2001), has its roots in evolution (Tooby and Cosmides 2001). There is greater zoomorphy for mammal names than for bird, insect or fish names. This question, meant to provoke discussion, was put to students on the first day of Animal Metaphors, an intermediate-level course designed for the multidisciplinary environmental studies major at Vassar College. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has shown that this tendency, called conformity bias, can affect even our perception of the world when we are in a social setting (Berns et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company; 1997. The soldier has gotten stranded alone in the desert during Napoleons 1798 Egyptian campaign. In a scientific context, the statement Humans are animals could be construed to mean that humans are members of the Animal Kingdom with traits we share with other animal species because we all evolved from common ancestors. Article In non-scientific contexts especially, however, metaphor can be used to persuade and manipulate, tapping into positive or negative emotions and networks of associated ideas in the listener, as when a public figure is accused of being a snake in the grass, or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is dubbed Obamas Katrina.. All of these engage our cognitive abilities. Other factors can create fictions that impair our discernment, such as the strong affect and networks of meaning associated with particular metaphors. We are inclined to care about the life choices other people make and to compare them with our own; to get emotionally caught up in stories of their conundrums; to want to discuss them and, sometimes, to let our passionate involvement drive on a discussion that has exhausted any other rational purpose. Zoomorphs tend to be male and refer to healthy adult individuals, with little usage referring to disability or infirmity. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2008. p. 46282. We read and analyzed literature in which animal metaphors are central, such as Honor de Balzacs short story Passion in the Desert and Langdon Smiths poem Evolution. Throughout the course, the overarching theme is that animal metaphors are powerful tools for framing our relationship with the environment and that they can be best understood in the context of humans as evolved animals. WebAn example of this is when the Germans throw bread around for the victims to scramble and eat and relates the men 's behavior to, "Wild beasts of prey, with animal hatred in their eyes;" (Wiesel 105). The texts eliciting conditions trigger a simulation process. Other Time to assume that health research is fraudulent, Comparative twin study: Access to healthcare, We jumped from planes without parachutes (and lived. The study remains inconclusive, however, with respect to how much or even whether such distancing from animals is an effective solution to the problem of anxiety associated with our awareness of death. Cognitive universals give writers the scaffolding for guessing what a reader will understand and how the reader will do so. Fauconnier G, Turner M. Conceptual integration and formal expression. Gossip serves other important functions, such as helping us to keep track of cheaters or learn of new opportunities (Pinker 1997). New York: Basic Books; 2003. Privacy Locke J. Through the study of specific works of literature, we can develop skills for understanding how animal metaphors mediate our identity and relationship with nature. A work of imaginative literature cannot be reduced to a categorical assertion about human beings, scientific or otherwise. This could be another reason why animals so very often figure in works of literature and get noticed on the cinema screen, along with any kind of animated figure. In short, framing is a big deal. Lakoffs frames are not unlike Fodors modules, neurally based and capable of rapid, automatic processing. Without invoking Lakoffs notational formalisms, we examine the factors that may discourage people from recognizing their automatic processing of metaphors, primary processes which are as much a part of our evolved psychological features as our ability to analyze metaphors. This is the grand theme of the course, and one that requires the explanatory power of evolution for understanding both how and why humans so often represent themselves in opposition to animals. The fourth assignment, a final project, was scaffolded into a proposal, an oral presentation, and a final paper. Accessed 6 November 2010. This affective power of metaphors is consistent with the module model that we automatically process metaphors and that their initial processing is not open to willful alteration. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-010-0301-6, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-010-0301-6. Cookies policy. In this paper, we discuss the structure of the course, metaphor and the evolved process of understanding metaphors, the conceptual tools needed to analyze metaphors critically in their textual and evolutionary contexts, and examples of how those conceptual tools were applied to the analysis of texts. It would not constitute an attempt to deny any and all distinctions between humans and non-human species. Animal Metaphors and Metaphorizing Animals: An Integrated Literary, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Analysis of Making and Partaking of Stories, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-010-0301-6, http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-environmental-underst_b_205477.html, http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/int/evolution.html, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0. We believe that the concept of animal metaphors can facilitate exchange of knowledge and ideas between the humanities and the natural sciences while helping us live productively with nature and our own human nature. Though a common term in literary studies, we intend animal metaphors to represent our particular approach to evolutionary studies. Unlike Figs are fruit, these statements have a much greater potential to be interpreted differently according to both the specific context and the sociocultural situatedness of the speaker or listener. WebInitially, animals were probably observed for practical reasons because early human survival depended on knowledge of animal behaviour. Derrida J. Paradoxically, the evolved use of animal metaphors to fashion a relationship with the environment allows humans to conceptualize themselves as non-animals. Toward that goal, we devised an approach to analyzing literary texts that distinguishes thematic universals from literary universals. Thematic universals are human universals that are engaged thematically by a literary text. Hernadi P. Literature and evolution. Self-deception and the mediaclimate change. Vassar College, Maildrop 422, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY, 12604, USA, You can also search for this author in Evolution can explain the mechanisms by which we are affectively drawn to or repelled by animals and is behind the cognitive architecture allowing us to represent animals according to the different roles or purposes we assign to them. For example, when an infant was ready to approach a male in a bad mood, the female would shake her head at the infant," Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory In a society that demonizes female ambition, stereotypes of women as cunning predators can be activated when reporters say a female politician was engaged in a catfight or cackled when she laughed. 2. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0 2001;30:627. One of the most inventive projects used evolutionary theories of self-deception in an analysis of commercials warning about global warming and then warning about global warming alarmists. This reification of metaphor is not surprising given the purported neural basis of the largely unconscious mechanisms for treating metaphors from different kinds of sensory sources, or modalities, as equivalent in the multimodal space of cognitive simulation (Barsalou, 2008). Columbus: Ohio State University Press; 2009. The uses of narrative. Wright R. The moral animal: why we are the way we are: the new science of evolutionary psychology. The narrative of mutual romantic love may serve as a cover story for overwhelming trauma, including, perhaps, the trauma of having sexual feelings for an animal. Thus far, we have adduced examples that conform to Glucksbergs strict definition of metaphor as a categorical assertion. To heighten the sense of attachment, the film uses a real leopard, so that we, as watchers, are first frightened as we put ourselves in the soldiers place. Yet the film never allows the viewers perception of the leopard or desert to become indistinguishable from the soldiers own constructions. Observing that greenhouse evokes notions of pleasant warmth and flourishing life, Brown suggests it is no coincidence that a Wall Street Journal editorial hailed the new lush plant growth generated by warmer climates as a gift from the industrial revolution. Cognitive science, literature, and the arts: a guide for humanists. That bridge is animal metaphors.. Behavioral and neurological evidence indicates that humans mentally simulateas part of their representational machinery constructing the activities of the narrativesensations, movements, and feelings (for review, see Barsalou, 2008). Metaphors can serve as analogies, mapping from the known source to the conceptually new target (Lakoff, 2008; Gentner and Bowdle, 2008), enabling us to understand something new in terms of something more familiar, as when a doctor tells a patient Your thyroid is a furnace and your pituitary gland is the thermostat. Metaphors in science serve an explanatory role. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2009. 2007;104:16598603. Linguistically, the identity can be expressed as a categorical assertion: I am a Baptist; I am an American; I am a Republican. He calls her Mignonne, the name of a former, knife-brandishing mistress who was violently jealous. It is easy to see how this behavior evolved. Craib (2004) proposes that when an experience is too disturbing, a preferred cover story can keep the full force of trauma at bay. 1998;2:175220. Like innate behaviors in other animals, reflex behaviors in human babies may help them survive. Springer Nature. Animals cavorted while humans drove cars that polluted and caused the oceans to rise and the animals to cry. Balzac only depicts the Maghrebi nomads as enemy captors whom the soldier labels animals. In contrast, the film shows scenes of Arab nomads engaged in the duties and rituals of their everyday life, having mastered the challenges of survival in a barren land. One way humans do this is by engaging in behaviors that serve, at least in part, to deny or minimize our commonalities with other animals (427). Many were surprised at how hard it was to find obvious metaphors of the categorical assertion type defined by Glucksberg. Resuming the account verbally, the narrator quotes the soldiers statement that the leopard very suddenly turned around, perhaps because the soldier had hurt her, and caught his leg in her teeth. WebMost animal metaphors for human personality are uncomplimentary, reinforcing the perceived distance between humans and nonhuman animal species. Mosaic. The most common examples of animal behavior include feeding, territorial behavior, courtship, nesting, breeding activity, hunting & predator evasion. It does so with scenes that trigger our subcortical emotive arousal and a protagonist whom we can relate to affectively. Burke M. Literature as parable. WebIts getting to see with your own eyes, the life and death struggles of wild animals. We use Easterlins particular concept of place, which incorporates research in emotion and cognition, to analyze animal metaphors in we use Easterlins particular concept of place, which incorporates research in emotion and cognition, to analyze animal metaphors in Lavinia Curriers 1998 film adaptation (Currier 1998) of Balzacs Passion in the Desert. Humans have the cognitive ability to make and understand metaphors, and they create animal metaphors in order to cognitively model and represent other agents, including other humans, in our ongoing struggle for existence in a rapidly changing environment. The nomadic culture is, to borrow a phrase from Easterlin (2004, 11), part and parcel of a specific natural setting.. The kind of object determined the speed at which humans could detect the change in the scene: humans and animals were detected faster than a variety of objects, both fixed and movable. Though our course embraces definitions of metaphor that include non-verbal as well as verbal analogies between different entities, we begin with Glucksbergs (2003) more restrictive definition of metaphor as categorical assertion. In the 2008 campaign, visual metaphor could reinforce cultural stereotypes of women and African American men. Returning to the opening theme of the course, one question was this: What is meant when we say that some humans are animals or like animals? Use course definitions of metaphor to address this question, but also give one or more examples from one or more course readings that explain why humans find it easy to see themselves in animals, or to see animals in themselves. Richard Lehman's weekly review of medical journals. animal metaphors for humans, metaphorical effects are not limited to the con-ceptual. The anti-alarmists used the same scenes but added a different voice-over, one in which the evil alarmists were causing young children to have nightmares and accept a lower standard of living. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. They can ponder the question of what is true and what is imagined, without confronting head-on the possibility that humans and big cats share feelings of attachment because of a shared evolutionary heritage. Google Scholar. The embedded narrator and foreign setting remove nineteenth-century readers several times from potentially threatening real-world scientific questions of the day concerning how to classify humans in relation to animals. Categorial identity refers to the symbolic ways in which humans define themselves in relation to a group, ostensibly (though not always in practice) adhering to the groups values and norms, or fulfilling one or more roles within the group (Hogan 2009). 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