European Journal of English Studies

2004, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 275293

DOI 10.1080/1382557042000277395

1382-5577/04/0803-275$16.00 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Metaphor Variation in Cultural Context:
Perspectives from Anthropology
Michael Kimmel
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Introduction: Why (and how) anthropologists study metaphor
Anthropologists working on culture and cognition offer a distinctive take
on metaphor variation suited to balance out some wide-spread assumptions
by linguists. Anthropologists stress that the quest for metaphor universals
requires taking into account metaphors situatedness and pragmatics, its
embedding in conceptual networks (metaphor networks, cultural models,
polytropes) and discourse, as well as a culture-specific role of the body in
shaping metaphor. I will argue that this dynamic, situated and culturally
embodied perspective locking into several current trends in cognitive
research
1
calls for a cautious reflection of what metaphor universals are
actually intended to explain about cultural cognition.
In social and cultural anthropology metaphor has never been so much
seen as a rhetorical figure or ornamental device than as a tool that shapes
and expresses cultural thought styles. If many leading ethnographers have
written on metaphor, it is because of the implicit realization that antici-
pating Lakoff and Johnsons (1980) celebrated book title people live by
their metaphors,
2
that they think through them and act on them. Anthropo-
logical metaphor research inherently extends beyond the study of language
proper. Metaphors in artifacts, landscapes, houses, emblems, action, etc.,
are under scrutiny as parts of a unified context; this results both from the
long-standing interest in symbolism and from the fieldwork method of
participant observation. Consequently, metaphor is studied from a multi-
Correspondence: Michael Kimmel, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Inst. of Psychology,
Vienna, Austria. E-mail: michael.kimmel@gmx.at
1
See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Taking Metaphor Out of Our Heads and Putting It Into
the Cultural World, in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Raymond Gibbs and
Gerard Steen (Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 145-166.
2
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago Univer-
sity Press, 1980).
276
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
277
medial viewpoint and from a perspective on how metaphors acquire dif-
ferent meanings across contexts. This holistic view entails a strong interest
in the pragmatics of metaphor, including the interpenetration of metaphor
with other tropes and its embedding in cultural models. Not surprisingly,
at least as much research deals with functional universals (how metaphor
is a fundament of culture in the singular) as with substantive universals
(shared metaphors between cultures in the plural). I will discuss both
aspects in turn.
1. Functional universals
Functional universals relate to the general job that metaphor accomplishes
in connecting culture and cognition. Anthropologists have reflected on the
role of metaphor in cultural thought systems as their creators, sustainers,
delimiters, conceptual glue, or contesters of the status-quo. Metaphor
enables a movement from an abstract concept to a concrete image; it
entails reference to affect and/or experience; it bridges logical gaps, it
relates parts to a larger whole, and it maps out nonverbal phenomena or
behavior.
3
Frequently identified cognitive functions of usually overt and
striking metaphors are emotionality, salience, memorability and the con-
stitution of a field of inference through so-called entailments. Metaphori-
cal mappings in the broad sense allow the solution of problems (analogy)
and the discovery of explanatory strategies (reframing). More than that,
conceptual metaphors serve fundamentally epistemic functions as shapers
of discourse. The study of conceptual metaphors is thus a major method
for cognitive anthropologists seeking to describe cultural representations
and how they are organized.
Ideology and metaphor networks
Metaphors are shapers of ideology. The hiding and highlighting function
of political or scientific ideologies has been analyzed by Lakoff and Lakoff
and Johnson.
4
More than that, some conceptual metaphors even come to
3
James W. Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Brenda E.F. Beck, The Metaphor as a
Mediator Between Semantic and Analogic Modes of Thought, Current Anthropology
19 (1) (1987), 83-88.
4
George Lakoff, Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify the War
in the Gulf, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Ptz (Philadelphia &
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992), 463-481. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Phi-
losophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New
York: Basic Books, 1999).
276
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
277
fulfill an epistemic function in culture. One such function is to delimit cul-
tural discourse. Consider as a particularly potent thought-shaping device
the CONDUIT metaphor that lets us see communication as a transfer of pre-
existing objects.
5
Metaphors like these render alternative conceptualiza-
tions of a domain difficult to think. From another viewpoint, metaphors
also enable cultural discourse by specifying its minimal common ground,
as Lakoff
6
observes in his analysis of U.S. politics and morality. The
superordinate metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY lends a common ground
to both liberal and conservative outlooks, but interpreted either as nurtur-
ant parent morality or strict father morality, respectively. Many other
connected metaphors of morality are also shared, but differently contex-
tualized and ordered hierarchically. This explains how opposing political
stances result from shared cultural understandings.
Anthropologists are predisposed to study cultural metaphor networks,
whether in cosmology or everyday beliefs. This has the virtue of acknowl-
edging that metaphors often coalesce in systems of considerable complex-
ity. In a comparison of epistemologies of science and indigenous Maori
thought Salmond
7
proposes that key metaphors organize sub-metaphors.
8

