Washing the Brain - Metaphor and Hidden Ideology
Washing the Brain - Metaphor and Hidden Ideology
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Author(s): Goatly, Andrew
ISBN No.: 9789027227133
Pages: 449
Year: 200701
Format: Trade Cloth (Hard Cover)
Price: $ 181.03
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude , investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is, in fact, culturally relative, compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover, event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and, as the basis for technological mega-projects, has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore, the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21st century, ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises.


The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor'e(tm)s reductionist tendencies.


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