Metaphors for and of kinship: the "range of the target" and the "scope of the source" in the anthropology of Roman culture (original) (raw)

Cognitive linguistics takes metaphor to be a pervasive and essential feature not only of language, but also of thought. In this view, metaphorical linguistic expressions reflect ‘conceptual metaphors’, that is, systematic mappings of conceptual content that deliver a society’s ways of making sense of – and hence speaking about – certain (mostly abstract) concepts in terms of other (mostly concrete, body-based) concepts. Highly abstract concepts in fact tend to be conceptualized in terms of whole networks of metaphors. The structuring of concepts via multiple metaphors is one way in which culture enters into metaphorical conceptualization (cf. Kövecses 2006: 70–86). There can be differences in the range of conceptual metaphors that societies (including historical ones) make use of in conceptualizing a particular target domain. Because conceptual metaphors provide the speakers of a language with their automatic and unconscious ways of thinking about things and tend to characterize those dimensions of a concept that are most culturally salient, differences in the ‘range of the target’ can therefore underpin – and provide good ‘emic’ evidence of – differences in worldview. Another way in which differences in metaphorical conceptualization can be culturally revealing lies in the ‘scope of the source’, that is, the overall set of target domains to which a particular source concept can apply metaphorically. Looking at how a particular source domain may provide greater or lesser opportunities for metaphorical understanding in different languages and cultures can help highlight what these cultures find most salient in experience. In this pair of dialoguing papers, we explore KINSHIP RELATIONS from both perspectives in the hope of providing valuable anthropological insight into Roman ideas of kinship. Buccheri is thus concerned with Latin’s metaphors for KINSHIP. These are drawn from the domains of PLANTS, BLOOD, SPACE IMAGE, among others (consider, e.g., the term stirps for a ‘lineage’, suboles, satum, propago for ‘descendants’; and the notions of consanguinitas and propinquitas). Buccheri analyzes which concepts in particular are selected from those domains and will try to assess the rationale for this choice of mapping. He proposes that the structure of the ‘range of the target’ of KINSHIP metaphors in Latin reflects the importance of the idea of continuity and resemblance between the members of a linage we find expressed in Roman texts (cf., e.g., Bettini 1991). Short then explores metaphors of kinship: that is, how this domain is utilized for comprehending other sorts of relations in Latin. In particular, Short focuses on usage of concepts of ‘exogamic’ relations like sociare (sanguinem) (= ‘join (bloodlines) through marriage’) to signify either the act of conversation or the alliances of communities who speak the same language. Meanwhile, in expressions like coniungere lingua and coniunctio linguae, ‘endogamic’ relations metaphorically convey the concept of the linguistic relationship that exists between members of the same community.3 Short concludes that the structure of kinship relations served as a convenient metaphorical model for linguistic relations above all because of the importance of language, alongside blood, as a mechanism of identity in Roman society. This discussion therefore raises questions of an anthropological kind; at the same time, it suggests certain theoretical reflections: for instance, about the nature of concepts that serve both as source and target in metaphorical understanding. If in cognitive linguistics metaphors are supposed to be unidirectional, how do we account for cases like this where the same domain serves as both a literal concept structuring the comprehension of presumably more abstract experiences and as a metaphorical concept whose understanding is delivered by presumably more concrete ones?