Description
Ethnographers use conventional anthropological practice to explore the metaphoric value of vehicles for identity, history, and society in different cultures. In sections on people as vehicles, vehicles as gendered people, and equivocal vehicles, they discuss such topics as living canoes as vehicles of moral imagination among the Murik of Papua New Guinea, using a gender metaphor to make sense of old warplanes in North America, gender metaphors and cognitive schemas in recessionary Japan, Yugoslav Fica as a vehicle for social commentary and ritual restoration of innocence, metaphors of cars and corruption in China, ambivalent aesthetics in Mexican American lowrider cars, and traversing life and death in a lynching reenactment by African Americans. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Metaphor, as an act of human fancy, combines ideas in improbable ways to sharpen meanings of life and experience. Theoretically, this arises from an association between a sign—for example, a cattle car—and its referent, the Holocaust. These “sign-vehicles” serve as modes of semiotic transportation through conceptual space. Likewise, on-the-ground vehicles can be rich metaphors for the moral imagination. Following on this insight, Vehicles presents a collection of ethnographic essays on the metaphoric significance of vehicles in different cultures. Analyses include canoes in Papua New Guinea, pedestrians and airplanes in North America, lowriders among Mexican-Americans, and cars in contemporary China, Japan, and Eastern Europe, as well as among African-Americans in the South. Vehicles not only “carry people around,” but also “carry” how they are understood in relation to the dynamics of culture, politics and history.
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