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Society for Cultural Anthropology
Oral Presentation Session
James Fernandez
University of Chicago
In this presentation we evoke the “Metaphor Mafia” of the 1970s with the emphasis in their work on the social presence and social usages of metaphor and the play of the principal tropes more generally in culture – both in the field data itself and in its ethnographic and ethnologic reformulation. We do not intend this evocation to “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living” but hopefully to be a helpful anchorage in assaying the actual progress made in understanding the foundational and the figurational in ways “that did not exist before.” In particular, we wish to see how what was called in that decade “the inchoate of inquiry” has obtained more satisfactory predication and formulation.” A recent onrush of perceptive treatment of the “knot” trope as foundational to intellection will be of particular interest in this paper as to the circumstances that have produced it and the predicative paradigms that have acted to resolve it.