Author:
Title: On a Cross-Cultural
Resemblance Among Certain Metaphors for Political
Power
Journal: Politicheskaia lingvistika.
Year: 2006
Volume: 20
Pages:
Language of publication: English
Full
text
Anderson R.
On a Cross-Cultural
Resemblance among
Certain Metaphors
for Political Power
The body supplies the basis for a wide variety of metaphors that humans
use to communicate the meaning of abstractions such as political power.а Orientation, sensation, interaction,
manipulation, and movement are all bodily experiences familiar to both hearers
and speakers. Knowing that these experiences are shared by their hearers,
speakers can confidently assume that lexical items mentioning bodily experience
will be understood by hearers when used as metaphors to talk about abstractions
presented as unfamiliar.а Since the
bodies found in any human community are very similar, it follows from the use
of shared bodily experience to construct metaphors that different linguistic
communities could use the same bodily experience to construct their representations
of political power.а
This conjecture flies in the face of arguments, such as those made by Russian
evraziisty or by the American Samuel P.
Huntington in his famous (or, perhaps, infamous) Clash of Civilizations that
cultures differ in their conceptions of political power and that these
disagreements produce both contrasting paths of internal development and ongoing
strife between cultural communities known as civilizations.а It is perfectly true that linguistic forms expressing
the same notion will seldom if ever coincide from one language to the next, and
then almost exclusively because of common roots or borrowing.а While English and Russian, for example,
display a substantial common vocabulary, especially if we accept divergent
pronunciations such as brat and brother or us and nas or even otets
and father as representing a single shared word in each case, this
sharing of vocabulary is attributable not to the common features of
English-speaking and Russian-speaking bodies but to the combination of shared
linguistic origins, occasional borrowing from Russian into English and vice
versa, and frequent common borrowing from third languages, particularly Greek
or French.а Thus pairs like democracy-demokratiia are not relevant to the hypothesis; nor are
calques like people power and narodovlastie.а It is the resemblances among independent
metaphors not derived from any common linguistic source that concern me here.
Language possesses the paradoxical feature that while each utterance is
an event of very brief duration, continuing repetition of these abbreviated
events perpetuates various features of any natural language almost unchanged for
hundreds or even thousands of years.а As
the examples of brat and brother reveal, some speakers mentioning
male siblings have repeated identical or very similar articulations for five or
six millennia regardless of whether the speech of their communities has
remained or ever was mutually intelligible (Strang
1970, 417).а Accordingly the contemporary
political lexicon of any language draws on metaphors composed from items left
over from many centuries ago.а Because representative
democracy (as opposed to classical Greek forms) is such a recent phenomenon, during
almost the whole period of the development of any language, political power is
exercised by a few rulers controlling a multitude of the ruled.а Accordingly the metaphors for political power
in contemporary language include some drawing a distinction between rulers and
ruled.
If a set of these metaphors drawn from widely scattered languages is
subjected to close examination, they display a common feature.а Their source domain is the bodily experience
of seeing, which proceeds by distinguishing a figure against the ground
composed of all other objects and then compiling the various figures into a
composite that humans experience slightly later as a holistic visual image
(Pinker 1997, 211-87).а In the case of
each member of the set of metaphors to be examined, the original etymological
form is a figure-ground metaphor in which the wielders of political power are
represented by some kind of figure visible against a ground constituted by
those denied political power.а Terminology
to be discussed is drawn from Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, Javanese and
Wolof.а Because contacts among these
languages, sometimes direct, sometimes mediated through Arabic or through
languages not on the list, are of very long standing, the possibility of
contagion cannot be absolutely excluded, but on the other hand this sample is
quite scattered and the languages in question do not all belong even to the
same typological categories.
