrated in detail his childhood dream of becoming a professional football player, confiding that all of his philosophy and thought had been inspired by sport and the game of football. Starting from this biographical note, the aim of my study is to demonstrate, first of all, how Derrida's whole philosophy and technique of deconstruction really has its roots in the concept of sport. The French-Algerian philosopher understood sport as a cultural structure based on the concepts of play, game, body, rules, and all of the oppositional pairs deriving from différance and from the tensions it generates. Secondly, the study tries to show how sport is for Derrida a metaphor of life and its meaning, suspended between being and nothingness; a place and a field in which human beings act, learn and educate themselves, deconstructing, as in a text, the values and prejudices of their lives and understanding, through sport itself, their roles and responsibility toward themselves and the community in which they live.

Memory, Tradition, and the Re-membering of Suffering

This article explores the interrelationship between memory and tradition in the work of religious education with particular attention to three questions: how memory serves the construction of the personal narrative called self and orients the self to the future; how body memory as articulated in habit and ritual becomes the foundation for social memory; and how the memory of suffering offers a generative metaphor for postmodern life. It concludes that the memory of suffering as practiced in religious education and worship is required for “more true” selves and communities and for transformative praxis.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated Equilibrium Larry Fondation (bio) La Medusa. Vanessa Place. FC2. http://fc2.org. 488 pages; paper, $22.00. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory of evolutionary change. Long periods of stasis are broken by bursts of rapid transformation, leading to the development of new species. This is also an apt metaphor for life as it is lived in Los Angeles—right here, right now. Life here is discontinuous; change comes in sudden explosions—sometimes predictably, often out of nowhere. Both human acts and acts of nature erupt seemingly ex nihilo and jolt us from our rest. The homeless sleep in downtown doorways; the police cruise in and roust them. Suddenly, Skid Row is rife with unwanted activity. The housing bust has been extreme here. The High Desert belongs again to the cacti and the jackrabbits, the builders' bulldozers silent and rusting. The fragile calm of Los Angeles cracked open in flaring violence when riots roiled the city in 1965 and 1992. Unlike hurricanes and snow storms, earthquakes cannot be foreseen. No scientist can yet tell us when the earth will shake and shudder. Los Angeles is a city of disruption. That is why gang life so epitomizes the city in many ways: the ennui of hanging out on the corner is suddenly interrupted by the sound of gunfire. The stillness is gone; the action begins. Vanessa Place aims to take on the cacophony that is present-day Los Angeles. La Medusa is a sprawling and many-layered book that pokes its nose into crevices and cubbyholes all over the city—from Venice to Hollywood, from Beverly Hills to South Central Los Angeles. The characters too come from multiple casting couches: a nine-year-old sax player, her closet-voodoo grandmother, a soon-dead doctor, big rig truckers, a vato ice cream vendor, and the human brain itself. Their stories pop up, trail off, and then pick up again, mirroring the snapshots and vignettes that truly define our lives. Myles and Stella drive a big truck painted pink. On the side, Stella has another woman, her lover Ricki. The passions of the two women light up their trucking journeys along the freeways that dissect and divide Southern California. Place plays the snake-head/freeway metaphor lightly and well. Feena is a precocious woodwind player. Her grandmother (Grandmere) has a larger-than-life influence over Feena and her mother, Athalie. Grandmere wears real diamonds drilled into her long fingernails. Jorge sells his wares amidst the gang-infested streets of the infamous Oakwood area of Venice Beach. There are many others, whose narratives run in sections, short and long, throughout the book. The brain has its own chorus, with speaking parts reserved for the regions of its anatomy—Cerebellum, Medulla, Thalamus, etc. La Medusa is described as a "conceptual" (or "post-conceptual") novel. I struggle with the term. The label evokes lost cachet in the visual arts, and, to me, it does not fit fiction very well. Barton Zwiebach's A First Course in String Theory (2004) is a conceptual book. It is a physics text. I have not taken calculus in twenty years. The book is difficult, cerebral. As I try to read it—in its language of mathematics equations—only my brain is engaged. In my view, fiction—like all other art forms—must provide primarily an emotional experience. At its best, art is a gut punch. When I confront great art, I yearn to be short of breath. Not as stricken with the flu, but as breathless as after sex. Los Angeles poses a mind-body problem of its own: the locus of sex and chiseled bodies also has more book buyers than any other city in the nation. LA is classically the body, but truly the mind. To her credit, Place tries to navigate both—the cerebral and the emotional. But the book vacillates on the issue. It becomes both a strength and a weakness of the novel. Place describes in an email exchange the origins of her novel: "The book began as a procedural piece: to write down everything that occurred to me for 41 consecutive days, in 15 minute installments. As I was reading in cognitive science at...

