General Anthropology Division

Oral Presentation Session

Creeping Plants and Winding Belts: Cognition, Kinship, and Metaphor

Presenter(s)

• BM

  Bojka Milicic

  Associate Professor-Lecturer
  University of Utah

Metaphors, probably unique to our species, are fundamental for human cognition. Harold Scheffler’s seminal perspective on kin terms and their metaphorical extensions foreshadowed a growing body of recent research showing that the study of kinship has a great potential for gaining insight into cognitive processes. A metaphorical expression is based on analogous relations between a source concept and its target concept. Highlighting Scheffler’s contribution, I propose here that perhaps the very concept of kinship terms is the model for metaphorical thinking.