A Russian Metaphor of Political Power. Any
form of political power is a relationship between the few who exercise it and
the many who experience it.а It is a noticeable feature of Russian that many
words designating those who exercise power derive from linguistic sources
foreign to the languageТs East Slavic base.а
The traditional terms kniazТ and
korolТ were borrowed from Germanic
sources, tsarТ and imperator from Latin, boiarinТ
apparently from Turkish (Chernykh 1993 I, 106, 210,
344-345, 431; 1993 II, 361-362), gosudarТ
from South Slavic.а For the modern terms sekretarТ, ministr,
prezident and deputat
Russian has turned to French, and when Peter I recast the service class, he took shlakhetstvo
from Polish and looked to Swedish and German for particular titles of rank (Raeff 1993, 34-35).а Among
the pre-revolutionary terms dvorianin and znatТ and among the newer ones predsedatelТ are East Slavic, but at least
the last two of these are presumably calques (respectively of French originals)
and even the first one has been alleged to be (from a derivative of German hof).а In any case the dvoriane
originally occupied the lowest rank of the ruling group, and it was only
because the holder of the title tsarТ relied on them in his conflict
with boiare that the term gradually extended
to encompass more exalted servitors (Chernykh 1993 I,
233-234).а Of course Russian is not unique
in this regard.а English noble, president,
senator, member of parliament, representative,
secretary and minister all derive from Latin usually through some
form of French; rule derives from Latin and government through
Latin from Greek.
The foreign origins of political lexicon are of course not irrelevant to
a broader version of the conjecture.а Words
of foreign origin conform only by chance or modification to the phonetic
patterns characteristic of the language into which they are borrowed.а While korolТ
shares the -oro- that marks East Slavic
variants, palatalized l is unusual as the following element at least in
nouns; tsarТ shares the element - arТ common
in modern Russian names for professions (although it takes a sense of humor to
categorize tsarТ together with job titles like slesarТ
or tokarТ) but it is the only one
preceded by a lone consonant rather than the syllabic root of a verb.а Especially when contrasted to words of local
origin designating the ruled, such as narod or
folk, the very foreignness of political vocabulary constructs a phonetic
icon that is an auditory figure against the ground of local sound patterns.
The term sobornostТ may be examined
as a metaphor of East Slavic derivation used in representing a quality said to
be characteristic of political life in Russia.а
Of course the degree to which sobornostТ
is actually a term characteristic of Russian discourse is disputable.а Coined by A. Khomiakov,
a nineteenth century landowner with intellectual pretensions, to describe a
quality he discerned as unique to the Orthodox branch of Christianity, it was
generalized by KhomiakovТs younger associate K. Aksakov to the political life that the latter held, on no
convincing grounds, to be natural for traditional Russia but tragically disrupted
by Peter I and his successors (Wieczynskii 1976, I
82-84; 1980, XVI 171). аIt may possibly
be a sign of the confinement of this concept to a narrow circle of intellectual
dilettantes that the nineteenth-century lexicographer DalТ
did not think the term deserved a separate entry or even mention in his Russian
dictionary.а After the overthrow of the Soviet
Union, some contemporary Russian intellectuals revived the concept as
supposedly distinguishing Russian political practices from the individualism
putatively essential to Western democracy.а
In a book whose English title contrasts democracy with Russian
Уtraditional culture,Ф V. Sergeev and N. Biriukov (1993) claimed that the incompatibility of sobornostТ аwith individualism rendered Russia incapable
of successfully adopting electoral institutions such as a parliament or a
presidency.а Without necessarily using
the term, Russian opponents of the new democracy labeling themselves Уpatriotic
forcesФ bore the concept in mind when they conceived a voluntary association of
persons and movements, each perhaps holding divergent beliefs,
as capable of forming a broad coalition to resurrect a distinctively Russian
statehood in opposition to the new elected Russian government (Prokhanov 1992; Ziuganov 2003).а
While the abstract noun sobornostТ
has circulated only narrowly and belatedly in Russian discourse, it abstracts terms
that have been much more prominent.а The
underlying noun sobor has named both
ecclesiastical and political institutions in traditional Russia, where state is
demarcated from church only vaguely if at all, as is evident in the Russian
chroniclesТ frequent mention of forcible tonsuring of men who fall into
political disfavor or the confinement to nunneries of their wives, sisters and
widows, as well as in the stateТs persecution of religious dissenters.а Of course by metonymy it has also been the
name of the most prominent church building.а
The underlying combination of prefix and verbal stem sobr-
forms the base the agentive sobiratelТ
that, followed by russkikh zemlei, remains an epithet of Iaroslav
Mudryi.а The
same base also generates the nominalization on which Emperor Paul I insists
when the subversive term obshchestvo аcirculates as a
description for those under his power; the emperor demands retention of the
older term sobranie instead (I.F. Protchenko, Leksika i slovoobrazovanie russkogo iazyka sovetskoi epokhi: sotsiolingvisticheskii aspekt, 2nd expanded edition (Moskva,
1985), 127).а In post-Soviet times sobor reappears in the name of various movements
formed by self-designated Уpatriotic forcesФ; sobranie
reappears in the name for the legislative branch of the Russian state
introduced by the Constitution of 1993.а
While in all these usages (except possibly that demanded by Paul I,
depending on whom sobranie includes) sobor/sobranie refers to the ruling stratum, in all
cases the sobor/sobranie is an entity subordinate
to the ultimate authority, whether tsarТ, imperator, or prezident.
