![]() Since there are typically fewer individuals at each level of society as one "ascends," the Pyramid is the "natural" trope for both. As Marx long ago pointed out, every dominant class inscribes its domination into the image of nature and for this to be possible, the principle of hierarchy must itself be unquestioned natural law.īoth social and cosmic hierarchies have traditionally been figured as verticality. The reasons for this projection of social hierarchy onto the cosmos are all too obvious. The next links are the mammals and birds, followed by the reptiles, the fish, the insects and other arthropods, the plants, and finally the rocks and minerals. A few links further back are human beings_or rather, Man, to whom Woman is subordinated. Next in rank are the spirits of the air, dragons, devas, or angels. Entire societies must be ranked as well: by size of social unit, military prowess or aggressiveness, degree of urbanization or mechanization, use of literacy or mathematics_or again by type of religious belief.Ĭivilized thought has typically inserted this social and intersocial hierarchy into a natural or cosmic one: the "Great Chain of Being." At one end of this chain are the gods or God. ![]() Human japanese pyramid collapse skin#This ranking is carried out along multiple and overlapping axes: gender (and possession of certain gendered characteristics) wealth (and how long one's family has possessed it) occupation (or hereditary occupational caste) skin tone (or other racial markers) regional origin tribal or religious affiliation and so forth. To begin with, all individuals in a society must be ranked. The PyramidĮver since the growth of patriarchy, caste, and class out of settled agriculture millennia ago, hierarchy has been as central to thought as it has to social organization. Such a shift is what I now propose_or rather, as it has already begun to take place, it is what I intend to foreground and clarify. ![]() Nevertheless, just as we can resist our predisposition to behave like chimpanzees even though we are genetically almost identical to them, so we may shift even these hypothetical "deep structures" toward new ones that better fit our experience and understanding. Some of the most basic meta-metaphors may in fact be partly "hardwired" in our brains out of our evolutionary history as primates or as mammals_since land mammals demonstrably share a language of facial and bodily expression, of which "primate" is a dialect. But I contend that metaphoric structuring extends beyond the word into all our signifying activity. Since they are mainly concerned with language as such, Lakoff and Turner demonstrate this metaphoric structuring by recourse to the dead and dying tropes buried in everyday speech. The structuring goes so deep in our consciousness that it is almost impossible to talk about time without invoking the journey metaphor in one way or another. ![]() For instance, in their study More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner show how our thinking about time is structured by the metaphor of the journey. As different corals have different characteristic shapes, so various areas of our thinking are dominated by certain meta-metaphors or metaphoric structures. Thought is a vast coral, whose "worms" are living metaphors and whose reef is composed of dead ones. All abstractions (including the word "abstraction") derive from terms for concrete experiences. ![]()
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