Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery
216
Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555918941 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Sales rank: | 113,979 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Pagans in the Promised Land
Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery
By Steven T. Newcomb
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2008 Steven T. NewcombAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-894-1
CHAPTER 1
A Primer on Cognitive Theory
This book is a tentative effort to apply what has been termed "cognitive legal studies" to federal Indian law. This chapter introduces the reader to a number of important conceptual tools that will be utilized throughout the rest of the chapters. The information presented in this chapter can be quite challenging because it involves an entirely new way of thinking about thinking. However, the insight to be gained from this information is critically important for those who seek to better understand how human beings reason, and for those who are serious about decolonization. Because cognitive science and cognitive theory involve a great deal of complexity and subtlety, this effort to apply some of the tools and methods of cognitive theory to federal Indian law should be understood as merely suggestive and tentative rather than definitive. A key point is that federal Indian law can be studied as an ongoing process of mental or conceptual activity and socialized human behavior. In part, it can therefore be analyzed and studied in terms of conceptual metaphors, image-schemas, and other cognitive operations, such as radial categories and idealized cognitive models (ICMs).
Cognitive science studies the mind by investigating conceptual systems, or systems of thought. This is accomplished in part through empirical research in such areas as psychology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Some cognitive scientists study what is known as the "cognitive unconscious," where, they say, most of our mental activity takes place. Two prominent thinkers in the area of cognitive theory, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, use the term cognitive to refer to "any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason." Based on some thirty years of work, their findings show that "our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies." Cognitive scientists study the way that people think and speak by also investigating the role that our physical bodies play in cognition, including the complex neural activities of our brains.
Steven Winter describes mind as "an embodied process formed in interaction with the physical and social world." One of the most surprising claims made on the basis of cognitive theory is that "all thought is irreducibly imaginative." "Meaning," says Winter, "arises in the imaginative interactions of the human organism with its world, and these embodied experiences provide both the grounding and the structure for human thought and rationality." Thus the human imagination is said to be the central means by which we interact with and adapt to the social and physical world. Furthermore, our dynamic imagination, says Winter, operates in a "regular, orderly and systematic fashion."
However, as Lakoff and Johnson have pointed out, "Our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious." Cognitive science and cognitive theory are efforts to empirically examine human phenomena, such as language, in order to better understand the inner workings and structure of human conceptual systems.
Based on the above, because the conceptual system of federal Indian law is a product of the human imagination, it is also irreducibly imaginative. Because the ideas that constitute federal Indian law are the result of imaginative processes, those ideas operate systematically in a regular, dynamic, and highly adaptive manner. Furthermore, the deep cognitive structure of the conceptual system of federal Indian law is not immediately evident, even to those who regularly study and practice this area of law. Cognitive science and cognitive theory provide a number of valuable tools for gaining much-needed insight into federal Indian law; one of these tools is conceptual metaphor.
Conceptual Metaphors
Metaphor is a matter of thought, not just language. Metaphorical thinking involves imaginatively thinking of and experiencing one thing in terms of another. Since we as humans automatically and unreflectively think and reason (imaginatively conceptualize) about all kinds of things in terms of the functions, structures, and activities of our physical bodies, it necessarily follows that human conceptual systems are largely metaphorical in nature. Because federal Indian law is a conceptual system composed of countless abstract ideas, it too is largely metaphorical in nature. Thus a study of the role that conceptual metaphors and other cognitive operations have played and continue to play in federal Indian law may provide us with a much deeper understanding of this extremely difficult and problematic field of law than has been previously possible.
The term metaphor is derived from the Greek meta pherein and means 'to carry over,' thereby "suggesting that the meanings and ideas associated with one thing are carried over to another." A more technical way of describing metaphor is to say that it involves complex neural brain functions that facilitate thinking of or understanding one conceptual domain in terms of ideas and inferences drawn from another conceptual domain. Two common examples of conceptual metaphor include understanding and experiencing the domain of argument in terms of the domain of war (argument is war) or thinking of and experiencing the domain of love in terms of the domain of a journey (love is a journey). In the first example, some entailments of war are mapped onto our understanding of argument. In the second example, the entailments of a journey are mapped onto our understanding of love. This gives rise to such expressions as "Our relationship isn't going anywhere" and "We're driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love."
An understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in terms of the location of the Indies, as Europeans referred to Eastern Asia during the so-called Age of Discovery, eventually resulted in the Europeans mentally projecting the concepts indios, Indians, or American Indians onto the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere. Thus the misnomer Indian can be thought of as the primary metaphor in federal Indian law. The tools of cognitive theory provide us with an effective means of examining the way that federal lawmakers, jurists, and policy makers have unconsciously and imaginatively applied certain categories, concepts, metaphors, and other thought processes to American Indian peoples, some of which, through time, have come to be objectified and reified as "the law."
Image-Schemas
In addition to identifying conceptual metaphors and the central role they play in human thought, scholars of cognitive science have also identified a mental phenomenon called image-schemas, which are part of the structure and operation of the human imagination. Image-schemas play a highly significant role in the conceptual system of federal Indian law. Such schemas are mentally modeled after the structure, functions, activities, and spatial orientation of the human body and its interactions with the social and physical world.
Image-schemas are grounded in the bodily experiences of our everyday actions. For example, when we get up in the morning, we walk upright. We typically walk forward, not backward, and we continue moving forward throughout our day. This continual forward motion is part of the experience of being human and the reason why, for example, humans tend to metaphorically think of, experience, and reason about the conceptual domain of life in terms of the conceptual domain of a journey. The typical forward movement of humans results in the metaphors life is a purposeful journey and purposes are destinations, both of which are structured in terms of what is called the source-path-goal image-schema. On the basis of this image-schema, and in keeping with such metaphors, it is typical to conceptualize our lives, and all kinds of daily activities, in terms of traveling from some source or starting point along some path or route toward and to a goal or destination. Another example of this thought process is the tendency for people raised in American society to typically think of progress as a forward movement toward some idealized image or model of society in the future. The classic image of this is exemplified in the painting American Progress, or Manifest Destiny by John Gast, which depicts the movement of the United States westward in the manner of a manifest destiny. An angelic blond white woman floats through the air in a westward direction, carrying what appears to be a Bible under her right arm while unfurling a telegraph line behind her.