In order to express the relational quality of the exercise of political
power, people develop metaphors in pairs designating the participants in the
relationship.а If the forms abstracted by
sobornostТ mention a quality ascribed to the
ruled in Russia, the complement to sobornostТ
mentioning a quality ascribed to rulers has been tsarstvennaia
osoba.а Osoba has meant more than its near synonym litso (itself another bodily metaphor); an osoba has been a litso
with standing, with distinction, with additional status (Institut
1959, VIII 1142-1144).а It is in the
pairing of osoba with the forms abstracted by sobornostТ that the figure-ground metaphor
becomes apparent: in contrast to the ground represented by the absence of distinction
among members in the gathered crowd, the visible figure is the osoba isolated or standing apart.
While the continuities linking Imperial rule to the new state
established after 1917 can easily be exaggerated, one noticeable feature was
the new rulersТ duplication of the old contrast sobornostТ/osoba
in novel form.а Considering themselves after
the model of their leader Lenin to be Marxists, albeit without much justification,
and therefore atheists, the post-1917 rulers perhaps wanted to distinguish themselves
in their own minds from the theological connotations of sobornostТ
while nevertheless retaining its sharp distinction between themselves as
exclusive exercisers of power and the indistinguishable crowd targeted by their
actions.а The old pairing sobornostТ/osoba was replaced in the discourse of
the new Soviet Union by the new juxtaposition kollektiv/deiatelТ.а Of course kollektiv
did not express the same meaning as sobornostТ;
the new rulers were desperately trying to communicate that the meaning of their
rule was different from that of their predecessorsТ domination.а But as an etymological metaphor, it was an
exact copy.а The new term simply
substituted the Latin con- (phonetically assimilated to the following
consonant) for its precise Slavic equivalent s(o)-,
the Latin pluperfect -lect- for the
semantically equivalent Slavic verb stem -b(o)r- , and the Latin
adjectival suffix -iv, stripped of its inflection and reanalyzed by
speakers of modern West European languages as a nominal suffix, for the Slavic
nominal suffix -nostТ (Onions 1966, 190-191,
489).
Meanwhile the existing Russian word deiatelТ
was recruited as a complement to designate those who exercised power over the kollektiv.а While
not directly expressing isolation like its predecessor osoba,
deiatelТ nevertheless took on this
significance from context.а The term
acquired a visual meaning from its frequent pairing with the adjective vidnyi and a connotation of separateness from
pairing with the adjective vydaiushchii, a
connotation that ultimately turned into part of the wordТs denotation.а Moreover, because both English and Russian belong
to language families that soon lost the Proto-Indo-European distinction between
the aspirated and unaspirated voiced dental, words
for doing and dividing have become conflated in both languages.а Russian delo
derives from the same unaspirated form as Russian delitТ, but its contemporary semantic meaning
has drifted much closer to that of etymologically unrelated Russian delatТ deriving from the aspirated form.а The same is true of English deal,
which now belongs in the same semantic field as etymologically unrelated do
but in its original meaning УpartФ has been supplanted by the Latin prefixed
verb form УdivideФ (seemingly a reduplicative combination of two
Proto-Indo-European elements each meaning УseparateФ) (Onions 1966, 247,
279-280).а That is, given the
organization of the Russian language, the term deiatelТ
has associated itself with the meaning of separateness that is explicit in osoba even though nothing in the origins of deiatelТ
аpertains to separateness.а Like its predecessor, and especially in its
frequent contexts vidnyi and vydaiushchii, deiatelТ
became the distinguishable figure against the visual ground of kollektiv. аIts
semantic origin in a word for action reinforced the metaphor by the contrast
between active and passive, the latter expressed in the Latin pluperfect that
would be understood by Russian hearers as contrasting with theа active deiatelТ
by the neutrality of any Latin form on the Slavic active-passive dimension. The
contrast between the Slavic sound of deiatelТ
and the complementary Latinism inverted but therefore reproduced the phonetic iconism of separateness between ruler and ruled.
