Ando presents a cognitive linguistic and anthropological examination of how metaphor, analogy metonymy, and ideation worked together to form the Roman way of thinking that dictated the shape of the Roman Empire as a political entity. The material is organized in three chapters devoted to belonging in the Roman Empire, cognition and the Roman Empire, and the ontology of the social. Clifford Ando is a faculty member of the University of Chicago and a research fellow of the University of South Africa. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology,Roman Social Imaginaries considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct.
Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latins extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire.
Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of todays most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of todays most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
