What is a metaphor? A metaphor links two seemingly disparate objects directly, usually with the verb “is.” “Time is money.” Is time money? Of course not. But it is a common American metaphor. Notice that the metaphor only goes one way. If I said “Money is time,” this sentence would not be understood. Now a simile is slightly different. It links the two objects indirectly, usually with the verb “like.” “Time is like money.” Analogies, on the other hand, directly relate two objects with the verb “as.” “Money is paid at a rate of time as more time means more money.” Notice that the metaphor/simile, like the analogy, is cultural and context-specific and even economic or class-specific as “Time is money.” can be a good thing for a wage earner and can be a bad thing for a boss. What this means is that an analogy is a deconstruction of a metaphor/simile and also underlies a complex and fairly fuzzy set of concepts that, at the highest level of abstraction, is the metaphor. (1)
While doing research into this topic I noticed a great deal of confusion between metaphors and analogies. George Lackoff is one of the proponents of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in which he claims that metaphors are central to human thought. (2) (4) He posits five tenets:
Metaphors structure thinking;
Metaphors structure knowledge;
Metaphor is central to abstract language;
Metaphor is grounded in physical experience;
Metaphor is ideological. (3)
The mathematician Douglas Hofstadter sees analogy as the base structure because every metaphor can be decomposed into an analogy. (5) Conceptual Metaphor Theory terms analogy “mappings.”(2) Often different ways to describe objects can inform or hinder a theory which remains to be seen but basically they are talking about the same thing from different perspectives. The main thing is that this constellation of concepts is now considered both uniquely human and a starting point to probe the inner workings of human thought.
While reading the book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, (7) written in 1978, I ran a citation search to find out what other researchers were saying about it and found a 1981 article in The Professional Geographer called “Maps and Metaphors.” (6) Downs addresses the confusion around maps (cartographic), mental maps (cognitive maps), metaphors, and analogies. He starts out with this definition:“A metaphor is based on the claim that concept A is B, whereas an analogy claims that A is like B.”In what I see as contemporary parlance this statement is incorrect, “A is like B” is a simile. An analogy would be “A is to C as B is to C”. A and B are linked through C, “A is B” is a shortcut, an abstraction that hides a rich set of relationships. Downs does make a major point. Both cognitive maps and cartographic maps are representations of reality. Modern research has shown that cognitive maps not only directly represent 3D Euclidean space but are hard-wired to do this. Somehow this results in a smooth unsegmented visual field. Cartographic theory has been dominated by the model of a map as a communication tool in the US and Great Britain and the model of a map as semiotic, a communicator of meaning. (8) Cognitive studies have mainly been focused on how we read maps rather than how we make maps. Work on indigenous spatial concepts (9) and how non-professionals draw maps (13) has led to the concept of sketch maps, hand-drawn maps of a person's concepts of a spatial object. (11) This is very different from measuring eye movements of subjects while reading maps.
Border Monument 123 (14)
Border Monument 127 (13)
I want to unpack a spatial metaphor, actually two. “The border is a line.” and “The border is a region.” Specifically the southern border of the United States and the northern border of Mexico, and most specifically the region where I work, Santa Cruz County in Arizona. The US-Mexican boundary was fixed on December 30, 1853, with the Gadsden Purchase. The treaty was ratified on April 25th, 1854 and a survey of the Gadsden part of the border was completed on October 15th, 1855. (12) Except for a small dispute on the Rio Grande which was resolved in 1964 this border has been stable. The 1853 survey team left 258 boundary markers, there is one of these west of Nogales, a 12 ft stone cut obelisk that marks the point where the turns northwest to Yuma. In 1890 the border was surveyed once again and other markers were placed. International Street was formally divided between two countries. Before that, to cross the border all you had to do was cross the street. Also, in 1890 it was found that the turning point to Yuma is incorrect, it should be 4½ miles east. This has never been corrected. (13)(14) In 2003 it was estimated by the Border Patrol that 90% of the US border in New Mexico and Arizona had been surveyed. The border as a line is first a legal description and second, a physical line that has changed as survey technology has changed. It is also, increasingly, a physical barrier although as little as seven years ago parts south of Duquesne were a simple wire cattle fence. The border as a line has psychological implications. People talk about going “south of the line” to visit family and friends. Others are infected by the current outbreak of nativism. I am amused at people who regard the border as a dangerous and scary place. These are different views American citizens have of “the line,” I'm sure Mexican perceptions are both just as complex and quite different. So how this “line” is viewed depends on which side of it you are on. In computer graphics, a line is made up of individual pixel values of varying intensity to give the illusion of smoothness. So a line is also a set of points. I've already talked about the survey markers. There are also official border crossing points that allow goods and people to flow across the border. There are four that I know about in Santa Cruz County, one in Lochiel is closed down while one is only for cattle and is one way, from Mexico into the US. Of course, there is also a large and changing set of points where illegal crossings occur. I think it is clear that the simple metaphor “the border is a line” releases a rich set of historical and personal analogies that can be referenced or “mapped” spatially. The metaphor, “the border is a region” is an even richer metaphor, one much more fluid spatially as the actual shape of the region depends much more on legal, ecological, historical, personal, geographic, and economic analogies.
Current thinking is that metaphor and analogy constitute a basic structure of human thought and that these structures are linked spatially both in a real and abstract sense.
Cabera. Every Metaphor and Simile Has an Analogy Inside. Accessed June 5, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhueKrKKNps
Nordquist, Richard. “Understanding Conceptual Metaphors?” ThoughtCo, 2020. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-conceptual-metaphor-1689899.
Lakoff, George; Turner, Mark. "More Than Cool Reason." University of Chicago Press, 1989
Lakoff, George. The Neuroscience of Language and Thought. Accessed June 7, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJP-rkilz40.
Hofstadter, Douglas, and Emmanuel Sander. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York, NY, US: Basic Books, 2013.
Downs, Roger M. “Maps and Metaphors.” The Professional Geographer 33, no. 3 (August 1, 1981): 287–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1981.00287.x.
O’Keefe, John, and Lynn Nadel. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1978.
Buchroithner, Manfred, and Pablo Fernndez. “Cartography in the Context of Sciences: Theoretical and Technological Considerations.” Cartographic Journal, The 48 (February 1, 2011): 4–10. https://doi.org/10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000003.
Gladwin, Thomas. East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll. Harvard University Press, 1970. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjsf6g9.
Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. “Mental Maps: The Cognitive Mapping of the Continent as an Object of Research of European History Mental Maps.” Text. EGO(http://www.ieg-ego.eu). IEG(http://www.ieg-mainz.de). Accessed June 5, 2020. http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories-and-methods/mental-maps/frithjof-benjamin-schenk-mental-maps-the-cognitive-mapping-of-the-continent-as-an-object-of-research-of-european-history.
Curtis, Jacqueline W. “Transcribing from the Mind to the Map: Tracing the Evolution of a Concept.” The Geographical Review 106, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 338.
James, Harold L. “History of the United States - Mexican Boundary Survey - 1848-1855,” n.d., 18.
Prendergast, Curt. “160 Years Later, Border Monuments Still Fascinate.” Nogales International. Accessed June 21, 2020. https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/160-years-later-border-monuments-still-fascinate/article_62f9ebd0-9291-11e4-822c-13a2f5fb3ece.html.
Taylor, David. “Forget the Fence: These Are the Real Markers of the US-Mexico Border – in Pictures.” The Guardian, December 11, 2017, sec. Inequality. https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/gallery/2017/dec/11/us-mexico-border-fence-in-pictures.
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