Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology

by James W. Fernandez (Editor)

Anthropology, Social Sciences

298 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1991

About the author

James W. Fernandez, Ph.D. (Northwestern University, 1962; B.A., Amherst College, 1952), is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Previously he was Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was chair of the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College, 1971–1975. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in the social sciences in 2003. In 1983, he received the Herskovits Prize for Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination In Africa from the African Studies Association.

Reviews

[Kevin Karpiak]

Here's a quote from Paul Friedrich's chapter “Polytropy”:

“The reader should perhaps be forewarned that in the next few pages I will be discussing these tropes before the full exposition of them that constitutes the body of the paper. I do this in the confidence that practically all the readers who have come this far will be familiar with ideas like imagistic, contiguity, figure of mood, metonymy etc.”



Now, there’s several fucked up things about those sentences, including:

1. Besides using technical language and only much later in the article actually explaining what he means by it (an obfuscatory power move if I’ve ever seen one) he obviously knew that not everyone would know what he’s talking about, hence the forwarning, yet doesn’t provide even one reference so that those who don’t know the lingo can go learn. It’s “either you know what I’m talking about or you’re not worthy to learn”.

2. This is even more fucked up because he makes it seem like if only you had the right background you would understand what he’s talking about, and this is just not the case. I have a little background in this stuff—more than 95% of anthropologists—and I know two things about the list of terms he offers as obvious: first, some of them are more obscure than others; and second, the ones that aren’t obscure have so much debate and history behind them (what, exactly, “metonymy” is, for example, has been argued about for at least two thousand years) as to make term-dropping (as if the term itself explained something) completely ridiculous. Just say what you mean, motherfucker, and don’t hide behind your liberal arts/humanistic diploma.


Can you tell how I feel about it? Once you get beyond that, however, it’s almost sorta kinda useful… I’m gonna finish it today maybe.

[Completelybanned · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently, most linguistic anthropologists study metaphor with semiotics in the vein of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Peirce’s second trichotomy (icon, index, symbol) has been highly popular, although his third trichotomy (rheme, dicent, argument) is arguably under-utilized for understanding how speakers craft utterances for their hearers (Sicoli, 2014, 2022). Whether one is using a Peircean framework or not, one might be inclined to define metaphor as capturing a relation between two things, an equation of the form A=B. In /i/ Beyond Metaphor/i/ Paul Freidrich (1991) argues this is merely one of the many dimensions of metaphor. In fact, he argues that “metaphor” is analytically vague and should be ditched in favor of five “macrotropes” (image, modal, formal, contiguity and analogical). Freidrich and his allies in the smaller body of literature known as metaphor studies have recently been overshadowed by Peircean semiotics in linguistic anthropology. This is partly understandable, considering how Peircean semiotics is so flexible. It helps the analyst draw attention to how signs are interpreted, and further how these interpretations are combined and recombined, without giving priority to any one kind of sign over another. For instance, a bus-stop bench advertisement becomes as potent a sign vehicle as the linguistic ‘word’(Gal and Irvine, 2019). However, this volume demonstrates how the wave of semiotics left some things behind which should be revived, such as an appreciation for the affective impacts of artful speech which this book explores.