Culture as a Metaphor

“A world ends when its metaphor has died” – Archibald MacLeish

Perhaps MacLeish is right; when we lose our metaphors, we lose our stories, our cultural identity, our heritage, our past, and our ties to the land. When we lose our culture, what do we have left? We no longer have ways of communicating ourselves to the rest of the world. As Jinal Shah puts it in her blog, Constant Beta, “[M]etaphors allow us to dip into our values, histories and mythologies to communicate the value of a brand and connect to our audience”.

A few weeks ago in my English class, we talked about the importance of metaphors, and the role they play in culture. The article, “Metaphors We Live by” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explains how metaphors are more than just embedded in language - “Metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action…We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature”. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that metaphors influence our everyday functioning.

But why the need for metaphors? Can’t we just explain things in literal terms? I thought about this, and realized how difficult it is to think non-metaphorically. Lakoff and Johnson use the example of an argument as war, to show just how often we use metaphors. This metaphor is revealed in a variety of expressions:

- I’ve never won an argument with him
- They just shot down all of my inputs.
- They’ll wipe you out if they think your strategy is flawed.
- They attacked every weak point I had in my speech.

We don’t just talk about arguments like this; the very things we do in an argument are controlled by the concept of war. The concept of an argument, the activity of an argument, and the language of an argument revolve around the war metaphor.

Metaphors can also be used to understand frame of minds and perspectives. Consider the war in Iraq. Americans understand the war from a western-ideology standpoint that emphasizes political, military and economic interest. On the other hand, Muslims understand the war from a religious and national pride position. The employment of different metaphors in understanding the war could be the reason why neither side understands the other. In this article, by Zoltan Kovecses, he states, “the application of very different frames to the same situation results in incompatible evaluations and actions”.

In addition, metaphors reflect a nation’s values and ethics. We use metaphors to reflect our ideals. This article states, “the variations in solutions to creating a metaphor for culture are related to the complexity of the concept”. The way we communicate ourselves to the larger world audience is done by metaphor. The metaphor that is used often reflects these underlying values of the culture. As Lily I-wen Su puts it, in this article, “Recent studies on metaphor have proved it to be an important language device that reflects the cognitive source of human thinking. These experientialists claimed that metaphors in our languages mirror our ordinary conceptual system”.

Metaphors play a large role in intercultural communication, and help us and reveal ourselves to the international melting pot we know as the world.