Western science is a theory governed by the spatialized image KNOWL-
EDGE IS A LANDSCAPE presiding over and constraining a host of related
sub-metaphors. Lakoffs above-mentioned study equally centers on the
state-as-a-parent key metaphor.
Anthropologists have also analyzed cultural key concepts as metaphor
networks of a multi-contextual kind. Poole sees the Nuer concept of kwoth,
originally analyzed by Evans-Pritchard, as compounding metaphoric impli-
cations of space, time, genealogy, ecology, etc., connected with notions
of deity, power, spirit, and other abstract notions. Likewise he sees the
complex concept of aiyem of the Bimin-Kuskusmin a stative verb or
less commonly an abstract verbal noun denoting efficacy or potency as
spinning metaphoric references through a myriad contexts. It may be an
attribute of persons, things, contexts, and an aneng (time-place) and is
5
Michael J. Reddy, The Conduit Metaphor, in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed.
Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1979 / 1993), 164-201.
6
George Lakoff, Moral Politics. What Conservatives Know That Liberals Dont (Chi-
cago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 35.
7
Anne Salmond, Theoretical Landscapes: A Cross-Cultural Conception of Knowledge,
in Semantic Anthropology, ed. David J. Parkin (London: Academic Press, 1982), 65-
88.
8
Gerard Steen, Metaphor and Discourse: Towards a Linguistic Checklist for Metaphor
Analysis, in Researching and Applying Metaphor, eds. Lynn Cameron and Graham
Low (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81-104, p. 95. See his concept
of motif.
278
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
279
viewed as a condition a state to be inferred retrospectively from the
outcome of events.
9

Conceptual integration and culture
As has been variously noted, metaphor systems move on a gradient from
high, over partial, to low congruence with other schemas of a culture.
10

Some metaphor systems systematically reach out into non-linguistic reali-
zations and a few even constitute a foundational schema of culture. An
example is the American schema of modularity and recombinability that
stretches from things, over words, to social relations.
11
In the opposite
case we find systematic dilemmas and difficult choices between conflict-
ing metaphors.
12
A recurrent pattern of discourse integration through conceptual meta-
phor is the creation of what I call a nodal domain into which several met-
aphors are projected. For example, architecture among the Batammaliba of
Benin metaphorically invests numerous parts of the house with a cosmo-
logical significance, using shapes like CROSS, CIRCLE, LINE and FORK, or
relations like UP-DOWN, CONTAINER, NESTING, VYING FORCES, BALANCE,
REPETITION.
13
Importantly the metaphors are perceived as (metonymically)
connected through belonging to the same artifact-substrate that generates
the organizing metaphor THE HOUSE IS A COSMOS. Similarly, Bourdieu
(1977) views the condensation of metaphors in a single locus (like the
Kabyle house) as everyday structural exercises for the embodied mas-
tery of cultural action schemas (habitus). In going in and out, filling and
emptying, or opening and shutting of the cosmic house, body space and
cosmic space are integrated.
14
Symbolism in ritual works by a similar
nodal principle. Rituals co-orchestrate material from so diverse conceptual
domains as kinship, agriculture, politics, and religion in a single real space,
9
Fitz John Porter Poole, Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropol-
ogy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (3) (1986), 411-457,
p. 432.
10
Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michelle Emanatian, Congruence by
Degree: On the Relation Between Metaphor and Cultural Models, in Metaphor in
Cognitive Linguistics, 205-218.
11
Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
12
Strauss and Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, ch 6.
13
Suzanne Preston Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture. Ontology and Metaphor in
Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987).
14
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977).
278
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
279
creating an experiential metonymy for the participants and spectators.
15

At a conceptual level the language of mystics, priests, philosophers, or
poets often involves floating signifiers which use a salient image across
social contexts, again as a node.
16
Although a polyvalent image or phrase
inserted into different domains is understood differently, at a higher plane
of meaning it may be implied that the domains are connected. In general,
all mentioned kinds of nodal domains are symbol-spaces in which various
metaphors are integrated through co-occurrence in an artifactual, embod-
ied, or conceptual locus.
Metaphor may account for, both, conceptual stability and dynamics in
culture. Some religious metaphors are guardians of what Peter L. Berger
calls the sacred canopy.
17
Metaphors that I would gloss as from-once-
to-now mappings secure a degree of conceptual continuity where society
itself undergoes rapid change, as when an old Scottish fisherman explains a
high-tech trawler, i.e. an unfamiliar target domain, through a more familiar
source domain of old-fashioned boats, or modern surgery through treatment
for sheep. Sometimes metaphors buffer the diversification of worldviews
within a single community by enabling a pseudo-dialogue around the same
key terms that are filled with differing meanings by each individual.
18
Cultural innovation and putting the inchoate into discourse
While many metaphors stabilize ideological systems, they can also give
leverage to criticism and subversion. Comparative studies of the rhetoric
of social revolutionaries and preachers indicate that well-chosen novel
metaphors funnel the diffuse discontent of the masses into a concrete
understanding of a social problem.
19
Metaphors are also used to recruit
highly emotionalized frames. Thaiss shows how, in Irans pre-revolu-
tionary period of forced modernization, Muslim leaders metaphorically
depicted the umma, the community of believers (umm = mother) as a weak,
violated, and defiled woman. THE COMMUNITY IS A WOMAN together with
WESTERNIZATION IS A FORCE implies that Iranian society is raped and thus
15
Bradd Shore, Twice Born, Once Conceived: Meaning Construction and Cultural Cog-
nition, American Anthropologist 93 (1) (1991), 9-27.
16
Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); see
also Beck, The Metaphor as a Mediator Between Semantic and Analogic Modes of
Thought.
17
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1967).
18
Anthony P. Cohen, Self-consciousness. An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1994).
19
Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974);
Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture.
280
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
281
bereft of its integrity and purity. A slightly different twist transfers deep-
seated anxieties of being cuckolded to politics, when Iranian society is
understood as a fickle and potentially adulterous woman having an affair
with the West. Either viewpoint insinuates the lack of virility and thus col-
lective shame of those who allow the woman to be taken by outsiders.
20

