The Metaphor as a Mediator Between Semantic and Analogic Modes of Thought [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

Anthropologists have overlooked the importance of the metaphor in human culture. Core etaphors can help us identify ultimate cosmic constructs underlying a given social or religious world view. But, even more centrally, metaphors can serve as key data in our attempts to understand how a cultural system adapts to and incorporates sensated experience from the physical world. Metaphors thus provide both a "reality" principle and a "tool" for change. Their special status rests on the way in which a metaphor moves between two different types of thought (Fernandez, CA, 1974). A variety of comments which E. R. Leach and C. Levi-Strauss have made on this issue are summarized, and it is pointed out that both men have underestimated the possibilities for images to develop meaning at the level of affect and motor experience alone, without recourse to opposition or to categorical contrast. Along similar lines, it is argued that many authors mistakenly attempt to isolate metaphoric from metonymic thought. This is taken as a false problem, and the continuity of a process which uses both paradigm contrast and analogic continuity is seen as fundamental. The paper concludes by suggesting that the contemporary theological and anthropological approaches to metaphor are roughly complementary. It is hoped that they will come to interact. Fernandez's article is seen as a useful step in this direction.