ABSTRACT

Social and symbolic anthropologists have been concerned with the interpretation of metaphors as culturally specific material artefacts or ritualised actions, since the 1960s. The work of Mary Douglas (1966), James W Fernandez (1972, 1974), Victor Turner (1967, 1974), and Sherry Ortner (1973) attempted to define master metaphors, root metaphors, key metaphors or organising metaphors within particular cultural settings. The attention paid to metaphor was only partly a response to Lévi-Strauss’ work. Franz Boas (1914) and Paul Radin (1945) were influential as also the work on rhetoric and symbolic action by Kenneth Burke (1941, 1950, 1966). Christopher Tilley suggests something of the reason why this examination was viewed as so fruitful:

The objectification of fundamental cultural values is not conveyed in words but in performances in which material forms are metaphorically put to work to effect the social transformations required. Memory and meaning are linked to the performance and become attached to the artefact. The power of the artefact to create meaning resides in its very materiality, a materiality that is recontextualised in ceremonial performance … Things create people as much as people make them.