Metaphor is also seen as constitutive for injecting religious or other
experience into discourse, by grounding the otherwise ineffable in lan-
guage. Fernandez posits a scaffolding of knowledge from the inchoate to
the representational,
21
while Turner studies the role of metaphor in limi-
nal and anti-structural phases of social process, e.g. carnival, rebellion,
or millenarianism where metaphor is the trigger of oceanic group experi-
ence.
22
Similarly, based on studies of symbolic healing, Kirmayer suggests
a three-tier conceptual architecture in which metaphor links primary body
knowledge and socio-cultural structuring principles. Myth, metaphor and
archetype capture social, psychological and bodily contributions to truth
and meaning, respectively. Primary metaphors of the body (archetypes)
are given situated conceptual extensions (metaphor proper), and these in
turn order experience by narratization into social legitimizing and structur-
ing narratives (myth) (see below).
23

2. Substantive universals
Bearing in mind the inevitable degree of decontextualization, various
kinds of metaphor universals can be sought. These fall into the categories
of prevalent source domains, source and target domain pairings, trans-
formational universals, and archetypical experiential scenes underlying
metaphor.
Source domains
Much comparative anthropological research focuses on prevalent meta-
phorical source domains, such as the human body.
24
Body parts, body
postures and gestures, body functions such as sex and reproduction, fluids
20
Gustav Thaiss, The Conceptualization of Social Change Through Metaphor, Journal
of Asian and African Studies 13, (1-2) (1978), pp. 1-13.
21
Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture.
22
Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors.
23
Laurence J. Kirmayer, Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: The Effectiveness of
Symbols Revisited, in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17 (1993), 161-195.
24
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1969); Mary Doug-
las, Natural Symbols: Explorations into Cosmology (New York, NY: Pantheon Books,
1970).
280
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
281
such as blood, sperm, saliva, or excretions are among the richest sources
of metaphor in a great number of cultures. The house and the landscape are
metaphorically productive across many cultures.
25
What may underlie the
significance of bodies, houses, and landscapes is that they are containers of
our existential in-dwelling. A further potent source for metaphors are ani-
mals. The profound significance of animals derives from their double role
as part of our enduring biological heritage as humans and as being outside
society, so that metaphor allows men to be animals, while also remaining
distinct. Besides their ecological and experiential salience animals allow
for many analogies with humans (moving, eating, mating, death, hierar-
chy, different races, having societies, etc.). Furthermore, there may be
characteristic foundational metaphors connected with modes of subsist-
ence. Bird-David argues that forest dwelling people, such as the Nayaka of
South India, the Mbuti of Congo, or the Batek of Malaysia, share a central
metaphor THE ENVIRONMENT (THE FOREST) IS A PARENT. The forest, like a
parent, gives unconditionally and provides for humans. Among the neigh-
boring cultivators of the same regions this metaphor is transformed into the
metaphor THE ENVIRONMENT (THE LAND) IS AN ANCESTOR. The land, like
an ancestor, only gives in return for services or provisions.
26

Mappings
The now most common way of looking for universals is to search for
conceptual metaphors in the strict sense, i.e. pairings of source and target
domains. For example, according to Kvecses ANGER IS HOT FLUID IN A
CONTAINER is found in English, Hungarian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese,
Zulu, Wolof, and Tahitian with minor variations.
27
Yu finds the English
event structure metaphor fully present in Chinese, including entailments
such as STATES ARE LOCATIONS, CAUSES ARE FORCES, CHANGES ARE
MOVEMENTS, ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS, PURPOSES ARE
DESTINATIONS, MEANS ARE PATHS, or DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS.
28

Alversons comparison of metaphorical collocations for time in English,
Chinese, Hindi and Setswana yields five and only five classes: (1) time as
a partible entity, (2) time as causal force or effect, (3) time as medium in
motion, (4) time as a course, and (5) time as an artifact of ascertainment
25
Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 36.
26
Nurit Bird-David, Beyond the Hunting and Gathering Mode of Subsistence: Observa-
tions on the Nayaka and Other Modern Hunter-gatherers, Man, 27:1 (1992), 19-44.
27
Zoltn Kvecses, Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture, Body in Human Feeling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
28
Ning Yu, Metaphorical Expressions of Anger and Happiness in English and Chinese,
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10 (2) (1995), 59-92.
282
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
283
of the change of time. Apart from one exception (Hindi has no conception
of time as a linear or orbital course) the results point at a common experi-
ential motivation and some phenomenological universals in the experience
of time.
29

Transformations
An intriguing kind of research from linguistic anthropology inquires which
kind of ontological kinds are expressed in terms of which others. Heine,
Claudi and Hnnemeyers study of categorial metaphors assumes that
there are experientially salient and universal connections between the
elementary ontological domains. A multi-language survey indicates a
universal directionality in what can become a source domain and what a
target domain. A category may be metaphorically expressed by any other
to the left of it in the following chain.
PERSON / OBJECT / SPACE / TIME / PROCESS / QUALITY
source domain pole target domain pole

