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Ричард Д. Андерсон (мл.).
Лос-Анжелес, США ON A CROSS-CULTURAL RESEMBLANCE AMONG CERTAIN METAPHORS FOR POLITICAL POWER
Abstract
В статье анализируются метафоры, связанные с телесным опытом человека и используемые для формирования представлений о политической власти в разных культурах. Ориентация пространстве, чувственные огцугцения, манипуляция объектами и движение - все это телесный опыт известный как слушателю, так и говорящему в любой культуре. Основываясь на анализе метафор из английского, русского, арабского, китайского и других языков, автор рассматривает межкультурное подобие метафор власти в контексте проблем демократизации, отношений власти и общества, меж-
культурных конфликтов.
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The body supplies the basis for a wide variety of metaphors that humans use to communicate the meaning of abstractions such as political power. Orientation, sensation, interaction, manipulation, and movement are all bodily experiences familiar to both hearers and speakers. Knowing that these experiences are shared by their hearers, speakers can confidently assume that lexical items mentioning bodily experience will be understood by hearers when used as metaphors to talk about abstractions presented as unfamiliar. Since the bodies found in any human community are very similar, it follows from the use of shared bodily experience to construct metaphors that differ-
ent linguistic communities could use the same bodily experience to construct their representations of political power.
This conjecture flies in the face of arguments, such as those made by Russian evraziisty or by the American Samuel P. Huntington in his famous (or, perhaps, infamous) Clash of Civilizations that cultures differ in their conceptions of political power and that these disagreements produce both contrasting paths of internal development and ongoing strife between cultural communities known as civilizations. It is perfectly true that linguistic forms expressing the same notion will seldom if ever coincide from one language to the next, and then almost exclusively because of common roots or borrowing. While English and Russian, for example, display a substantial common vocabulary, especially if we accept divergent pronunciations such as brat and brother or us and nas or even otets and father as representing a single shared word in each case, this sharing of vocabulary is attributable not to the common features of English-speaking and Russian-speaking bodies but to the combination of shared linguistic origins, occasional borrowing from Russian into English and vice versa, and frequent common borrowing from third languages, particularly Greek or French. Thus pairs like democ-racy-demokratiia are not relevant to the hypothesis; nor are calques like people power and narodovlastie. It is the resemblances among independent metaphors not derived from any common linguistic source that concern me here.
Language possesses the paradoxical feature that while each utterance is an event of very brief duration, continuing repetition of these abbreviated events perpetuates various features of any natural language almost unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. As the examples of brat and brother reveal, some speakers mentioning male siblings have repeated identical or very similar articulations for five or six millennia regardless of whether the speech of their communities has remained or ever was mutually intelligible. Accordingly the contemporary political lexicon of any language draws on metaphors composed from items left over from many centuries ago. Because representative democracy (as opposed to classical Greek forms) is such a recent phenomenon, during almost the whole period of the development of any language, political power is exercised by a few rulers controlling a multitude of the ruled. Accordingly the metaphors for political power in contemporary language include some drawing a distinction between rulers and ruled.
If a set of these metaphors drawn from widely scattered languages is subjected to close examination, they display a common feature. Their source domain is the bodily experience of seeing, which proceeds by distinguishing a figure against the ground composed of all other objects and then compiling the various figures into a composite that humans experience slightly later as
a holistic visual image. In the case of each member of the set of metaphors to be examined, the original etymological form is a figure-ground metaphor in which the wielders of political power are represented by some kind of figure visible against a ground constituted by those denied political power. Terminology to be discussed is drawn from Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, Javanese and Wolof. Because contacts among these languages, sometimes direct, sometimes mediated through Arabic or through languages not on the list, are of very long standing, the possibility of contagion cannot be absolutely excluded, but on the other hand this sample is quite scattered and the languages in question do not all belong even to the same typological categories.
