Today’s RDM guest blogger, Hanna Bruns, comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. Although her data come from a set of German What’sApp Chats, her larger topic (how immigrants are dehumanized through the use of metaphors) is one with much broader international relevance today. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Hanna’s work:
We are all familiar with metaphors. After all, we know that when Robert Burns rhymes about the red red rose, he is talking about love, and that the white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is supposed to represent God, nature, the subconscious, and so on… But metaphors are not only found in poems, literary works and poetic speeches: they are everywhere!
Conceptual Metaphors
In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson introduced a linguistic framework called “conceptual metaphor theory,” which described metaphors as one of “our principal vehicles for understanding” the world around us (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 159). Metaphors facilitate our “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 5). In other words, metaphors are often used to make difficult and abstract concepts (“target domain”) easier to understand by using clearer and easier terms (“source domain”). Take, for example, the metaphor of life is a journey. Since life is a complicated thing which is not so easily grasped (grasp, another metaphor 😉), people try to make it easier by imagining it as a journey, which has a starting point (birth) and an end (death). In fact, this is a very popular conceptual metaphor. You can find it in a lot of contexts, for example when people say you have to move on, or you are on the right path, or that you are lost. So you see, in a way, these conceptual metaphors are made up out of a lot of smaller parts which are all connected to form one big picture. Everybody uses these conceptual metaphors, and there are a lot of them, for all kinds of situations. And metaphors can be powerful, especially because they highlight one specific aspect of the target domain while ignoring other aspects.
Although some metaphors can be helpful as tools for understanding the world around us, there are other metaphors that can be harmful. For instance, metaphors can be used to spread and justify damaging ideas about others, without people even realising this!
My focus in this post is on the metaphors found in xenophobic discourse which are used to talk about immigrants in a negative way. By using specific metaphors to refer to immigrants, immigrants can be portrayed in a very bad way without actively saying that they are “bad.” As one linguist who does research on metaphors says: “Ideological patterns […] arise when text-producers select one set of metaphors instead of alternative ones” (Hart 2010: 127).
A typical conceptual metaphor that is used often in anti-immigrant discourse is that of floods of immigrants. This belongs to the conceptual metaphor of immigration as natural disaster. In this concept, immigrants are portrayed as floods, coming in waves, or as a stream, flowing into the country, and destroying the country. Other popular xenophobic concepts portray immigrants as diseases, which makes the (national) body ill; or as animals and beasts. What all of these metaphors have in common is that they portray the immigrants as not being human, and as dangerous.
The WhatsApp group chat “AfD Info LSA”
In the past few years, the German political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (“Alternative for Germany”, in short “AfD”) has caused a lot of debate in the German political field mostly because of their (for some, not so apparent) xenophobic, nationalistic, and Islamophobic viewpoints. In June 2017, a WhatsApp group chat was leaked with the group name “AfD Info LSA”. In that group, members of the AfD from the state Saxonia-Anhalt discussed several topics.
My home-town is Dresden in Saxonia, where the AfD has a strong influence on people. I have seen how people have changed and have started being mean and openly racist because they felt supported by the opinions expressed by the AfD, so this matter is very personal for me. But I am a scientist too. So instead of basing my opinions about the party solely on my personal feelings, I decided to analyze the language in that leaked WhatsApp chat from June 2017. More specifically, I looked at racist and xenophobic metaphors.
Metaphors found in the AfD chat
I started by looking at what other studies have identified as “typical” racist and xenophobic metaphors. I found a long list of metaphors that were used by the National Socialists. These are summarized in the table below (click on table to enlarge it).
Once I knew what I was looking for, I started reading through the WhatsApp chat and searching for any of these metaphors. Let me give you some examples of what I found (they are, of course, in German, but you can find my English translations below). As you read them, maybe you can think about which category they belong to.
Example 1
06.02.17, 16:02:11: [telephone number]: I know a family in my neighbourhood, there’s a single mother. Her boy is 8 years and is in 2nd grade. He told me that he has never been on holidays. It is disgraceful, when you see these parasites here…
Example 2
17.02.17, 09:36:03: [name of sender]: These people are like water – it always finds a way. And if we don’t close it up quick enough, then we are soon under water (lit. land under)!
17.02.17, 10:05:23: [name of sender]: [Name], the land is already under water and if nothing is done about it, we will drown mercilessly. And a lifeboat is far away.
Example 3
28.02.17, 16:21:08: [name of sender]: I am at the main station in Nuremberg and feel foreign in my own country, there are invaders from Africa or from Arabic countries just everywhere
28.02.17, 16:21:34: [name of sender]: Just saw a grandma who was using the other side of the street just so that she didn’t have to walk straight towards these invaders
These are of course just a few examples, but in my analysis of the chat, I actually found that ALL of the typical racist and xenophobic metaphors were used! The most frequent conceptual metaphor was war and military, where immigrants were, for example, described as invaders of the country. The members of the AfD then described themselves a bastion against the enemies that are attacking the German nation. But, as you can see from the example, immigrants were also described as a flood, that tries to drown the German people – or as parasites feeding on the German people. To see even more kinds of metaphors used in the chat, have a look at the table below (click on the table to enlarge it).
What I have tried to show in this post is that metaphors don’t only exist in poems – they are all around us, and we use them every day. Metaphors can be really useful and cool: especially if you know what you are using them for – as well as if you can recognize how other people are using them. Sometimes, a person’s real message is actually hidden in the metaphors they use. So maybe, the next time you describe one thing in terms of another, take a minute to ask yourself about why you’re saying the things you’re saying, in the specific way that you are saying them – and pay close attention to how other people use metaphors as well. Because HOW people say things is every bit as important and meaningful as WHAT they say.
References
Bruns, H. (2017). „Scheint ein bösartiges Geschwür am Volkskörper zu sein“ – National Socialist metaphors in a WhatsApp group chat of members of the German party Alternative für Deutschland. (unpublished).
Burns, R. (1794). A red red rose. Retrieved from: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/a-red-red-rose
Hart, C. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New perspectives on immigration discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melville, H. (1851). Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Foto (Featured image): Lizard by: Free-Photos
https://pixabay.com/en/lizard-reptile-graffiti-wall-you-1210069/
Foto: Migration by: Capri23auto
https://pixabay.com/en/migration-integration-migrants-3129299/
Foto: Whatsapp-Icon by: geralt
https://pixabay.com/en/whatsapp-icon-communication-social-2317206/
Note: This blog-post is based on my term-paper, which I wrote for my M.A. studies “Applied Linguistics” at the University of Bonn, Germany. Special thanks to my lecturer, Dr. Stefanie Pohle, for her support (regarding this post and everything else).