Apparently, the leftmost ontologies like person lend themselves more to
an expression of others because they are more concrete.
30
According to
Heine the most basic ontological metaphor transformations AN OBJECT
IS A PERSON, SPACE IS AN OBJECT, A QUALITY IS AN OBJECT, QUALITY IS
SPACE, TIME IS SPACE, A PROCESS IS SPACE, QUALITY IS A PROCESS are
universal.
31
What is more, studies of diachronic language development and
the transformation of lexical into grammatical categories support this, for
example when a volitional verb first applied to deliberate human agents
comes to be used for non-human entities (the AN OBJECT IS A PERSON trans-
formation). Heine (1997: 148ff) observed that the range of concepts from
which new linguistic forms are metaphorically derived are restricted cross-
linguistically.
32
Thus, if new terms for east and west are acquired, these
most likely relate to expressions for the rising and setting sun. Definite
articles are most likely derived from a demonstrative attribute, indefinite
articles from the cardinal numeral one, etc. The hierarchy of the senses,
as documented in synesthetic metaphors seem to follow quite a similar
29
Hoyt Alverson, Semantics and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in English,
Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
30
Bernd Heine, Ulrike Claudi and Friederike Hnnemeyer, Grammaticalization: A Con-
ceptual Framework (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).
31
Bernd Heine, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (New York & Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997)
32
Ibid., p. 148.
282
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
283
universal logic. Metaphors such as sweet silence are quite natural, while
silent sweetness occurs rarely. According to Williams
33
and Yanna Pop-
ova (pers. comm.), touch is more primary than taste, taste more primary
than smell, smell more primary than sound, and sound more primary than
vision when used as a source domain for a synesthetic metaphor:
TOUCH / TASTE / SMELL / SOUND / VISION
source domain pole target domain pole
Modes such as touch may seem closer to us and thus more reliable in an
ontological sense, while visual information is experienced as external and
more remote.
Primary experiential linkages
Finally, universals may be prefigured by linkages that we may call expe-
riential metonymies and that children undergo independently of culture.
Grady hypothesizes dozens of experientially connected primary meta-
phors out of which more differing complex ones get put together.
34
These
emerge from archetypal, bodily experiences in the parent-child relationship
like AFFECTION IS WARMTH, INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS, and RELATIONSHIPS
ARE ENCLOSURES, basic experiences with objects like UNDERSTANDING IS
GRASPING, MORE IS UP, or IMPORTANT IS BIG or movement in space like
TIME IS MOTION, STATES ARE LOCATIONS, and PURPOSES ARE DESIRED
OBJECTS. It remains to be seen how generally the evidence bears out these
hypothesized universals.
3. Metaphors in cultural context
The pragmatics of metaphor: The search for specifics within univer-
sals
It is crucial to distinguish idealized metaphors from their particular cul-
tural actualizations.

First consider how the cultural scope or the specific
applications of ontological metaphors varies. Beck compares Lakoff and
Johnsons MORE IS UP in Tamil to its pervasive use in English. Although
Tamil also frames gaining status as up (climb the ladder of fame) its loss
is conceived differently as someones light has dimmed. Likewise, being
33
Joseph M. Williams, Synaesthetic Adjectives: A Possible Law of Semantic Change,
Language 52 (2) (1976), 461-478.
34
Joseph Grady, Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes,
Ph.D. Dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, 1997.
284
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
285
in health is not being up as in English, but as the body container being
filled; poor health is a liquid evaporating from the body.
35

The cognitive function of metaphors is determined by how they are
embedded in cultural discourse. By consequence, seemingly identical
metaphors may have opposing emotional, evaluative, and normative entail-
ments or accomplish opposing ideological functions: Chinese and German
idioms of the heart both reveal it to be a locus of emotional action.
36
In
both cultures the heart is conceptualized as a container which can become
agitated. Yet, while in German the heart joyfully pounds, beats or jumps,
this positive rhythmic action is missing in Chinese. When it palpitates this
is considered to be negative, characteristic of a heart in fear or danger,
because the Chinese ideal of quietness and harmony constructs a heart that
is canonically still and empty. Although the metaphors share something
analytically, their experiential nature diverges, such that the jumping of
the heart is actually felt differently by Germans and by Chinese. Simi-
larly, the idiom A rolling stone gathers no moss is used in a derogatory
sense in Britain: moss is valued and rolling signifies rolling too fast. In
the United States, on the other hand, moss stands for something undesir-
able that sticks when one stays in one place for too long. This distinction
reflects the cultural importance of roots versus mobility. All this shows
that cultural evaluation and fine-tuning ipso facto enter into metaphor
comprehension.
The promising thing about recently developed frameworks is that they
allow a systematic analysis of how universals provide pathways to specif-
ics, again a stereoscopic endeavor. Once one gets into the nitty-gritty
of a situated metaphor analysis, a crude either-or view of universalism
and relativism usually proves untenable. For example, Emanatian found
embodied metaphors for emotions that are basically shared between cul-
tures, yet differ in scope, entailments, framing, and associated imagery.
37