The Supernatural Elements as Metaphors of Life in W. B. Yeats's Purgatory and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore*

Yeats and Murakami are writers who believe in spirits. They both treat them as if they are real. Yeats's Purgotory is a story of Father and Son, Father killing his own son to disrupt the cycle of Life that is tainted, whereas Kafka on the Shore is a story of Mother and Son, Mother causing all the tragedies in Kafka's father, sister, and himself. Kafka's mother is a person of Memory that stays constant, which is the origin of all the tragedies, and refuses to flow with time; and Son intervenes in her Fate, changing her and himself. The leitmotif of the novel is the Oedipus complex. In the meantime, Purgatory is a practice of Yeats's religious system of Life and humanity. In the play, the two kinds of people are illustrated by Father and Son; Father can see the invisible, ghosts, but Son cannot. The play is based on the conception of souls being born again and again in endless cycles. To disrupt it Father kills his own Son, as he had killed his own Father. It is beyond the moral of the world, killing his own son, following his own belief. Both works could be read as a metaphor of life. One relies on psychology, and the other relies on mythology. Murakami may have read Yeats, and Yeats might be interested in Murakami if he lived and read him. Murakami is in a position to deal with this kind of subtle subject in a subtle way, because he is a writer of the East well versed in the West. In the same way, Yeats was in a unique position, who was familiar with things eastern. Hence, their works manifest strong inclinations toward mysterious milieu, most prominently what is supernatural.

Towards a people-centered theory of translation

Translation has become a metaphor for contemporary life, and thus translation theories demand a paradigm shift from binary opposition between ‘self and other’, or between ‘original and target’, towards negotiation and dialogic interaction. This article argues that translation as dialogue in the ‘in-between space’ – or what Mary Louise Pratt termed a ‘contact zone’ – involves a new model of language use that can incorporate both cultures and languages without prioritizing any. Anna Wierzbicka's concept of linguistic universals and Eva Hoffman's experiences of integrating bilingual and bicultural aspects are elicited to illustrate the tentative translation strategies for ‘translation as a dialogue’. The article proposes the importance of understanding and empathy, or, at least, a will to believe in translatability. It also maintains, drawing on Edward Sapir's insight that language is the index to culture, that translation should be not only about content but also about relation between ‘self and other’, and that translators should realize the importance of learning vocabularies as a sensitive index to a culture. These requirements ask translators to be more attentive to what people are and what people do, thus proposing a more people-oriented translation theory.

