Vehicles ― Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Ambivalence

Ethnographers use conventional anthropological practice to explore the metaphoric value of vehicles for identity, history, and society in different cultures. In sections on people as vehicles, vehicles as gendered people, and equivocal vehicles, they discuss such topics as living canoes as vehicles of moral imagination among the Murik of Papua New Guinea, using a gender metaphor to make sense of old warplanes in North America, gender metaphors and cognitive schemas in recessionary Japan, Yugoslav Fica as a vehicle for social commentary and ritual restoration of innocence, metaphors of cars and corruption in China, ambivalent aesthetics in Mexican American lowrider cars, and traversing life and death in a lynching reenactment by African Americans. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

David Lipset is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea since 1981. His most recent book is called Yabar: Alienations of Men in a Papua New Guinea Modernity (2017). He has also published articles on a variety of topics about changing masculinity in Murik culture. He is currently working on a book on concept of place in the Anthropology of the Anthropocene.