A Russian Metaphor of Political Power. Any form of political power is a relationship between the few who exercise it and the many who experience it. It is a noticeable feature of Russian that many words designating those who exercise power derive from linguistic sources foreign to the language’s East Slavic base. The traditional terms kniaz’ and korol’ were borrowed from Germanic sources, tsar’ and imperator from Latin, boiarin’ apparently from Turkish, gosudar’from South Slavic. For the modern terms sekretar’, ministr, prezident and deputat Russian has turned to French, and when Peter I recast the service class, he took shlakhetstvo from Polish and looked to Swedish and German for particular titles of rank (M. Raeff, “La Noblesse et le discours politique sous le regne de Pierre le Grand,” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique (1993) 34(1-2):34-35, 39). Among the pre-revolutionary terms dvorianin and znat’ and among the newer ones predsedatel’ are East Slavic, but at least the last two of these are presumably calques (respectively of French originals) and even the first one has been alleged to be (from a derivative of German hof). In any case the dvoriane originally occupied the lowest rank of the ruling group, and it was only because the holder of the title tsar’ relied on them in his conflict with boiare that the term gradually extended to encompass more exalted servitors. Of course Russian is not unique in this regard. English noble, president, senator, member of parliament, representative, secretary and minister all derive from Latin usually through some form of French; rule derives from Latin and government through Latin from Greek.
The foreign origins of political lexicon are of course not irrelevant to a broader version of the conjecture. Words of foreign origin conform only by chance or modification to the phonetic patterns characteristic of the language into which they are borrowed. While korol’ shares the -oro- that marks East Slavic variants, palatalized l is unusual as the following element at least in nouns; tsar’ shares the element - ar’ common in modern Russian names for professions (although it takes a sense of humor to categorize tsar’ together with job titles like slesar’ or tokar) but it is the only one preceded by a lone consonant rather than the syllabic root of a verb. Especially when con-
trasted to words of local origin designating the ruled, such as narod or folk, the very foreignness of political vocabulary constructs a phonetic icon that is an auditory figure against the ground of local sound patterns.
The term sobornost’ may be examined as a metaphor of East Slavic derivation used in representing a quality said to be characteristic of political life in Russia. Of course the degree to which sobornost’ is actually a term characteristic of Russian discourse is disputable. Coined by A. Khomiakov, a nineteenth century landowner with intellectual pretensions, to describe a quality he discerned as unique to the Orthodox branch of Christianity, it was generalized by Khomiakov’s younger associate K. Aksakov to the political life that the latter held, on no convincing grounds, to be natural for traditional Russia but tragically disrupted by Peter I and his successors. It may possibly be a sign of the confinement of this concept to a narrow circle of intellectual dilettantes that the nineteenth-century lexicographer Dal’ did not think the term deserved a separate entry or even mention in his Russian dictionary. After the overthrow of the Soviet Union, some contemporary Russian intellectuals revived the concept as supposedly distinguishing Russian political practices from the individualism putatively essential to Western democracy. In a book whose English title contrasts democracy with Russian "traditional culture,” V. Sergeev and N. Biriukov claimed that the incompatibility of sobornost’ with individualism rendered Russia incapable of successfully adopting electoral institutions such as a parliament or a presidency (V. Sergeyev, N. Biryukov, Russia's Road to Democracy: Parliament, Communism, and Traditional Culture (Brookfield, Vt.: E. Elgar, 1993)). Without necessarily using the term, Russian opponents of the new democracy labeling themselves "patriotic forces” bore the concept in mind when they conceived a voluntary association of persons and movements, each perhaps holding divergent beliefs, as capable of forming a broad coalition to resurrect a distinctively Russian statehood in opposition to the new elected Russian government (A. Prokhanov, “A ty gotov postoiat' za Rossiiu?” Den' 25-31 October, 1992. This is the text of his speech at the founding congress of the Front for National Salvation held in the same month. The same illusion continues to underlie the strategy propounded by the leader of the now dwindling Communist Party of the Russian Federation: see G. A. Ziuganov, Vernost’ (Moskva: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003)).
