The general question that I will be concerned with in this book is the following: To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society?

Clearly, any answer to this question forces us to consider issues typically discussed in two broad ranges of disciplines: cognitive science and the social sciences. Typical representatives of the former include contemporary cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, whereas a chief representative of the latter is anthropology in its several forms (symbolic, cultural, semantic, etc.). Metaphor has been of great interest to many anthropologists since the very beginnings of the field (see, for example, Fernandez, 1986, 1991). The general difference between the two ranges of disciplines in the handling of metaphor seems to be a slightly different focus on what they find most important in the study of metaphor. Whereas scholars in cognitive science tend to ask, “What is metaphor?” and “How does it work in the mind?” scholars in the social sciences tend to focus on the issue of “What does metaphor do in particular social-cultural contexts?”

Many anthropologists working on issues related to metaphor had found new inspiration for their work in the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor that was first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their widely read book Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). But it soon became clear that, although in many ways inspirational, this book (and much of the research that grew out of it; see Kövecses, 2002) does not in every way meet the needs of anthropologists.