Metaphor, as an act of human fancy, combines ideas in improbable ways to sharpen meanings of life and experience. Theoretically, this arises from an association between a sign-for example, a cattle car-and its referent, the Holocaust. These "sign-vehicles" serve as modes of semiotic transportation through conceptual space. Likewise, on-the-ground vehicles can be rich metaphors for the moral imagination. Following on this insight, Vehicles presents a collection of ethnographic essays on the metaphoric significance of vehicles in different cultures. Analyses include canoes in Papua New Guinea, pedestrians and airplanes in North America, lowriders among Mexican-Americans, and cars in contemporary China, Japan, and Eastern Europe, as well as among African-Americans in the South. Vehicles not only "carry people around," but also "carry" how they are understood in relation to the dynamics of culture, politics and history.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Charon's Boat and Other Vehicles of Moral Imagination
David Lipset
PART I: PERSONS AS VEHICLES
Chapter 1. Living Canoes: Vehicles of Moral Imagination among the Murik of Papua New Guinea
David Lipset
Chapter 2. Cars, Persons, and Streets: Erving Goffman and the Analysis of Traffic Rules
Richard Handler
PART II: VEHICLES AS GENDERED PERSONS
Chapter 3. "It's Not an Airplane, It's My Baby": Using a Gender Metaphor to Make Sense of Old Warplanes in North America
Kent Wayland
Chapter 4. Is Female to Male as Lightweight Cars Are to Sports Cars?: Gender Metaphors and Cognitive Schemas in Recessionary Japan
Joshua Hotaka Roth
PART III: EQUIVOCAL VEHICLES
Chapter 5. Little Cars that Make Us Cry: Yugoslav Fića as a Vehicle for Social Commentary and Ritual Restoration of Innocence
Marko Živković
Chapter 6. “Let’s Go F.B.!”: Metaphors of Cars and Corruption in China
Beth E. Notar
Chapter 7. Barrio Metaxis: Ambivalent Aesthetics in Mexican American Lowrider Cars
Ben Chappell
Chapter 8. Driving into the Light: Traversing Life and Death in a Lynching Reenactment by African-Americans
Mark Auslander
Afterword: Quo Vadis?
James W. Fernandez
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the Author :
David Lipset is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and has conducted fieldwork among the Murik Lakes people in Papua New Guinea since 1981. He is the author of two books, Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist (1982) and Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary (1997) as well as articles on culture, masculinity and modernity in Melanesia. His most recent book (co-edited with Paul Roscoe) is Echoes of the Tambaran: Masculinity, History and the Subject in the Work of Donald F. Tuzin (2011). Richard Handler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he is Director of the Program in Global Development Studies. He has written extensively on nationalism and the politics of culture, museums, and the history of anthropology. His most recent book is Critics Against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Society (2005).
Review :
"The essays in this collection offer fresh perspectives on the social role of transportation. I appreciated the weight given to Pacific cultures, which are not as common in conversations about mobility writ large. Though they do undoubtedly use anthropological methods and ask anthropological questions, they also model innovative ways for discussing how technologies enable their drivers and passengers to engage in an embodied relationship to the past." * Technology and Culture