While the abstract noun sobornost’ has circulated only narrowly and belatedly in Russian discourse, it abstracts terms that have been much more prominent. The underlying noun sobor has named both ecclesiastical and political institutions in traditional Russia, where state is demarcated from church only vaguely if at all, as is evident in the Russian chronicles’ frequent mention of forcible tonsuring of men who fall into political disfavor or the confinement to nunneries of their wives, sisters and widows, as well as in the state’s persecution of religious dissenters. Of course by metonymy it has also been the name of the most prominent church building. The underlying combination of prefix and verbal stem sobr- forms the base the agentive so-
biratel’ that, followed by russkikh zemlei, remains an epithet of Iaroslav Mudryi. The same base also generates the nominalization on which Emperor Paul I insists when the subversive term obshchestvo circulates as a description for those under his power; the emperor demands retention of the older term sobranie instead (I.F. Protchenko, Leksika i slovoobrazovanie russkogo iazyka sovetskoi epokhi: sotsiolingvisticheskii aspekt, 2nd expanded edition (Moskva, 1985),
127). In post-Soviet times sobor reappears in the name of various movements formed by self-designated "patriotic forces”; sobranie reappears in the name for the legislative branch of the Russian state introduced by the Constitution of 1993. While in all these usages (except possibly that demanded by Paul I, depending on whom sobranie includes) sobor/sobranie refers to the ruling stratum, in all cases the sobor/sobranie is an entity subordinate to the ultimate authority, whether tsar’, imperator, or prezident.
In order to express the relational quality of the exercise of political power, people develop metaphors in pairs designating the participants in the relationship. If the forms abstracted by sobornost’ mention a quality ascribed to the ruled in Russia, the complement to sobornost’ mentioning a quality ascribed to rulers has been tsarstvennaia osoba. Osoba has meant more than its near synonym litso (itself another bodily metaphor); an osoba has been a litso with standing, with distinction, with additional status. It is in the pairing of osoba with the forms abstracted by sobornost’ that the figure-ground metaphor becomes apparent: in contrast to the ground represented by the absence of distinction among members in the gathered crowd, the visible figure is the osoba isolated or standing apart.
While the continuities linking Imperial rule to the new state established after 1917 can easily be exaggerated, one noticeable feature was the new rulers’ duplication of the old contrast sobornost’/osoba in novel form. Considering themselves after the model of their leader Lenin to be Marxists, albeit without much justification, and therefore atheists, the post-1917 rulers perhaps wanted to distinguish themselves in their own minds from the theological connotations of sobornost’ while nevertheless retaining its sharp distinction between themselves as exclusive exercisers of power and the indistinguishable crowd targeted by their actions. The old pairing sobor-nost’/osoba was replaced in the discourse of the new Soviet Union by the new juxtaposition kollektiv/deiatel’. Of course kollektiv did not express the same meaning as sobornost’; the new rulers were desperately trying to communicate that the meaning of their rule was different from that of their predecessors’ domination. But as an etymological metaphor, it was an exact copy. The new term simply substituted the Latin con- (phonetically assimilated to the following consonant) for its precise Slavic equivalent s(o)-, the Latin pluperfect -lect- for the semantically equivalent Slavic verb stem -b(o)r-, and the Latin adjectival suffix -iv, stripped of its inflection and reanalyzed by
speakers of modern West European languages as a nominal suffix, for the Slavic nominal suffix -nost'.
