How Things Count As The Same: Memory, Mimesis, And Metaphor

Description

In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today. Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference. Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor. Cover......Page 1 How Things Count as the Same......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 List of Illustrations......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 14 1. What Counts as the Same?......Page 18 2. How Memory Counts as the Same......Page 46 3. Mimesis, or “Society Is Imitation”......Page 66 4. Metaphor......Page 91 5. Framing Gifts......Page 112 6. Memory, Metaphor, and a Double Bind......Page 131 7. Sign, Ground, and Interpretant......Page 148 Conclusion......Page 178 Notes......Page 194 References......Page 212 Index......Page 224