The question of whether the contrast between sobornostТ
and osoba, reproduced in the contemporary
pairing of kollektiv with deiatelТ,
represents a peculiarity of the Russian language or culture can be addressed by
examining whether metaphors for undemocratic forms of political power show the
same figure-ground contrast in other languages.
English Noble and Commoner
It is immediately apparent that English (a closely related language
deriving from the same ultimate source as Russian) expresses the concept of undemocratic
political power by a distinction precisely parallel to the Russian pairing of sobornostТ with osoba
or kollektiv with deiatelТ.
ааAs the ruling group in England
gradually switched between 1100 and 1400 from speaking Norman French to
speaking English, the French word noble replaced the English heiemen, contemporary Уhigh men,Ф which is attested
as late as 1300, as the name for wielders of political power (Hughes, 110-111).а Noble originates in Latin gnobile, Уknowable,Ф the lost g is still seen
in the contrary form ignoble.а
While contemporary speakers of English may be presumed with great
confidence to be unaware of the Latin derivation of noble, its
pronunciation is barely distinguishable from that of knowable, and a
priming experiment might confidently be predicted to find that either activates
the other, implying that they are associated in cognition.а While the rulers were knowable, those over
whom they ruled acquired the designation commoners.а Originally the distinction was
tripartite.а Peasants who composed the
vast majority of the population were called villeins
or rustics.а In changed spelling
the former term now means Уevildoer,Ф while the latter occurs most often in the
singular as an adjective meaning Уrural.Фа
Neither has remained a social category.а
Commoner was originally the third category for persons who were
neither nobles nor villeins, from a
Latin form that in the emerging Romance languages had come to refer to a town.а Thus commoners were townsmen.а Yet the Latin form came to designate towns
because of its older meaning, which persists as the deontic
meaning of contemporary English common, as interchangeable.а Thus the noble was a distinguishable
figure against the ground of interchangeable and therefore unidentifiable commoners,
with the reference of the latter term gradually extending to displace the
former distinction from peasants.а While
of course the social category of nobles has, with the recent changes in the House
of Lords, at long last finally lost its political significance throughout the
English-speaking world, and the Congress of the United States remains forbidden
by the Constitution to establish a nationwide nobility (Article I, section 9),
the word noble remains in active use both as a designation for a member
of a past social category or for a contemporary category that might exist in
some other country, while particularly in the phrase the common people
its counterpart also remains active.
The earlier heiemen also represented a
designation of rulers by visual salience against a ground composed of the
corresponding lowe
men.а As Talmy
Givon has observed, Уin paired antonymous adjectives,
most typically of size, extension, elevation, texture, loudness, brightness,
speed, weight etc., the positive member of the pairЕ has greater perceptual
saliency.Ф (Talmy Givon, Mind, Code, and Context: Essays in Pragmatics
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 161). Of course
the contrast between the lexical item heiemen
and the combination of head noun with modifier lowe men represents both a phonetic and
a visual icon of the visual metaphor.а
When the composition of the ruling group changed after the victory in
1066, the transition from heiemen to nobles
precisely mirrors the supplanting of osoba by deiatelТ after 1917.