Metaphors for sexuality in American English and Chagga (a language of
Tanzania) reveals striking similarities in that eating and heat are used
as source domains to conceptualize lust. (The eating metaphor has been
also documented in several other languages including Cuna, Panama, and
35
Brenda E.F. Beck, Review Article: Root Metaphor Patterns, Semiotic Inquiry 2 (1)
(1982), 86-97, p. 90.
36
Thomas Ots, The Silenced Body The Expressive Leib: On The Dialectic of Mind
and Life in Chinese Cathartic Healing, in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential
Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 116-136, p. 129.
37
Michelle Emanatian, Metaphor and the Expression of Emotion: The Value of Cross-
Cultural Perspectives, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (3) (1995), 163-182
284
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
285
Mehinaku, central Brazil).
38
On the one hand, these metaphors may be
experientially motivated in a similar way all over the world. On the other
hand, how these basic correspondences are felt, perceived, and schema-
tized is cultural. Variation may arise in several respects:
39
(1) Variety of metaphors used for a target domain: lust metaphors are
highly varied in English and include SEXUALITY IS A PHYSICAL FORCE
AND LUST IS A REACTION TO IT, LUST IS INSANITY, and SEX IS WAR. These
source domains are not used in Chagga. In fact, Chagga uses no more than
a third, but less systematic source domain for lust that draws on traits of
various animal species to describe human sexuality. Other than that, only
SEX IS EATING and SEX IS HEAT occur.
(2) Range of entailments and source domain productivity: as always,
the source domain is used selectively, so that the choice and number of
traits mapped accounts for variation. In English eating is exploited only to
a much lesser extent than in Chagga. While lust is conceived of as hunger
and positive sexual attributes of either partner as flavor (although sweet-
ness is more used for women), the mapping is selective in that sexual
intercourse is not referred to as eating. By contrast, Chagga uses all the
entailments of the eating schema: hunger, the hunt for and sampling of
food, sex as eating itself, nourishment and satisfaction from eating, and
savoriness of the food. Nonetheless, there are constraints even here. A
woman may taste good and sweet, but not spicy, smoky or salty. She can
be sugar honey, but not goat meat or corn gruel. A man may eat or taste a
woman, but does not chew or swallow her.
(3) Framing of the target: differences in the target domains occur with
respect to what is mapped and how. English metaphors conceptualize
the desire of both sexes, whereas Chagga only conceptualizes male lust.
Similarly, for Chagga speakers male sexuality does not involve heat. In
contradistinction to English, heat is typically ascribed to a desired female;
it is not a trait of the person desirous himself. Heat is the sexual enthusiasm
and skill of a woman, whereas in English it refers to lust of both men and
women.
(4) Imagery: the imagery concretizing a mapping almost always
involves cultural prototypes. In Chagga hot women are likened to a
38
Caitlin Hines, Rebaking the pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT metaphor, in Rein-
venting Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. eds. M. Bucholtz, A.C. Liang and
L.A. Sutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 145-62; Z. Maalej, Of Animals,
Foods, Objects, Plants and Others, or, How Women are Conceptualised and Evaluated:
a Cross-cultural Perspective (Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor IV.
University of Manouba, Tunis, 5-7 April 2001).
39
Emanatian, Metaphor and the Expression of Emotion: The Value of Cross-Cultural
Perspectives, p. 172.
286
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
287
hearth, rather than a microwave oven. Likewise their sweetness can be
sugar or honey, but not the (ice cream) flavor of the month. Kvecses
adds to this list further sources for cross-cultural variation: (5) variation in
the content of prototypical cultural models; (6) variation in the influence of
the broader cultural context and its key concepts; (7) incidence of linguistic
metaphor as opposed to a preference for metonymies.
40

Is embodiment a source of universality?
Cognitive linguists claim that a degree of universality in metaphor results
from its embodied nature in at least two ways. The first claim has to do
with the recurrence of image schemas, which are not yet metaphors them-
selves, but customarily used as source domains. According to Johnson,
basic embodied experiences such as FORCE, SUBSTANCE, BALANCE, CON-
TAINER, LINK, PATH, CYCLE, CENTER, UP-DOWN, etc., form a repository for
structuring the target domain of a great number of metaphors, e.g. LIFE IS
A PATH, TIME IS A SUBSTANCE, JUSTICE IS BALANCE, CHOICE IS A BIFURCA-
TION.
41
The simple image schemas contribute constituents of many kinds
of cultural experience, and they do so everywhere.
First of all, what is the ontological status of such basal image schemas?
As Alverson notes, (1991: 117) they are contextual significance bestowing
devices, not Euclidean abstractions, and therefore cannot be actualized as
pure idealizations.
42
The search for phenomenological universals is beset
by a necessary conflation of that which is locally, historically or culturally
acquired and that which is a priori to experience. Reflecting an example of
symbolic healing by Csordas,
43
Strathern argues with justification that
[d]emonic possession () begins with an inchoate (pre-objectified)
feeling of loss of control over the body This is then objectified by
a healer in terms of what Johnson calls the container schema and
is diagnosed as an intrusion across a boundary, to be corrected by a
suitable form of embodied action in response. What emerges, then,
is something quite particular and also something comparable to
40
Kvecses, Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture, Body in Human Feeling, p. 165.
For a more refined suggestion of dimensions see Kvecses, this volume.
41
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and
Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).
42
Alverson, Semantics and Experience. Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Man-
darin, Hindi, and Sesotho, p. 14.
43
Thomas Csordas, Words from the Holy People: A Case Study in Cultural Phenom-
enology, in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self,
269-290.
286
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
287
other contexts in which the container schema is similarly activated.
[my italics]
44
What we then need to cultivate is a stereoscopic view on context-bound
and transcontextual functions of image schemas.
45
(This notwithstanding,
I suggest below that some examples of image schemas are more transcon-
textual than others).
In and of itself, the often noted recurrence of PATH, BALANCE, CON-
TAINER, CYCLE or UP-DOWN schemas in all everyday discourse, poetry,
politics, religion and science, simply means that the format of imagery is
an important general resource in cognition. To be of interest as substantive
universals we must find either (a) a simple image schema that is univer-
sally connected to a given target domain in other words a full-blown
metaphor or (b) a more complex image schema configuration with cross-
cultural occurence, or both. As concerns the first point, the most likely
candidates for simple image schemas transculturally defining the same
target domain, are probably ontological metaphors of space, time, agency,
or causality, such as EVENTS ARE PATHS, PURPOSES ARE GOALS, TIME IS
MOVEMENT IN SPACE, or EVENTS ARE AGENTS (although we still lack data
from most languages). Note that these and other ontological metaphors do
not spring from specific situations but the transcontextual depth structure
of experience.
46