Ancestors rising: Aboriginal art as historical testimo

Testimony - the attesting to the truth of a matter - is often thought of in legal terms as a form of evidence based on fact or perceived opinions, though there is as well the personal testimony, the bearing of one's truth or personal experience for all to witness. For Aboriginal people, acts of testimony in the legal and personal sense have been a critical platform in the pursuit of reclamation of land, history, identity and personal experience. In the past two decades, many Aboriginal people have taken the legal stand for land claims to protect their traditional territories from further encroachment from governments and commercial enterprises by providing physical evidence of their historical territorial use. They have also had to 'prove' their painful, personal accounts of abuse in residential schools in order to bring forth justice and closure. The overlapping generation will soon testify to their personal accounts of the 'Sixties Scoop' - the apprehension of thousands of Aboriginal children who were placed in foster care by Canadian Social Services, many of whom experienced abuse and exploitation as child labourers, mirroring the residential school experience. The Sixties Scoop term is in fact a misnomer, given that apprehensions began in 1951 and remain today in a staggering amount of apprehensions, with Aboriginals in foster care averaging 40 per cent of all children in foster care in Canada, even though they make up only 3-4 per cent of the Canadian population. Given that Aboriginal peoples did not have the proof of written historical documents, oral accounts are being considered as admissible evidence in the courts. Aboriginal peoples do, however, have physical records of their history that have been overlooked: their historical art. Their artwork visually recorded major historical events, territorial maps, cultural ideology and customs, and personal and mythological stories - all of which were tied to a specific territory and period. This article explores how Aboriginal art in the past and present has served as a valuable testimonial of history and cultural identity. Aboriginal art as historical records For thousands of years, Aboriginal peoples have told their stories orally and visually to document their history and to teach the values, beliefs and traditions of their culture. Oral accounts, legends, songs, dances, ceremonies and art communicated experience and metaphors of life to the physical and the metaphysical realm. From these accounts, we have learnt about history and cultural customs and learnt to make meaning of the lessons of life. Aboriginal art - in representational forms or codified visual imagery - preserved this cultural and historical information for generations to come. The physicality of art, in and of itself, can be dated and placed within a specific area, though the content of the work points to specific stories. Pictographs and petroglyphs throughout Canada are good examples of visual records that document hunting practices, wars and colonial contact and provide large territorial maps on significant water passages. Works in stone, such as carved sculptures from the west coast and plateau regions, or tipi rings and medicine wheels from the plains, provided permanent markers for identifying communities that occupied sites thousands of years ago. Early palaeo-Arctic ivory engravings integrated images of everyday activities with the supernatural. Robe paintings and ledger drawings from the plains nations visually documented ceremonial custom and protocols, narrated wars and major political, historical or personal events. A recently repatriated sketch done by Chief Pasqua of the Pasqua First Nation, Saskatchewan, was created some time between 1874 and 1882 and is a fine example of visual art documenting history (Figure 1). The illustration became the possession of William Henry Barneby in 1882 and remained with his family in London, England, for 124 years. The graphite sketch shows the negotiations and trade agreements leading up to Treaty Four. …

The Cancer on Your Coffee Table

Women's magazines are a significant resource for information about women's health, but there are important variations in how they address health issues. A discourse analysis of 148 health articles and coverlines that appeared in nine top-circulating US women's magazines reveals how the magazines configure health problems of all types and how these messages engage with various feminist discourses. By looking at how agency, autonomy, and subjectivity are constructed, and identifying whether health problems and solutions are cast as individual or collective, the paper found reflections of postfeminist, liberal-feminist, and radical-feminist discourses. Findings indicate that health emerges as a metaphor for life in control through individual-oriented postfeminist wellness mandates, which dominate health coverage. Health as a decontextualized individual issue is especially suitable within the contexts of a consumerist reading environment and of the broader US neoliberal health policy. Alternately, women who suffer from disease confound the “will to health” and thus are allowed liberal-feminist agentic subjectivity and can question the system from a radical-feminist perspective. There are also a few examples of articles that deal with political health issues, reflecting radical-feminism. Text that engages with liberal- and radical-feminist discourses is much less prevalent than text that espouses postfeminist hyperindividualism.

Can We Move Beyond Visual Metaphors? Virtual World Provocations and Second Life

Is it possible for the human beings, who are the driving forces behind virtual worlds and the avatars that inhabit them, to move beyond Real Life metaphors? What does this sort of questioning mean for teaching and learning in virtual worlds?

The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (review)

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing Social. Durham: Duke University Press. $84.95 he. $23.95 sc. xiii + 313 pp.To numerous turbulent and productive turns of 1990s, Patricia Ticineto Clough adds advent of turn, which she sees as an expression of new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter insti- gating a shift in thought in critical theory brought on by transformations in economic, political, and cultural realms (1-2). In tracing genealogy of affect in her introduction through Deleuze and Guattari Spinoza and Bergson, Clough establishes affect as potential [and] often autonom- ic responses (2); different from emotion, which reflects in part product of meaning-making processes, affect exceeds consciousness: it refers pre- subjective agency, a force that delimits boundaries, determining bodily affect and be affected (2).The shift in thought that Clough describes challenges some of basic metaphors of life - from its most basic components its attendant cosmologies - such an extent that I found my studies as a biology major in college poor preparation indeed. In her chapter contribution, Karen Wendy Gilbert situates now axiomatic laws of thermodynamics as a product of nineteenth century and of industrial capitalism, and challenges widely accepted notion that matter and energy are governed by a tendency towards equilibrium or homeostasis within a closed system. The postmodern mantra about fragmented identity is revisited at molecular and cellular levels, opening up and radicalizing organism of subjectivity- - -as unified and enclosed by a discrete boundary or skin - into a concern with affect as flows of energy that pass between porous bodies in open systems or networks.This reconceptualization of body is well illustrated by Elizabeth Wissinger in her chapter on affective labor and modeling industry, where model is shown work in dynamic interaction with information and televisual technologies, making body and image available for circulation in order to feed endless demand for images ... in circulating affective energy in an affect economy. In this sense, what Sara Ahmed calls the very effect of surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds (232). Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse's contribution revisits theories of trauma, which presuppose a thermodynamic self vis-a-vis psychoanalysis, and rethinks injured soldier as an assemblage of capacities that are newly constituted through rehabilitation. Such rehabilitation is now understood as an effect/process of biopolitical control that continually calculate^], engineer^], and mutate [s] life itself (266).A subgroup of chapters are concerned with intersection of theory, body, affect, and capital. David Staple's chapter reviews transformation of capitalism from a thermodynamic model a turbulent system via flows of female labor, reconsidering concept of gift in terms of giving of time and information. Ariel Ducey's chapter on healthcare workers offers concrete examples of perpetuation of training and certification programs, which refashio[n] . …

