CASCAIUAES2017 panel: Metaphor: Transfer and the Motion of Language

Panel Title: Metaphor: Transfer and the Motion of Language

Convenors
Alexis Black (Concordia University )
Jean DeBernardi (University of Alberta)

Panel Short Abstract:
Metaphor, from the Greek metapherin, or transfer, has become central
to multidisciplinary inquiries in language and cognition. This panel
invites submissions that explore the implications of recent arguments
concerning the metaphorical nature of human language and cognition for
anthropology.

Panel Long Abstract:
Multidisciplinary studies in language and cognition have argued for
decades that the metaphorical nature of human language is a symptom of
the fundamentally metaphorical nature of human cognition. For
centuries metaphor, from the Greek metapherin, or transfer, was
primarily the purview of rhetorical, literary, and most recently
linguistic study. What are the implications for anthropology of
recent arguments concerning the metaphorical nature of language? How
does language move our minds, frame our conceptions, and animate our
realities? How does human language, as a symbolic system always in
motion, inhibit or undermine ideological attempts to fix cultural
paradigms and practices? How do human beings construct stable
realities (or the illusion thereof?) from fluid forms and semantic
values?

This panel encourages the submission of papers concerning language in
motion and as motion. In the face of literacy, urbanization, and
programs of national identity, languages have changed, with outcomes
from standardization to creolization to language death. How do people
innovate linguistically in situations where they called on to extend
and change cultural paradigms and practices? As they construct new
syntheses of past and present, what kinds of stories do people tell
about themselves, their histories, and their futures, and how do they
use use new media to tell those stories? Finally, what role do artists
play in both perpetuating existing structures of meaning and extending
language?


More Information:

http://nomadit.co.uk/cascaiuaes2017/suite/panels.php5?PanelID=5379