SOCIAL COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE IN URBAN BRAZIL

Ana Cristina Pelosi, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil (pelosi@ufc.br)

Post-Graduate Program in Linguistics

C A P E S

Research context

• Main Project: Interdisciplinary project on social cognitive representations in the conceptualization of VIOLENCE in Brazilian urban centers. (Global uncertaintities: security for all in a changing world, UK., 2008);

• Partners: • Universidade de Caxias do Sul, RS; Open University, Milton

Keynes, UK (subproject: Living with uncertainty: metaphor and the Constant threat of urban violence in Brazil). Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG.

The project• Aims: • to gather knowledge about individuals’ behaviors

and concerns as regards the escalating of violence in Brazil, by analyzing the ways they conceptualize violence and develop or resist empathy feelings towards their assailants;

• to help in the devising of public policies which might foster a better management of the violence problem in urban areas of Brazil.

Presentation aims

• Based on ICM theory (LAKOFF, 1987), to foster an embodied, socio culturally situated concept of representation;

• to analyze the kind of figurative language which emerge from verbal interactions of 2 focus groups in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, as they talk about urban violence;

• to identify cognitive and discursive factors which engender their verbal interactions (image kinesthetic schemas; primary metaphors) ;

Research questions• Three related research questions are the focus of

the analysis:

• (1) What are the key themes around urban violence that emerge from the Brazilian focus groups discussions and how to they express these by means of language?

• (2) What metaphors emerge in their talk?

• (3) What kind of cognitive models / image kinesthetic schemas and prim.mets seem to motivate the language produced by focus groups participants?

Theoretical basis• Cognition, as embodied, social culturally situated

action (Varela, Thompson e Rosch, 1993).

• Language, seen as a cognitive situated human activity, is taken as widely structured from sensory-motor schemas but, at the same time, as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

• Socio cognitive representations are understood as a kind of mental evocation which emerges from embodied and socio culturally shared beliefs and values;

Theoretical basis• ICM theory provides the basis for a reformulated

view of mental representation which opposes the classical thought of such representation as an idealized and decontextualized mental construct. (Cartesian thesis).

• According to ICM theory, meaning emerges from man’s interactions with the ecological, social, cultural world. It is not a decontextualized feature of the universe or the result of an abstract symbolic mind, or, much less, can it be described and understood in terms of features supposedly intrinsic to objects.

Theoretical basis• With such a view of meaning and its

characteristics, Lakoff (1987), proposes that concepts are structured in terms of a mental construct which he terms “idealized cognitive model” (ICM).

• An ICM represents an idealized knowledge structure about the world. It is idealized in the sense that it captures only a portion of the knowledge available about the realities represented.

Theoretical basis• It is, therefore, always a provisional structure in the

sense that it is incomplete since it cannot include all the knowledge about the referent, situation, event etc., it relates to in the world.

• It is also provisional in the sense of being a dynamic construct. That is, the information it contains is not static, unchanging, but, in some ways, incomplete and can be modified, adjusted in order to cope with new, unusual information which results from adjusted or new behaviors, knowledge, beliefs etc, which spring from the advancement of knowledge in any one area.

Theoretical basis• One important aspect to bear in mind is that ICMs

are “nonobjectivist representations” and, therefore, cannot be understood as

• [...] internal representations of external reality [...] first, because they are understood in terms of embodiment, not in terms of direct connection to the external world; and second, because they include imaginative aspects of cognition such as metaphor and metonymy. (LAKOFF, 1987, p. 341).

Theoretical basis• The citation synthesizes the argument put forward in this

presentation.

• That, which sees ICMs as a valid and adequate explanation for a concept of representation as an emergent cognitive phenomenon which is made possible from cognoscitive beings embodied situatedness in their ecological, social and cultural world.

• Whatever nature a mental evocation might assume, it occurs not as a strange entity in relation to the world, but, results from a distributed (or shared) kind of cognition which results from what our bodies afford us in the environment in which we live (ecological, social, cultural).

Data, method and findings• 11 participants aged 16 to 43 years old, college/university,

undergrads and postgrads, answered questions in 2 FGs, from a topic guide translated and adapted from English (PCTR).

• Talk is transcribed and translated.

• Data is fed into the Atlas.ti and coded into Metons families and Metvs families.

• Metaphor-led discourse analysis is performed– discourse topics– metaphors / metonymies– stories (circulating stories)– scenarios

Data, method and findings• A conceptual metaphor analysis was also performed,

which helped us understand discursive interactions motivations and the nature of embodied social cognitive representations which emerge in participants’ talk .

• Preliminary results point to eleven recurrent discursive topics in the groups analyzed. (change; criminals; family; government; location; media/TV; others; police, response to violence; types of emotion; violence.)

Data, method and findingsIdentification of metaphors in data

collecting into

semantically-connected

groups

systematic metaphors

analysis of distribution

of metaphors

metaphor clusters and

absences

analysis of discourse topics and

themesconceptual metaphor motivation analysis

Data, method and findings• Linked to DTs were 06 Meton families and a much larger

number of MetVs which were organized into 36 family groups.