Meanwhile the existing Russian word deiatel' was recruited as a complement to designate those who exercised power over the kollektiv. While not directly expressing isolation like its predecessor osoba, deiatel’ nevertheless took on this significance from context. The term acquired a visual meaning from its frequent pairing with the adjective vidnyi and a connotation of separateness from pairing with the adjective vydaiushchii, a connotation that ultimately turned into part of the word’s denotation. Moreover, because both English and Russian belong to language families that soon lost the Proto-Indo-European distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated voiced dental, words for doing and dividing have become conflated in both languages. Russian delo derives from the same unaspirated form as Russian delit’, but its contemporary semantic meaning has drifted much closer to that of etymologically unrelated Russian delat’ deriving from the aspirated form. The same is true of English deal, which now belongs in the same semantic field as etymologically unrelated do but in its original meaning "part” has been supplanted by the Latin prefixed verb form "divide” (seemingly a reduplicative combination of two Proto-Indo-European elements each meaning "separate”). That is, given the organization of the Russian language, the term deiatel' has associated itself with the meaning of separateness that is explicit in osoba even though nothing in the origins of deiatel’ pertains to separateness. Like its predecessor, and especially in its frequent contexts vidnyi and vydaiushchii, deiatel' became the distinguishable figure against the visual ground of kollektiv. Its semantic origin in a word for action reinforced the metaphor by the contrast between active and passive, the latter expressed in the Latin pluperfect that would be understood by Russian hearers as contrasting with the active deiatel' by the neutrality of any Latin form on the Slavic active-passive dimension. The contrast between the Slavic sound of deiatel' and the complementary Latinism inverted but therefore reproduced the phonetic iconism of separateness between ruler and ruled.
The question of whether the contrast between sobornost' and osoba, reproduced in the contemporary pairing of kollektiv with deiatel’, represents a peculiarity of the Russian language or culture can be addressed by examining whether metaphors for undemocratic forms of political power show the same figure-ground contrast in other languages.
English Noble and Commoner. It is immediately apparent that English (a closely related language deriving from the same ultimate source as Russian) expresses the concept of undemocratic political power by a distinction precisely parallel to the Russian pairing of sobornost’ with osoba or kollektiv with deiatel’. As the ruling group in England gradually switched between 1100
and 1400 from speaking Norman French to speaking English, the French word noble replaced the English heiemen, contemporary "high men,” which is attested as late as 1300, as the name for wielders of political power. Noble originates in Latin gnobile, “knowable,” the lost g is still seen in the contrary form ignoble. While contemporary speakers of English may be presumed with great confidence to be unaware of the Latin derivation of noble, its pronunciation is barely distinguishable from that of knowable, and a priming experiment might confidently be predicted to find that either activates the other, implying that they are associated in cognition. While the rulers were knowable, those over whom they ruled acquired the designation commoners. Originally the distinction was tripartite. Peasants who composed the vast majority of the population were called villeins or rustics. In changed spelling the former term now means "evildoer,” while the latter occurs most often in the singular as an adjective meaning "rural.” Neither has remained a social category. Commoner was originally the third category for persons who were neither nobles nor villeins, from a Latin form that in the emerging Romance languages had come to refer to a town. Thus commoners were townsmen. Yet the Latin form came to designate towns because of its older meaning, which persists as the deontic meaning of contemporary English common, as interchangeable. Thus the noble was a distinguishable figure against the ground of interchangeable and therefore unidentifiable commoners, with the reference of the latter term gradually extending to displace the former distinction from peasants. While of course the social category of nobles has, with the recent changes in the House of Lords, at long last finally lost its political significance throughout the English-speaking world, and the Congress of the United States remains forbidden by the Constitution to establish a nationwide nobility (Article I, section 9), the word noble remains in active use both as a designation for a member of a past social category or for a contemporary category that might exist in some other country, while particularly in the phrase the common people its counterpart also remains active.
The earlier heiemen also represented a designation of rulers by visual salience against a ground composed of the corresponding lowe men. As Talmy Givon has observed, "in paired antonymous adjectives, most typically of size, extension, elevation, texture, loudness, brightness, speed, weight etc., the positive member of the pair... has greater perceptual saliency"
(Talmy Givon, Mind, Code, and Context: Essays in Pragmatics (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 161). Of course the contrast between the lexical item heiemen and the combination of head noun with modifier lowe men represents both a phonetic and a visual icon of the visual metaphor. When the composition of the ruling group changed after the victory in 1066, the transi-
tion from heiemen to nobles precisely mirrors the supplanting of osoba by deiatel’ after 1917.