Colloquium paper: three ambitious (and rather unorthodox) assignments for the field of biodiversity genetics.

The field of molecular genetics has many roles in biodiversity assessment and conservation. I summarize three of those standard roles and propose logical extensions of each. First, many biologists suppose that a comprehensive picture of the Tree of Life will soon emerge from multilocus DNA sequence data interpreted in concert with fossils and other evidence. If nonreticulate trees are indeed valid metaphors for life's history, then a well dated global phylogeny will offer an opportunity to erect a universally standardized scheme of biological classification. If life's history proves to be somewhat reticulate, a web-like phylogenetic pattern should become evident and will offer opportunities to reevaluate the fundamental nature of evolutionary processes. Second, extensive networks of wildlife sanctuaries offer some hope for shepherding appreciable biodiversity through the ongoing extinction crisis, and molecular genetics can assist in park design by helping to identify key species, historically important biotic areas, and biodiversity hotspots. An opportunity centers on the concept of Pleistocene Parks that could protect "legacy biotas" in much the same way that traditional national parks preserve special geological features and historical landmarks honor legacy events in human affairs. Third, genetic perspectives have become an integral part of many focused conservation efforts by unveiling ecological, behavioral, or evolutionary phenomena relevant to population management. They also can open opportunities to educate the public about the many intellectual gifts and aesthetic marvels of the natural world.

The Understanding of Metaphor in Lives of Girls and Women

observation and penetrating psychological insight are expressed exactly with remarkable narrative strategies. Though my thesis is informed by my reading of Munro’s published books, this study does not attempt to analyze the whole stock of her literary work. I concentrate on my discussion on one of her stylistic narrative techniques--- metaphor in Lives of Girls and Women, which is considered her most representative. With the understanding metaphor in the novel, readers know well the character’s complex patterns of existence and the suppression endured by the female characters in a patriarchal society.

Can Dreams Within Dreams Serve as Metaphor for Modern Life Itself?: Commentary on Paper by Hilary Hoge

The social nature of dreaming is discussed. Those few remembered and shared dreams (out of the totality of experienced and soon-forgotten dreams) are eventually shaped by the particular culture that reads into dreams its own way of viewing private psychological experience. Psychoanalysis is one such culture. It is recommended that the dream, on its own terms and in its own images and stories, be allowed to lead the way in psychotherapy. The significance of the creations of the mind asleep is discussed in relation to Freud's and Jung's mission to create a depth therapy for the psychological maladies attendant to life in modern Western culture. Dr. Hoge's contribution is significant in its subtle and intelligent evocation of the rich complexities of the world of dreams. Her use of the dream within the dream opens into a consideration of the sleeping mind's capacity for play and for stretching the boundaries of psychotherapy. Her discussion of the intermixing of subjectivities in therapeutic dream discussion (“Was it her dream or mine?”) leads to a consideration of the relationship between psychoanalytic work with dreams and ancient healing methods that often include an interest in the healer's own dreams as locus of treatment. Finally, there is a discussion of the relation of dreams to the emerging electronic virtual world which replaces the real and natural world with its own designs. In such a world, the dream within a dream may serve as a metaphor for modern life itself.