What does metaphor have to do with culture? A short (and vague) answer may be that metaphor and culture are related in many ways. For example, one way in which metaphor and culture are connected in our mind arises from what we have learned about metaphor in school: Creative writers and poets commonly use metaphors, and because literature is a part of culture, metaphor and culture can be seen as intimately linked. After all, metaphor can be viewed as the ornamental use of language. Thus, metaphor and culture may be seen as being related to each other because they are combined in literature – an exemplary manifestation of culture. This is a possible way of thinking of the relationship, and I will deal with it in various places in the present work.

But this is not the kind of relationship between the two that interests me in the present context. I have in mind a much more fundamental connection between them that can be explained in the following way: In line with some current thinking in anthropology, we can think of culture as a set of shared understandings that characterize smaller or larger groups of people (e.g., D'Andrade, 1995; Shore, 1996; Strauss and Quinn, 1997).This is not an exhaustive definition of culture, in that it leaves out real objects, artifacts, institutions, practices, actions, and so on, that people use and participate in in any culture, but it includes a large portion of it: namely, the shared understandings that people have in connection with all of these “things.”