Chinese Jieji. As Chinese thinkers began to contemplate political reform of the Qing dynasty toward the end of the nineteenth century, they borrowed from Japanese predecessors (who used Chinese characters as kanji when writing Japanese) the practice of translating the Marxian concept "social class” by the pair of traditional painted characters that are transliterated into Latin script as jieji. This pair of characters reprises the figure-ground metaphor found in osoba-sobornost’and again in noble-commoner. In traditional usage jieji meant "rank of silk” and served as a metonym for the hierarchy of Chinese officials whose relative standing was measured by the quality of silk cloth with which their predecessors had once been remunerated in kind. By the Qing dynasty, however, the term had fallen into disuse. As separate characters, jie means "rungs on a ladder” and by extension "ladder,” while ji means "silk cloth” and by extension "cloth” in general (I thank my student Bang Zhou for carefully investigating the history of this term in Chinese sources that I cannot read or even cite and for writing the term for me in both formal and cursive characters. He is not responsible for my interpretation, with which he disagrees).
Both conceptually and graphemically the use of jieji as a metaphor for political power expresses the experience of vision. Conceptually, a ladder has the same structure as cloth woven from threads: both are composed of vertical and horizontal members at right angles. At the same time, a ladder functions only if the vertical and horizontal members are visually separate -otherwise it is at best a ramp that cannot be used to climb at a sharp vertical angle; conversely, a cloth functions only if the threads are so close together as to be nearly indistinguishable - otherwise it is a net that is useless as a cloth. Graphemically both the formal character and the modern cursive character for jieji present reduplicative visual icons of the conceptual relationship. Formal Chinese characters consist of a cue to meaning on the left and a cue to sound on the right. The cue to meaning in jie is the character pronounced fu, translated "hill,” a common meaning cue in words mentioning elevation or things found in association with elevations. Its initial element looks like an English cursive capital B (Russian v) with the leftmost vertical elongated downward; visualize B on a pole. As the eye moves to the right, a parallelogram occurs that, consisting of two elongated strokes at angles to three shorter strokes, looks at least to a Western eye very like a depiction of a ladder in perspective. Both the meaning and the sound element of the formal character ji contain shapes that suggest folds of cloth. In the cursive form, jie and ji are both written with vertical squiggles, but the horizontal strokes of the cursive jie are further apart and visually more distinct than the corresponding elements of cursive ji, with the result that the representation of jie is higher
than that of ji. Remarkably the visual icon is preserved even in pinyin transliteration, as jie contains one more alphabetic character than does ji.
While jieji was used to translate the Marxian concept of social class, in extralinguistic context it had the same meaning as noble-commoner. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, China of course had developed very little or nothing in the way of either a bourgeoisie or a proletariat in Marx’s sense, and in describing China, any term for "social class” could describe only the traditional distinction between shi and simin, "literati” and "city folk,” that like noble-commoner simply omitted the peasants who composed the vast bulk of the Chinese population. In translating social class, jieji meant the exercise of political power. As in the case of noble-commoner, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown and ultimately a new authoritarian republic replaced it, the revived term displaced an earlier distinction in terms of elevation between shang and xia, "those above” and "those below.” (J.n Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao" and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford , 1996), 6).
Arabic rucat-raciyya. According to Ami Ayalon, "Until the twentieth century there had been one Arabic expression to indicate the political status of the ruled: raciyya [meaning] herd or flock of livestock.” Its complement for the rulers was rucat, "shepherds,” since in the Arabic-speaking world, the herd most often consisted of sheep. The distinctive figure of the shepherd stood out against the ground of nearly indistinguishable sheep; his vertical torso and staff contrasted with the horizontal orientation of the sheep torsos and elevated him above them. As Turkish rule began to deteriorate, a new metaphor emerged in Arabic to mention the local authorities who displaced central power: acyan, "eyes,” the significance of which as a metaphor of vision, focus of attention and verticality in the body hardly requires further comment
(A. Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Political Discourse (New York: Oxford, 1987), 44, 61).