Chinese Jieji
As Chinese thinkers began to contemplate political reform of the Qing dynasty toward the end of the nineteenth century, they
borrowed from Japanese predecessors (who used Chinese characters as kanji
when writing Japanese) the practice of translating the Marxian concept Уsocial
classФ by the pair of traditional painted characters that are transliterated
into Latin script as jieji. This pair of
characters reprises the figure-ground metaphor found in osoba-sobornostТ
and again in noble-commoner.а In
traditional usage jieji meant Уrank of silkФ
and served as a metonym for the hierarchy of Chinese officials whose relative standing
was measured by the quality of silk cloth with which their predecessors had
once been remunerated in kind.а By the Qing dynasty, however, the term had fallen into
disuse.а As separate characters, jie means Уrungs on a ladderФ and by extension Уladder,Ф
while ji means Уsilk clothФ and by extension
УclothФ in general (I thank my student Bang Zhou for carefully investigating
the history of this term in Chinese sources that I cannot read or even cite and
for writing the term for me in both formal and cursive characters.а He is not responsible for my interpretation,
with which he disagrees).а
Both conceptually and graphemically the use of
jieji as a metaphor for political power
expresses the experience of vision.а
Conceptually, a ladder has the same structure as cloth woven from
threads: both are composed of vertical and horizontal members at right
angles.а At the same time, a ladder
functions only if the vertical and horizontal members are visually separate Ц
otherwise it is at best a ramp that cannot be used to climb at a sharp vertical
angle; conversely, a cloth functions only if the threads are so close together
as to be nearly indistinguishable Ц otherwise it is a net that is useless as a
cloth. Graphemically both the formal character and the modern cursive character for jieji present reduplicative visual icons of the
conceptual relationship.а Formal
Chinese characters consist of a cue to meaning on the left and a cue to sound
on the right (Unger 1996, 46-47).а The
cue to meaning in jie is the character
pronounced fu, translated Уhill,Ф a common meaning cue in words
mentioning elevation or things found in association with elevations.а Its initial element looks like an English
cursive capital B (Russian v) with the leftmost vertical elongated
downward; visualize B on a pole.а As the
eye moves to the right, a parallelogram occurs that, consisting of two
elongated strokes at angles to three shorter strokes, looks at least to a
Western eye very like a depiction of a ladder in perspective.а Both the meaning and the sound element of the
formal character ji contain shapes that
suggest folds of cloth.а In the cursive
form, jie and ji
are both written with vertical squiggles, but the horizontal strokes of the
cursive jie are further apart and visually
more distinct than the corresponding elements of cursive ji,
with the result that the representation of jie
is higher than that of ji.а Remarkably the visual icon is preserved even
in pinyin transliteration, as jie
contains one more alphabetic character than does ji.
While jieji was used to translate the
Marxian concept of social class, in extralinguistic
context it had the same meaning as noble-commoner.а Even at the end of the nineteenth century,
China of course had developed very little or nothing in the way of either a
bourgeoisie or a proletariat in MarxТs sense, and in describing China, any term
for Уsocial classФ could describe only the traditional distinction between shi
and simin, УliteratiФ and Уcity folk,Ф that
like noble-commoner simply omitted the peasants who composed the
vast bulk of the Chinese population.а In
translating social class, jieji meant the
exercise of political power.а As in the
case of noble-commoner, when the Qing dynasty
was overthrown and ultimately a new authoritarian republic replaced it, the
revived term displaced an earlier distinction in terms of elevation between shang and xia,
Уthose aboveФ and Уthose belowФ (Judge 1996, 33).
Arabic rucat-raciyya
According to Ami Ayalon (1987, 44), УUntil the
twentieth century there had been one Arabic expression to indicate the
political status of the ruled: raciyya
[meaning] herd or flock of livestock.Фа
Its complement for the rulers was rucat, Уshepherds,Ф since in the Arabic-speaking world, the herd
most often consisted of sheep.а The
distinctive figure of the shepherd stood out against the ground of nearly
indistinguishable sheep; his vertical torso and staff contrasted with the
horizontal orientation of the sheep torsos and elevated him above them.а As Turkish rule began to deteriorate, a new
metaphor emerged in Arabic to mention the local authorities who displaced
central power: acyan, Уeyes,Ф (Ayalon 1987, 66) the significance of which as a metaphor of
vision, focus of attention and verticality in the body hardly requires further comment
(Ayalon 1987, 44, 61).
