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General Anthropology Division
Oral Presentation Session
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.