The earlier shepherd-flock distinction goes far back in Semitic tradition. For example, it is found in Psalm 23 traditionally attributed to King David: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..” And its contrast of vertical orientation for the ruler versus horizontal orientation for the ruled is even older. Around 1800 B.C. Old Babylonian refers to a member of the class of royal servitors as awilum, "man,” but to one of those over whom they ruled as mushkenum, "one who prostates himself.” (J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (W. Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 285-286). Even earlier a diagram of an upper torso turned sideways began to signify "man” in Sumerian writing, while rulers were mentioned in writing by a vertical diagram of a standard, a pole topped by a banner or sign with a wedge on the bottom for insertion into a
hole dug to keep it upright (S. Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: Chicago, 1963), 302; K. Szarzynska, “Archaic Sumerian Standards,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 48 (1996), 1-15). As powerholders writing in Sumerian
were replaced by writers of Semitic languages, first Akkadian, then Aramaic, and ultimately Arabic, new metaphors emerged, but each new metaphor replicated the original distinction pitting the visually salient vertical figure against the ground of the horizontal.
Javanese unggah-ungguh. In traditional Javanese society kings ruled with the aid of their priyayi, a loanword derived from Sanskrit priya, "friend,” reprised probably by accident in Russian priiatel’. The priyayi might be kinsmen of the king in various degree or unrelated appointees to offices of various importance. When two priyayi met, they needed to determine who was entitled to the elaborate deference encoded in krama, the esoteric form of Javanese taught only to the sons of priyayi. The determination depended on weighing the status conferred by closeness of kinship against importance of office. They signaled this mutual determination by the paralinguistic gesture known as unggah-ungguh, each extending his parallel forearms forward and turning the palms upward and then moving the upturned palms up and down. While interpreted as an imitation of balancing scales, visually this practice signified the determination of rank by the relative elevation of the palms. In turn it likened the priyayi to the focus of visual attention against the unseen wong cilik, "little people,” who lacking social rank and having learned only the unelaborated form of Javanese ngoko or perhaps the intermediate madya, were unable to display linguistic deference and therefore had no use for performing unggah-ungguh (J. J. Errington, Language and Social Change in Java: Linguistic Reflexes of Modernization in a Traditional Royal Polity (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, Center for International Studies, 1985), 4, 27-40). Thus the power in traditional Java was symbolized by a visual metaphor of relative height contrasting the figure of action by the rulers to the ground of inaction of the ruled.
Wolof "Conspicuous Disfluency”. Speakers of Wolof are concentrated in Senegal although spilling over, as is customary in post-colonial Africa, into neighboring states whose boundaries were established without regard for local ethnic identities by foreign colonizing powers. Wolof speakers distinguish between waxu gewel, a laconic form stereotypically associated with members of the caste that ruled before colonial occupation but continues to be identifiable, and waxu geer, full of emotional expressiveness and metaphorical variety and increasingly frequent as social rank diminishes until it is used most fully by the griot caste whose task it is express sentiments that would be undignified if voiced by persons of more importance. While Wolof speakers attribute waxu gewel and waxu geer to the powerful and the powerless respectively, observation reveals that speakers generally use both forms, depending on whether their social rank or immediate needs enable them to demand or compel them to request favors from their interlocutor. Consequently, outranking all others, the Wolof chief rarely or never engages in waxu geer. His speech and that of other important men tends to be
marked by "conspicuous disfluency”: a continuous slurred mumble displaying hesitancy, repetitiveness and frequent grammatical errors. The Wolof explain the need for the powerful to restrict themselves to waxu geer by the greater weight of their words that would otherwise crush people with less
rank (Judith T. Irvine, “Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion,” in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, 1990), 131-145). While weight is a tactile rather than a visual metaphor, it entails a visual component. Weight matters because the powerful may bear down on the powerless. Thus in the Wolof conception the powerful are elevated, as they are in the other cases, and because greater weight in humans is associated with larger size, the powerful are also construed as visually enlarged relative to the less powerful. While in the description of the Wolof case available to me, the figure-ground metaphor is only implicit, it still organizes the conception of political power.