Many not-so-simple image schemas are experientially grounded in cul-
ture-specific settings or practices where they occur as composite schemas.
As an illustration, take Shores description of how young Samoans acquire
the cultural key concepts of mana and tapu through a setting in the
presence of a big man with a host of typical sensual attributes by learn-
ing a ritual position called fatai that involves CONTAINMENT, BINDING,
CENTEREDNESS, and STASIS.
47
Only at later ages a situation-independent
and abstract concept of mana and tapu develops. Examples like this imply
that (a) image schemas may become imbued with emotion and cultural
44
Andrew Strathern, Body Thoughts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996),
p. 188-89.
45
Michael Kimmel, Metaphor, Imagery, and Culture, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Vienna, 2002, p. 162.
46
The fact that simple image schemas are largely independent of any specific setting
equally matters with a view on the intra-cultural worldview integration. As Shore
observes, simple image schemas are inherently abstract and perceptually uncommit-
ted forms that lend themselves to so-called foundational schemas of a culture because
what they lose in specific sensory reference they gain in their ability to organize a wide
diversity of particular models (Shore, Culture in Mind, p. 53).
47
Shore, Twice Born, Once Conceived: Meaning Construction and Cultural Cogni-
tion.
288
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
289
motivation only to the degree that they are embedded into a setting rich
in social context, sensory information and participant motor action; and
(b) that in practice image schemas are often not of a simple or basal, but
of a complex and compound kind. Compound schemas are usually cultur-
ally unique, although analytically decomposable into simpler universals.
Hence, the atomistic status of image schemas cannot always be taken for
granted, especially not where a concept is directly acquired through a body
technique. The more embodied and situated the image schema, the less
universal it is.
Second, embodiment as a source of universals has also been claimed
for metaphors that are experientially motivated by body physiology (see
Kvecses, this volume). ANGER IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER is an impor-
tant way of conceptualizing anger in many cultures precisely because
anger involves the rise of blood pressure, muscle tension, and body
heat.
48
However, metaphor universals in the strong sense are unlikely,
since how people experience and cognize their body is also shaped by
culture, even where measured physiology is similar. In Never in Anger
Briggs shows how anger disappears under the overlay of cultural ideology
in Inuit life. The Inuit consider even the latent feeling of anger heavily
deviant and the explosion of the body container (i.e. when Americans let
off steam) is virtually unknown among adults.
49
More generally, consider
how even body physiology itself is shaped by and in turn expresses cul-
ture, engendering highly specific embodied metaphors. Scheper-Hughes
(1990) reports a mass-syndrome of involuntary seizures and trembling
legs among exploited female Brazilian sugar-cane workers. She interprets
this as an embodied and collective, though not premeditated metaphor of
I cannot carry my burden any longer so that my legs falter.
50
Scores of
other so-called culture bound syndromes such as voodoo, amok, el calor,
hysteria, or anorexia have been described by medical anthropologists, in
48
To make a general case for embodied motivation more studies are needed in which
the target domain is really perceived as external to the body. In Kvecses examples
embodied feelings (like being a pressurized container) metaphorize emotions, which at
least Europeans ontologically locate in the body to begin with, so that source and target
may be said to be part of the same generic domain (a near-metonymy). By comparison,
I suspect that most imagery of the body-external kind (e.g. a category as a container,
God as an infinite radius, society as a hierarchy) is rather disembodied, meaning that
the image schemas have become decoupled from any functional activation of the kines-
thetic centers of our brain. The result is purely abstract, conceptual imagery.
49
Jane L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1971).
50
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, The Rebel Body. The Subversive Meanings of Illness, TAS
Journal 10 (1990), 3-10.
288
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
289
which the body autonomously expresses cultural, non-universal meaning
in a metaphorical way.
51

Are metaphors the appropriate units for analysis?
On the one hand, conceptual metaphors fulfill functions usually attributed
to cognitive schemas.
52
On the other hand, they are frequently organized
through higher-order mechanisms, whether we call these key or superordi-
nate metaphors or something else. In the most common parlance, metaphors
happen against the background of a cultural model
53
or cultural schema.
54

