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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.
“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
“…the book succeeds in demonstrating that vehicles of all sorts may powerfully affect our ways of looking at the world, even as they help us travel through it.” · Transfers
“This edited volume compiles a set of original ethno-graphic case studies focusing on the diverse ways vehicles that convey people through geospatial territory and also convey metaphorical meanings and constructions of the moral…while there has been plenty of attention given to what vehicles signify, there has been little given to how vehicles signify, which is precisely where this book.” · Anthropos
“This volume, Vehicles, is exceptionally important not only for anthropology but for other scientific fields as well. It addresses a core human activity, driving, which appears likely to become a relic of, primarily, the 20th century.” · Anthropological Notebooks
“This book offers ethnographic journeys into the daily work of cultural imaginations by giving attention to what is generally neglected: their vehicles. Not only functional supports or futile material dresses, cars, boats or planes are here delightedly addressed as morale-boosting devices engaged in situated social relations… These essays show that vehicular units are always participation units—they are always vernacular units of cultural agency.” · Pierre Lanoy, Université Libre de Bruxelles
“…An excellent and original volume, a fine example of what comparative anthropology can achieve. Furthermore, in addition to its main topic and objectives (about particular metaphors, what they ‘do’ and how they ‘work’), it addresses key issues in the study of objects, material culture, and techniques, namely the involvement of materiality in non-verbal communication.” · Pierre Lemonnier, Université d'Aix-Marseille
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