The earlier shepherd-flock distinction goes far back in Semitic
tradition.а For example, it is found in
Psalm 23 traditionally attributed to King David: УThe Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not wantЕ.Фа And its contrast of
vertical orientation for the ruler versus horizontal orientation for the ruled
is even older.а Around 1800 B.C. Old
Babylonian refers to a member of the class of royal servitors as awilum, Уman,Ф but to one of those over whom they
ruled as mushkenum, Уone who prostates himselfФ
(Schloen 2001, 285-286).а Even earlier a diagram of an upper torso
turned sideways began to signify УmanФ in Sumerian writing, while rulers were
mentioned in writing by a vertical diagram of a standard, a pole topped by a
banner or sign with a wedge on the bottom for insertion into a hole dug to keep
it upright (Kramer 1963, 302; Szarzyńska 1996,
1-15).а As powerholders
writing in Sumerian were replaced by writers of Semitic languages, first Akkadian, then Aramaic, and ultimately Arabic, new
metaphors emerged, but each new metaphor replicated the original distinction
pitting the visually salient vertical figure against the ground of the
horizontal.
Javanese unggah-ungguh
In traditional Javanese society kings ruled with the aid of their priyayi, a loanword derived from Sanskrit priya, Уfriend,Ф reprised probably by accident in
Russian priiatelТ.а The priyayi
might be kinsmen of the king in various degree or unrelated appointees to
offices of various importance.а When two priyayi
met, they needed to determine who was entitled to the elaborate deference
encoded in krama, the esoteric form of
Javanese taught only to the sons of priyayi.а The determination depended on weighing the
status conferred by closeness of kinship against importance of office.а They signaled this mutual determination by
the paralinguistic gesture known as unggah-ungguh,
each extending his parallel forearms forward and turning the palms upward and
then moving the upturned palms up and down.а
While interpreted as an imitation of balancing scales, visually this
practice signified the determination of rank by the relative elevation of the
palms.а In turn it likened the priyayi to the focus of visual attention against the
unseen wong cilik, Уlittle people,Ф who lacking social rank and
having learned only the unelaborated form of Javanese ngoko
or perhaps the intermediate madya, were unable
to display linguistic deference and therefore had no use for performing unggah-ungguh (Errington
1985, 4, 27-40).
Thus the power in traditional Java was symbolized by a visual metaphor
of relative height contrasting the figure of action by the rulers to the ground
of inaction of the ruled.
Wolof УConspicuous DisfluencyФ
Speakers of Wolof are concentrated in Senegal although spilling over, as
is customary in post-colonial Africa, into neighboring states whose boundaries
were established without regard for local ethnic identities by foreign
colonizing powers.а Wolof speakers
distinguish between waxu gewel, a laconic form stereotypically associated with
members of the caste that ruled before colonial occupation but continues to be
identifiable, and waxu geer,
full of emotional expressiveness and metaphorical variety and increasingly
frequent as social rank diminishes until it is used most fully by the griot caste whose task it is express sentiments that
would be undignified if voiced by persons of more importance.а While Wolof speakers attribute waxu gewel and waxu geer to the
powerful and the powerless respectively, observation reveals that speakers
generally use both forms, depending on whether their social rank or immediate
needs enable them to demand or compel them to request favors from their
interlocutor.а Consequently, outranking
all others, the Wolof chief rarely or never engages in waxu
geer.а His
speech and that of other important men tends to be marked by Уconspicuous disfluencyФ: a continuous slurred mumble displaying
hesitancy, repetitiveness and frequent grammatical errors.а The Wolof explain
the need for the powerful to restrict themselves to waxu
geer by the greater weight of their words that
would otherwise crush people with less rank (Irvine 1990, 131-145).а While weight is a tactile rather than a
visual metaphor, it entails a visual component.а
Weight matters because the powerful may bear down on the
powerless.а Thus in the Wolof conception
the powerful are elevated, as they are in the other cases, and because greater
weight in humans is associated with larger size, the powerful are also
construed as visually enlarged relative to the less powerful.а While in the description of the Wolof case
available to me, the figure-ground metaphor is only implicit, it still
organizes the conception of political power.