• The Meton families included labels such as, acting stories, body, change, inside/outside, people/government, with words or expression members such as, disguise, traffic light, ‘cellular for the robber’.

• The MetVs were grouped into families like, balance, body, clean/dirty, disease, and included words and expressions such as, blind, manure, disease, prevent, capture, curfew etc.

Data, method and findings• Recurrence and interconnectedness of some MetVs

within and across DTs, and the salience of the INSIDE/OUTSIDE metonymy, in special, made possible the identification of 06 systematic metaphors: VIOLENCE IS A PRODUCT MANUFACTURED BY THE MEDIA; VIOLENCE IS A CONTAGIOUS SPREADING DISEASE; VIOLENCE IS AN UNCONTROLLED FORCE; FEAR (AS A RESPONSE TO VIOLENCE) IS PUTTING YOURSELF IN PRISON; RESPONDING TO VIOLENCE BY PLAYING A ROLE; and RESPONDING TO VIOLENCE BY BEING PASSIVE.

Data, method and findingsCOGNITIVE

SUBMODELS / IMAGE

KINESTHETIC SCHEMAS

PRIMARY METAPHORS / Met.Vs

/ Metons

SYSTEMATIC METAPHORS

ILLUSTRATIVE EXCERPTS

SEEING

FORCE / COUNTERFORCE)

UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING

(instruments; propagation;

dissemination; make; fabricates)

VIOLENCE IS A PRODUCT

MANUFACTURED BY THE MEDIA

(Ana – FG 1)27.I see that that28. ..analyzing this way31. ..of violence I see that TV32. ... Is one of the biggest

instruments33. .. of propagation of this

violence because I see it this way

37. that you learn on TV how to make an assault

38. ...that you learn how to make a bomb,

(Celso – FG1, lines 84-91) just adding more to the

comment Ana made, …the media issue I find that it fabricates, ..violence […] ..when we go out what ..comes to mind ..it is fear, ..it is persecution ..right so it is the values inversion as Ana explained (Handout 1)

Data, method and findingsCOGNITIVE SUBMODELS / IMAGE KINESTHETIC SCHEMAS

PRIMARY METAPHORS / Met.Vs

/ Metons

SYSTEMATIC METAPHORS

ILLUSTRATIVE EXCERPTS

FORCE AND COUNTERFORCE

CONTAINER

ACCEPTING IS SWALLOWING

(overflow; receive; accumulate)

VIOLENCE IS AN UNCONTROLLED FORCE

(Ana, FG1, line 35); “TV is in everybody’s houses”

(Ana Lívia, FG2, lines 206-210)“so then, violence, ..it is present I see that it is the media that makes a point for it to be each time more present in everybody’s lives,

(Vania, FG2, lines 1942-1955)“when something as a robbery or a car crash happens, we use this fact as a .. a, a .. a place where we can let it overflow, so ..you end up being more violent than the violence you suffered (received), it accumulated so much that you didn’t know how to work on that and you don’t accept it”

Data, method and findingsCOGNITIVE

SUBMODELS / IMAGE

KINESTHETIC SCHEMAS

PRIMARY METAPHORS /

Met.Vs / Metons

SYSTEMATIC METAPHORS

ILLUSTRATIVE EXCERPTS

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

/ CONTAINER

FEELING SAFE IS BEING INSIDE (?)

(house arrest; you lock yourself to the world; you deprive yourself; limit your children’s lif; you

make your child live inside a box)

FEAR AS A RESPONSE TO VIOLENCE IS PUTTING YOURSELF IN PRISON

(Antonio, FG1, lines 361-368)you are in house arrest, …you lock yourself …, and you deprive yourself of everything you could do,…you could have, …because you’re afraid, …of going out, …,on the streets

(Sara, FG1, lines 342-348)every day the effects are you lock yourself to the world, …because you’re afraid,…and just like Ana, I’m a mother too and we, …have to limit our children’s life,

… You kind of make your child live inside a box … because of fear …(Handout 2)

Summary

• The influence of the Media/TV in the present state of violence in urban Brazil, is strongly felt by the participants of the two FGs. The fact that the Media banalizes violence by its trivialization and excessive show of violent scenes which are repeated over and over again indiscriminately on television, causes violence to acquire a common-place status and exacerbates its presence in everyday life.

Summary• It is A PRODUCT MANUFACTURED BY THE MEDIA which is

intensely and uninvitedly offered people.

• Violence is also AN UNCONTROLLED FORCE which insists in invading people’s lives and in changing their routines.

• These metaphors, however, seem to emerge both as a result of the dynamics of talk but also because of participants embodied and social-culturally shared experiences.

• This is in line with the violence representation which emerges from their interaction in the stretch of data analyzed. One which presents violence with the impetus of an uncontrolled force which takes its toll on the way people react towards one another and on how they get affected both emotionally and psychologically.

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Websites

Metaphor analysis http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/metaphor-analysis/index.cfm

Living with Uncertainty projecthttp://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/livingwithuncertainty/

Research Group at UFC/Brazilwww.gelp-colin.ufc.br