Conclusion. A thousand years of intermittent strife marks the interaction between speakers of English and of Arabic. Russian speakers and Chinese speakers have clashed again and again during the three centuries since the eastward spread of the one and northwest spread of the other brought them into contact. Frenchmen using the metaphor noble conquered the Wolof, and Dutchmen who still call their government the overheid, "that which is above,” subdued the Javanese. Even if Russian speakers and English speakers may rarely have fought, neither the Cold War nor the subsequent development of independent Russia’s relations with the United States can be described as a consistent record of mutual concord. None of this strife can be attributed to differences in cultural conceptions of political power, since the cultural conceptions in question are constructed in the same way. Of course metaphors of political power do not exhaust cultures, and nothing I have said excludes the possibility that some other cultural trait may underlie conflict.
It would possible to imagine a process of cultural diffusion rather than independent conception by which the observations I have reported spread from a common Sumerian source. Some scholars think that traders brought Sumerian writing down one river, along the coast and up another river to Indian Harappa, where it either became known to invaders who brought Indo-European speech, or was adapted by the locals who adopted foreigners’ Indo-European speech, or even may have been modified by the locals who were the first users of Indo-European. Perhaps the Sumerians’ vertical-horizontal distinction between rulers and ruled spread with their script. Since cultural diffusion invariably proceeds by misunderstanding that leads to modification, Sumerian forms, which originated from the chance transposition of an originally vertical diagram of the torso into a horizontal one when their writing turned from vertical columns to horizontal lines, may conceivably
have turned into the source for the vertical Vedic conception of priests who sprang from the forehead of the principal god, rulers from his arms, their subjects from his belly, all resting on labor by those born of his feet. Hindu traders took it along with their Sanskrit word priya as far as Java, while Buddhist missionaries could have spread the vertical conception to China where it became "those above” and "those below.” From the Chinese, Mongols and Tatars may have taken it to Russia. Meanwhile Greeks could have acquired it with the syllabary that they turned into an alphabet and handed it along to Romans from whom speakers of early Germanic languages, including the predecessor of English, might have understood no more than the Chinese and ended up with "high” and "low.” Arabs penetrating into West Africa might have been dimly understood by speakers of languages that ultimately became Wolof who might have thought that weight distinguished a herdsman from an animal, the sheep, that they had never seen. It would be interesting to know whether Amerind languages show this same distinction, but thus far I have been unable to find an account containing the necessary information. And even then contacts across the Pacific are not out of the question, although reliance on them would strain the credibility of the process.
It is a matter of intellectual curiosity whether this fanciful process of diffusion or the far less demanding hypothesis of independent invention from experience of a shared human body accounts for the pattern of the representation of political power by visual figure-ground metaphors. In any case the receptivity to a common metaphor, whether independently conceived or transmitted by contact, must be a sign the people could understand visual contrast and vertical elevation by consulting their own ordinary bodily experience.
While the cross-cultural similarity in concepts of political power precludes the supposition that they can account for strife among members of different cultural communities, the character of these conceptions precludes the hypothesis that they explain why some communities democratize while others retain authoritarian rule. A figure-ground contrast between rulers and ruled does not prevent democratization, it enables it. As speakers of a language learn to represent political oppression in terms of a figure-ground metaphor, they also acquire a capacity easily to imagine what the elimination of oppression would look like: all they have to do is subtract either the figure or the ground. Thus Americans liberating themselves from English overlords simply wrote a Constitution eliminating nobility; only commoners would be left, and while the particular Americans composing the Constitution desired to preserve slavery, exterminate the indigenous population, and limit popular influence on politics, their erasure of half the metaphor of political domination has continuously subverted accomplishment of their original goals. If one looks at the discourse of Russia after 1991, it is striking how deiatel’ has
dwindled and kollektiv has become specialized to trudovye kollektivy, the workforce of enterprises, whose continuing privatization has removed the term from the semantic field of politics. It is perfectly true that a new metaphor like siloviki reproduces the perceptual salience of paired antonymous adjectives and that upravliaemaia demokratiia reproduces the Slavic-foreign phonetic iconism characteristic of traditional Russia, but these instances are at most weak echoes of past undemocratic patterns that hold promise for the same kind of slow movement with plenty of reversals that characterizes the development of any democratic state.
© Ричард Д. Андерсон (мл.)., 2006
