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At the core of human thought and expression lies the profound capacity of metaphor – the act of understanding one concept in terms of another. However, over the last decade, in response to the socio-political and ecological realities of the ‘Anthropocene’, disciplines like anthropology have also pointed at the limitations of human thought, highlighting its fundamental role in large scale planetary destruction.
These critical enquiries into modes of thought beyond the human such as in Eduardo Kohn’s path breaking work with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon forests, challenged our perceptions about the ‘field’ of thinking and communication as the sole domain of humans. It is with such a renewed orientation of metaphors that we organised our PhD symposium, Metaphors: Conceptualising Horizons of Meaning, held from the 26th to the 28th of February 2024 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
The present volume aims at exploring some of these perspectives. The symposium was the result of a collective endeavour by the doctoral candidates of the PhD in Asian and African Studies, XXXVIII cycle, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice: Rebecca Ciattini, Wenxin Jin, Cien Liang, Laura Locatelli, Michele Pulini, Michele Scarlassara, Kesang Thakur, and Claudia Zancan.

Table of contents:

METAPHORS: CONCEPTUALISING HORIZONS OF MEANING

Editors’ Preface
Rebecca Ciattini, Wenxin Jin, Laura Locatelli, Michele Pulini, Kesang Thakur, Claudia Zancan

Inter-Ships: Metaphors as Encounters
Mieke Bal

Chinese Neologisms and Metaphorical Potential in Pedagogy
Claudio Gebbia

Re-Reading the Cityscape. How Saihate Tahi’s Poetry Installation Shi no kasoku Opens Up New Urban Imaginaries
Sarah Puetzer

Swelling Horizons: Coloniality, Sea-Level Rise, and their Otherwise
Lukas H. Seidler

From Metaphors to Figurations: Experiencing ‘Margin’, ‘Centre’ and ‘Resistance’ in the Ethnographic Field and Beyond
Elsa Gios, Nabila Tavolieri

Pathways to Nirvāṇa: Aquatic Imagery and Visual Metaphors in Gandhāra
Alice Casalini

The Medieval Daoist Metaphor of the Cave: Cosmogony, Sacred Geography, and the Human Body
Xiaoyu Zhang

A Metaphorical Narrative of Outer Space in China’s Diplomacy: Toward a Heavenly ‘Community of Common Destiny’
Tonio Savina