Cienki advocates to integrate the study of metaphorical expressions from
actual discourse data with what is being said in between the metaphorical
expressions to help reveal the cultural models of which they are part.
55

For example, what makes Russians choose between the conceptual meta-
phors HONEST IS RIGID AND STRAIGHT and DECENT IS FLEXIBLE AND OPEN
MOVEMENT, depends on which discourse frame for morality is considered
appropriate, i.e. proper behavior or the politeness frame.
56
What is true
for intra-cultural variation a fortiori applies to the trans-cultural study of
metaphor: in a functional view, it makes little sense to ask whether similar
metaphors are the same without specifying their discourse use and the
organizing schemas they are embedded in.
This question is associated with a methodology issue that continues to
divide linguistics and anthropology: is it valid to isolate metaphors and
understand them independently of the dynamic discourse segment they
are embedded in, e.g. by doing corpus studies?
57
The least we can say is
that approaches following an alternative path raise legitimate issues that
went unnoticed in the past. In an interview-based study Quinn inferred
eight, and only eight, themes her American interviewees use to reason in
their folk-model of marriage: lastingness, mutual benefit, compatibility,
51
See the volume Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and
Self, ed. Thomas Csordas.
52
David W. Allbritton, When Metaphors Function as Schemas: Some Cognitive Effects
of Conceptual Metaphors, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (1) (1995), 33-46.
53
Shore, Culture in Mind; Alan Cienki, Cultural Models as Profiles and Bases, in Meta-
phor in Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard Steen (Amsterdam
& Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999), 189-203.
54
Gary Palmer, Towards a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1996); Strauss & Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning.
55
Cienki, Cultural Models as Profiles and Bases, in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics,
p. 201.
56
Ibid., p. 200
57
cf. Alice Deignan, Corpus-based Research Into Metaphor, Researching and Applying
Metaphor, eds. Lynn Cameron and Graham Low (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 177-99.
290
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
291
sharedness, difficulty, effort, success and risk.
58
A crucial finding was that
each of these thematic elements, perhaps stored as a complex proposition,
crosscut metaphors. Hence, each theme can be instantiated by a variety of
metaphors. For instance, lastingness can be expressed as a manufactured
product that is well put together, as a journey undertaken by two people,
which lasts as long as the two move onwards, as two inseparable objects,
a durable attachment or permanent common location, as a secure posses-
sion, an indestructible object or a covenant with God. Even within short
sequences speakers effortlessly slip between metaphors which, moreover,
encompass all four basic ontological image schemas (OBJECT, LINK, CON-
TAINER and PATH). Quinn suggests that the choice of metaphors tends to
maximize an overlap with the thematic field as a whole, such that most
metaphors express aspects of two or more themes. This would make the
themes the pivotal explanatory construct of cognitive discourse process-
ing rather than the metaphors themselves, and with this a more holistic
cultural schema that organizes them. However, it is probably wrong to
deduce from this, as Quinn does, that metaphors play no conceptual, but
a purely linguistic and expository role. Metaphors embedded in dynamic
discourse organizing devices contribute OBJECT, LINK, CONTAINER, or
PATH ontologies (framing marriage as a valuable object, permanent bond,
vessel, or journey). A particular chosen metaphor may reflect a speakers
aim to interpret a topic in the light of an ontological field of inference or
adduced cognitive material from a neighboring domain.
More generally, the question discussed here (Is the choice of linguistic
metaphor determined by a conceptual metaphor or by something else?)
bears both on the role of discourse pragmatics and the cognitive status of
metaphor. In this regard psycholinguists have not been able to exclude the
possibility that immediate discourse cues enable us to interpret metaphoric
idioms, rather than permanently stored conceptual metaphors.
59
While
associations with a conceptual metaphor are demonstrable, these may be
constructed ad hoc and parasitically. Recent research on higher-level tools
(e.g. so-called Memory Organization Packets, MOPs) that assist a dynamic
construction of meaning on the fly, would perhaps relegate metaphor
construction to something bound to discourse context.
60
Ultimately, how-
58
Naomi Quinn, The Cultural Basis of Metaphor, in Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of
Tropes in Anthropology, ed. J. Fernandez (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
56-93.
59
Gibbs, Taking Metaphor Out of Our Heads and Putting It Into the Cultural World, in
Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, p. 155.
60
Raymond W. Gibbs, Prototypes in Dynamic Meaning Construals, in Cognitive Poet-
ics in Practice, eds. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (London: Routledge, 2003), 27-
40.
290
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
291
ever the yardstick of these models must be if they can steer clear of an
either-or response to who governs discourse conceptually?. What they
need to capture are elective affinities between metaphors and cultural
models as well as their mediation through context knowledge. Hence, our
models should address the interaction of various organizational levels of
cultural discourse and individual episodic memories:
Embedding in polytropes: Metaphor as dynamic performance
Polytropes are a particularly dynamic sort of structure in which metaphors
are embedded. Many cultural settings feature interpenetrating, overlap-
ping, or nested tropes.
61
For example, it is an essential principle of ritual
and myth that tropes are interdependent, transform into one another, and
operate on several cognitive levels at the same time. Hence, metaphors
stand in structural continuity with other forms, creating a complex play of
tropes.
62
Especially the suggestion to see tropes as instruments of cultural
performance made by Fernandez makes categorical definitions of meta-
phor as standing apart from metonymy, synecdoche (as a special form of
metonymy), and irony obsolete in many cases.
63
A common form that the
play of tropes takes, is the transformative process from categorial proxim-
ity to categorial inclusion in ritual, whereby two (otherwise metaphorically
connected) domains are construed metonymically, i.e. as a process occur-
ring within what has now become one domain, for example to foreground
the idea of wholeness. Bifocal construals are also possible, e.g. when
social minority groups are subsumed under the general we to negate
their presence, while at the same time they are set apart as scapegoats.
64

