Pain: metaphor, body, and culture in Anglo-American societies between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
This article explores the relationship between metaphorical languages, body, and culture, and suggests that such an analysis can reveal a great deal about the meaning and experience of pain in Anglo-American societies between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. It uses concepts within embodied cognition to speculate on how historians can write a history of sensation. Bodies are actively engaged in the linguistic processes and social interactions that constitute painful sensations. Language is engaged in a dialogue with physiological bodies and social environments. And culture collaborates in the creation of physiological bodies and metaphorical systems.
Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London , London , UK.
Joanna
J
Bourke
American; British; body; cognitive linguistics; culture; history; metaphor; pain