аConclusion
A thousand years of intermittent strife marks the interaction between
speakers of English and of Arabic.а
Russian speakers and Chinese speakers have clashed again and again during
the three centuries since the eastward spread of the one and northwest spread
of the other brought them into contact.а
Frenchmen using the metaphor noble conquered the Wolof, and
Dutchmen who still call their government the overheid,
Уthat which is above,Ф subdued the Javanese.а
Even if Russian speakers and English speakers may rarely have fought, neither
the Cold War nor the subsequent development of independent RussiaТs relations
with the United States can be described as a consistent record of mutual
concord.а None of this strife can be
attributed to differences in cultural conceptions of political power, since the
cultural conceptions in question are constructed in the same way.а Of course metaphors of political power do not
exhaust cultures, and nothing I have said excludes the possibility that some
other cultural trait may underlie conflict.
It would possible to imagine a process of cultural diffusion rather than
independent conception by which the observations I have reported spread from a
common Sumerian source.а Some scholars think
that traders brought Sumerian writing down one river, along the coast and up
another river to Indian Harappa, where it either became
known to invaders who brought Indo-European speech, or was adapted by the
locals who adopted foreignersТ Indo-European speech, or even may have been
modified by the locals who were the first users of Indo-European.а Perhaps the SumeriansТ vertical-horizontal
distinction between rulers and ruled spread with their script.а Since cultural diffusion invariably proceeds
by misunderstanding that leads to modification, Sumerian forms, which
originated from the chance transposition of an originally vertical diagram of
the torso into a horizontal one when their writing turned from vertical columns
to horizontal lines, may conceivably have turned into the source for the
vertical Vedic conception of priests who sprang from the forehead of the
principal god, rulers from his arms, their subjects from his belly, all resting
on labor by those born of his feet.а
Hindu traders took it along with their Sanskrit word priya
as far as Java, while Buddhist missionaries could have spread the vertical
conception to China where it became Уthose aboveФ and Уthose below.Ф From the
Chinese, Mongols and Tatars may have taken it to Russia.а Meanwhile Greeks could have acquired it with
the syllabary that they turned into an alphabet and
handed it along to Romans from whom speakers of early Germanic languages,
including the predecessor of English, might have understood no more than the
Chinese and ended up with УhighФ and Уlow.Фа
Arabs penetrating into West Africa might have been dimly understood by
speakers of languages that ultimately became Wolof who might have thought that
weight distinguished a herdsman from an animal, the sheep,
that they had never seen.а It
would be interesting to know whether Amerind
languages show this same distinction, but thus far I have been unable to find
an account containing the necessary information.а And even then contacts across the Pacific are
not out of the question, although reliance on them would strain the credibility
of the process.
It is a matter of intellectual curiosity whether this fanciful process
of diffusion or the far less demanding hypothesis of independent invention from
experience of a shared human body accounts for the pattern of the
representation of political power by visual figure-ground metaphors.а In any case the receptivity to a common
metaphor, whether independently conceived or transmitted by contact, must be a
sign the people could understand visual contrast and vertical elevation by
consulting their own ordinary bodily experience.
While the cross-cultural similarity in concepts of political power
precludes the supposition that they can account for strife among members of
different cultural communities, the character of these conceptions precludes
the hypothesis that they explain why some communities democratize while others
retain authoritarian rule.а A
figure-ground contrast between rulers and ruled does not prevent
democratization, it enables it.а As
speakers of a language learn to represent political oppression in terms of a
figure-ground metaphor, they also acquire a capacity easily to imagine what the
elimination of oppression would look like: all they have to do is subtract
either the figure or the ground.а Thus
Americans liberating themselves from English overlords simply wrote a
Constitution eliminating nobility; only commoners would be left, and while the
particular Americans composing the Constitution desired to preserve slavery,
exterminate the indigenous population, and limit popular influence on politics,
their erasure of half the metaphor of political domination has continuously
subverted accomplishment of their original goals.а If one looks at the discourse of Russia after
1991, it is striking how deiatelТ has
dwindled and kollektiv has become specialized
to trudovye kollektivy,
the workforce of enterprises, whose continuing privatization has removed the
term from the semantic field of politics.а
It is perfectly true that a new metaphor like siloviki
reproduces the perceptual salience of paired antonymous adjectives and that upravliaemaia demokratiia
reproduces the Slavic-foreign phonetic iconism
characteristic of traditional Russia, but these instances are at most weak
echoes of past undemocratic patterns that hold promise for the same kind of
slow movement with plenty of reversals that characterizes the development of
any democratic state.
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