Turner suggests the term synecdoche for a specific relationship between
metaphor and metonymy, where a part of the whole structurally replicates
the form of the whole, e.g. in frontispiece of Thomas Hobbess Leviathan
in which the giant body of the sovereign is made up of innumerable little
61
David Sapir, The Anatomy of Metaphor, in The Social Use of Metaphor, eds. David
Sapir and Christopher Crocker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977),
3-32; Roy Wagner, Symbols That Stand For Themselves (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1986); Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James
W. Fernandez (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney,
Embedding and Transforming Polytrope: The Monkey as Self in Japanese Culture,
in Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, 159-189; Shore, Culture
in Mind; Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture.
62
Terence Turner, We Are Parrots, Twins Are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational
Structure, in Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, 121-158, p.
126.
63
See Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture.
64
See Ohnuki-Tierney, Embedding and Transforming Polytrope: The Monkey as Self in
Japanese Culture, in Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology.
292
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
293
bodies of his subjects. The macrocosmic and the microcosmic levels of a
whole (metonymy) thus also share the same form (metaphor).
65

An example for a full polytrope is the relation of the Pacific-rim Kwak-
iutl to totemic animals.
66
The dominant theme of the Kwakiutl universe is
not how two different things are alike, but how one becomes another in the
chain of eating. By donating its flesh the animal participates in the human
regeneration. Through incorporation the body is human on the outside,
but animal within, so that humans and animals form a single thread of life,
a continuous chain of participations. A second chain of life is the use of
the animal skins as medium of marriage exchange, through which, again,
regeneration of the human species is effected. Third, animals are used
as classificatory crests with their outer shape considered a kind of soul.
Therefore, animals as a total regenerative artifact include three overlap-
ping symbolic modalities:
As food, the dominant symbolic modality was incorporative and
participatory As skins, the emphasis was on symbolic mediation
between human groups and the transformability of tribal opposition
into unity through marriage. And as crests, animals entered into
metaphorical relationships with humans and came closest to serving
a genuine classificatory function.
67
While different contexts require different emphases of the modalities (e.g.
subject to seasonal shifts), positing a polytropic totality lets each mode
imply a co-presence of the others in the background, perhaps as one aspec-
tual construal of a complex mental gestalt.
68
4. Conclusion: Metaphor is what metaphor does
Past linguistics have tended to focus on metaphor-as-cultural-competence.
Anthropologys genuine contribution is the complementary focus on per-
formance. This situated view converges both with the latest cognitive
models and trends in linguistic pragmatics and discourse studies. If we
subscribe to a performance-focus (Cognition is what cognition does) and
a relative de-emphasis of permanently entrenched cognitive structures, it
65
Turner, We Are Parrots, Twins Are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational Struc-
ture, in Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, p. 148.
66
Shore, Culture in Mind, p. 197.
67
Ibid., p. 198.
68
Palmer, Towards a Theory of Cultural Linguistics.
292
MICHAEL KIMMEL METAPHOR VARIATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
293
follows that we inherently need to study metaphors together with wider
structures such as cultural schemas, polytropes and discourse.
The methodological upshot for metaphor comparison is a stronger
emphasis on discourse-analytical approaches, in turn linked to a theo-
retical need for multi-level models. While dynamic and situated cogni-
tion does not invalidate the legitimacy of comparison per se, it calls for
a more cultivated sense for contextual effects. Models of the notoriously
slippery notion of context are required as a backdrop against which to
assess whether our (nilly-willy de-contextualized) metaphor universals do
in fact explain something about cognition. Plainly, whether some meta-
phor counts as a universal, depends on our perspective. Is our interest in
explaining (a) situated resources of discourse formation, (b) the cultural
cognitive toolbox, (c) universals in human experience, or (d) shared devel-
opmental origins of language? A differentiated methodology follows from
the realization that universals inevitably emerge from an act of abstraction.
Analogies only emerge against our chosen problem contexts (often equiva-
lent to theory nets), and wed better be transparent about it.
Let me close with the briefest of agendas for a further rapprochement
of metaphor in anthropology and linguistics.
69
Both avenues in relating
culture and cognition face the challenge to avoid extremism, either in
the snares of super-relativistic constructionism, or slapdash universal-
ism. What remains to be promoted are (a) analyses of metaphor in action
and habitus, (b) a holistic approach to multimedial settings in ritual and
modern media, (c) an understanding of the body as culturalized entity and
a focus on how discourse inscribes metaphors in it (complementary to
discourses grounding in embodied experiences).
69
Kimmel, Metaphor, Imagery, and Culture.