Metaphor, Imagery, and Culture. Spatialized Ontologies, Mental Tools, and Multimedia in the Making.

The thesis deals with metaphor and imagery in cultural thought-models, the aim being an integrative framework for a rapprochement between cognitive science, cultural anthropology , and linguistics. The work couches previous ethnographic data in the theoretical apparatus of cognitive linguistics (as pioneered by G. Lakoff and R. Langacker), which is horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena and vertically extended to include high-level mental tools. As groundwork for understanding cultural cognition in Part One I undertake a reappraisal of the theory of conceptual metaphor from a genuinely anthropological perspective: I elaborate (1) the multiplicity of metaphor's socio-cognitive functions, its embedding in complex 'polytropes', and its interplay with higher-level cultural schemas; (2)I propose a balanced view between universality and cultural variation in metaphor; and (3) I advocate an intensified focus on cultural body knowledge as the basis of metaphor. Part Two sets as its goal to contour the scope of cultural imagery by extending the theory of dynamic image schemas, as laid out by Langacker, beyond language itself: (4) I analyze essentialist and processual ontologies as being defined through basic imagery types and dynamic switches between ontologies through image schema transformations. (5) Next, I argue for the necessity of cognitive multimedia analysis and offer a model based on the presupposition that various aspects of language, non-linguistic symbolism, action schemas, and body feelings operate in a continuous mental substrate, namely image schemas. (6) Finally, taking the lead from Lakoff's 'spatialization of form' hypothesis, I challenge the broader cognitive sciences with a multi-level theory of spatialized ('geometric') imagery that spans from semantics to general-purpose mental 'tools'. Its upshot is a relativization of symbolic or propositional approaches to thought as well as faculty psychology.