A Dog or a Wolf – The Role of Connotations in Animalistic Metaphors and the Process of Dehumanisation

Małgorzata Patrycja Waśniewska

Abstract


Animalistic metaphors have been used since the dawn of times to dehumanise members of outgroups and thereby deny them their rights. The paper examines the causes and symptoms of animalistic dehumanisation through the analysis of connotations of several terms used to conceptualise undesirable individuals and groups across various cultures, focusing on four source domains: rat, cattle, wolf, and dog.


Keywords


connotation; dehumanisation; metaphor; Conceptual Metaphor Theory; animal studies

Full Text:

PDF

References


Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Bartsch, Renate. 2002. “Generating polysemy: Metaphor and Metonymy.” In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, edited by René Dirven and Ralf Pörings, 49-74. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Benson, Thomas L. 1983. “The Clouded Mirror: Animal Stereotypes and Human Cruelty.” In Ethics and Animals. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society, edited by Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams, 79-90. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press.

Bradley, Keith. 2000. “Animalizing the Slave: the Truth of Fiction.” Journal of Roman Studies 90: 110–25. DOI: 10.2307/300203.

Chase, Andrew. 2002. “Strange foods.” Gastronomica 2 (2): 94–96.

Clifton, Jonathan, and Dorien Van De Mieroop. 2016. Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves. Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 520 million words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Dower, John W. 1986. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books.

El Fadl, Khaled Abou. 2008. “Dogs in the Islamic Tradition.” In Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, edited by Bron Taylor, 498-500. New York: Continuum International.

Forceville, Charles J. 2009. “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.” In Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, 19-42. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Forceville, Charles J., Paul Hekkert, and Ed Tan. 2006. “The adaptive value of metaphors.” In Heuristiken der Literaturwissenschaft. Einladung zu disziplinexternen Perspektiven auf Literatur, edited by Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann and Steffanie Metzger, 85-109. Paderborn: Mentis.

Gray, Heather M., Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner. 2007. “Dimensions of Mind Perception.” Science 315 (5812): 619. DOI: 10.1126/science.1134475

Haslam, Nick. 2006. “Dehumanisation: An Integrative Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (3): 252–264.

Hippler, Fritz. 1940. Der Ewige Jude. https://archive.org/details/1940-Der-Ewige-Jude (accessed 10 April 2017).

Jacoby, Karl. 2008. “The Broad Platform of Extermination: Nature and Violence in the Nineteenth Century North American Borderlands.” Journal of Genocide Research 10(2): 249-267.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980/ 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lind, Nancy S., and Bernard Ivan Tamas. 2007. Controversies of the George W. Bush presidency: pro and con documents. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Madley, Ben. 2013. “The Genocide of California's Yana Indians.” In Centuries of genocide: essays and eyewitness accounts, edited by Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons. New York: Routledge.

McMurtry, Stanley. 2015. MAC ON... Europe's open borders. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3321431/MAC-Europe-s-open-borders.html (accessed 28 October 2017)

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online. Available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/

Mason, Jim B. 2017. “Misothery.” In Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, edited by Linda Kalof, 135-151. New York: Oxford University Press.

Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

The Holy Bible, New International Version. Available at https://www.biblica.com/resources/scholar-notes/niv-study-bible/

Quran, Sahih International Version. Quranic Arabic Corpus. http://corpus.quran.com (accessed 19 October 2017)

Rigato, Emanuele and Alessandro Minelli. 2013. “The great chain of being is still here.” Evolution: Education and Outreach 6 (1), 1-6. DOI 10.1186/1936-6434-6-18.

Rodman, John. 1974. “The Dolphin Papers.” The North American Review 259 (1), 12-26.

Rodriguez, Junius P. 1997. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Schaller, Dominik. 2013. “The Genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa, 1904-1907.” In Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness, edited by Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, 89-114. New York: Routledge.

Serpell, James. 1986. In the Company of Animals: a Study of Human-animal Relationships. Oxford: B. Blackwell.

Smith, David Livingstone. 2011. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Steuter, Erin and Deborah Wills. 2008. At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda and Racism in the War on Terror. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Waytz, Adam, Nicholas Epley and John T. Cacioppo. 2010. “Social cognition unbound: Insights into anthropomorphism and dehumanisation.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (1), 58-62. DOI: 10.1177/0963721409359302




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/nh.2018.3.3
Date of publication: 2018-08-17 08:52:16
Date of submission: 2018-04-30 11:53:36


Statistics


Total abstract view - 2447
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 0

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2018 Małgorzata Patrycja Waśniewska

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.