Publication Date
3-1-2015
Abstract
The world is your oyster! proclaims a promotional poster for a study-abroad program, confirming that the oyster-as-world, like all good metaphors, has done some morphing since the days of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Newer bands of shell material have repainted the mollusk metaphor, transforming it from ostracism, opportunism and exploitation to openness, opportunity and exploration, and thus an apt symbol for the intercultural experience. Indeed, Robinson’s (1988) definition of culture as “a system of symbols and meanings” seems to evoke the very image of the oyster’s constant production of shell layers: “past experience influences meaning, which in turn affects future experience, which in turn affects subsequent meaning, and so on” (p. 11). Metaphors are powerful in the economy of their complex bundling of experience. Lakoff (1993) contends that as mappings across conceptual domains metaphors help us grasp abstract concepts [such as culture] in more concrete terms. The metaphor of the oyster as world may thus guide us to look back at how we have mapped culture and perceived our culture-teaching mission in order to look ahead to the construction of new cultural metaphors from the intercultural construct of Sustainable Development.
Recommended Citation
Galloway, Vicki
(2015)
"Culture and Sustainability: Lessons from the Oyster and Other Metaphors,"
Dimensions: Vol. 50, Article 7.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/dimensions/vol50/iss1/7