1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458551303321

Titolo

Vehicles : cars, canoes, and other metaphors of moral ambivalence / / edited by David Lipset and Richard Handler ; contributors, Mark Auslander [and eight others]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York ; ; Oxford, [England] : , : Berghahn Books, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

1-78533-751-3

1-78238-376-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (224 pages)

Disciplina

629.04/6

Soggetti

Vehicles - Social aspects

Transportation - Social aspects

Material culture

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction - Charon's Boat and Other Vehicles of Moral Imagination; Part I - Persons as Vehicles; Chapter 1 - Living Canoes: Vehicles of Popular Imagination among the Murik of Papua New Guinea; Chapter 2 - Cars, Persons, and Streets: Erving Goffman and the Analysis of Traffic Rules; 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

Chapter 4 - Is Female to Male as Lightweight Cars Are to Sports Cars? Gender Metaphors and Cognitive Schemas in Recessionary JapanPart III - Equivocal Vehicles; Chapter 5 - Little Cars that Make Us Cry: Yugoslav Fica as a Vehicle for Social Commentary and Ritual Restoration of Innocence; Chapter 6 - ""Let's Go F.B.!"": Metaphors of Cars and Corruption in China; Chapter 7 - Barrio Metaxis: Ambivalent Aesthetics in Mexican-American Lowrider Cars; Chapter 8 - Driving into the Light: Traversing Life and Death in a Lynching Reenactment by African-Americans; Afterword - Quo Vadis?; Contributors



Index

Sommario/riassunto

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,