Based on the source-path-goal image-schema and the life is a purposeful [westward] journey conceptualization, there is a long history of the American people thinking of the indigenous peoples of North America as a "barrier" or "obstacle" to American "progress." This is partly the result of American society's sense of a forward-moving manifest destiny being traditionally and unconsciously measured in terms of success at colonization and the resulting accumulation of Indian land. Because the Indians, as the original possessors of the land, stood fast in resistance to their ancestral homelands being overrun and overtaken by the invading Europeans, American society viewed them as impediments standing in the way of America's purpose and, therefore, as obstacles to America's "civilized, forward, westward momentum." Thus, according to the standard viewpoint of the United States, the American Indians, because of their efforts to hold on to their lands, were typically thought of as "backward" peoples. In other words, the Indians were not considered to be attempting to stand still. They were thought of as not having "advanced," or as holding back, the "forward" movement of "progress."
There is another aspect of the human experience that has gone into the development of federal Indian law and policy; it is the fact previously mentioned that we walk upright. We do so by maintaining our balance (though we seldom spend much time consciously thinking about this, unless we are about to or do lose our balance). As Winter has stated, "The discovery that human rationality is embodied means that basic body states like balance, and other image-schemas, provide the primary structure of human reason." We habitually think and speak in terms of the concept of balance, either how to achieve it or to maintain it. It is our physical bodily experience of balance that leads, for example, to the common metaphorical expression about some important issue "hanging in the balance." In other words, our everyday human experience of balance results in the balance image-schema, and this schema yields metaphors and linguistic expressions having to do with balance. For example, the balance image-schema is the basis for the iconic image of the scales of justice held by the statue of the female figure known as Justicia. Judgments are unconsciously thought of as being made by "weighing" alternative courses of action.
Other Important Image-Schemas
The human experience of individuating objects and the experience of grasping objects and holding onto them result in object image-schemas. For example, conceptualizing ideas as if they were individual physical objects leads to the metaphor ideas are objects. Additionally, the experience of using our hands to physically grasp objects is used as the basis for the metaphorical concept of mentally "grasping" ideas, which leads to the metaphor understanding is grasping. This example leads to the observation that metaphorical thinking is expansive; we are able to imaginatively conceive of mental activity as grasping without losing the meaning of grasping in a physical sense. The idiomatic expression "hold that thought" is an example of the use of a conceptual metaphor that follows from a thought being conceived of as if it were a physical object that one can grab hold of. The question "Could you please repeat that, it went right over my head?" is a metaphorical expression that imaginatively conceptualizes an idea as if it were a physical object that moves through space and bypasses one's head, which means that one did not understand the idea communicated. This conception of an idea going by one's head is related to the mind is a container metaphor, on the basis of which the mind is conceptualized as a container that ideas go into or don't.
The part-whole image-schema results from the fact that we "experience our bodies as structured wholes with identifiable parts," which is the experiential and bodily basis for the part-whole image-schema. The part-whole structure of the human body leads to a cognitive phenomenon known as metonymy, a concept in which "the part stands for the whole." Thus, for example, the concept crown used by John Marshall in the Johnson ruling refers to the iconic symbol worn on a monarch's head. He used, crown as a metonymy (part) that stands for the entire monarchy (whole). An excellent example of a metonymy is the journalistic expression "The White House said today ...," in which the physical building of the White House is the part that stands for the whole of the entire executive branch of the U.S. government.
The part-whole image-schema figures prominently in the conceptual system of federal Indian law, particularly when Indian lands are conceptualized as constituting a part of the whole territory of the United States. This role that the part-whole image-schema plays in federal Indian law is also intimately related to the container image-schema that comes into play when the boundaries of the United States are thought of as forming a kind of container. "In the United States" is an expression predicated on the conception of the country of the United States as a container.
The container image-schema is experientially grounded in the fact that the human body is a kind of container; it has an inside and an outside, a point made evident whenever we eat or drink something or eliminate wastes from our body. It is on the basis of the container schema that we unconsciously conceptualize a state as a location, which is predicated on the sense of "being in a bounded region of space." An abstract state is thought of as if it were a physical container with rigid boundaries. A map of any of the respective states of the United States provides a graphic image of the concept of a state as a bounded region of space. But this sense of containment with rigid boundaries also comes into play when we refer to a mental state, such as "a state of confusion," or an emotional state, such as "a state of bliss." However, emotional states are also conceptualized as "entities within a person," in which case the person is conceived of as a container.
The container schema can also give rise to the image of a container-within-a-container. This is well exemplified, for example, by the book title The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. The concept Nations in the title refers, of course, to American Indian nations, and the concept Within refers to the country of the United States. The title The Nations Within is structured by the unconscious image of a container-within-a-container and conveys the idea that Indian nations exist within the larger United States or, more accurately stated, within the American empire. The container image-schema and the metaphors it structures are highly instrumental in the patterns of reasoning used in federal Indian law.
For example, in 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court applied the container image-schema in the case United States v. Kagama. Deciding on an appeal dealing with a murder conviction of two Indians on the Hoopa Reservation, the Court "went back to geography, noting that 'Indians are within the geographical limits of the United States. The soil and the people within those limits are under the political control of the government of the United States, or the States of the Union.'" The container image-schema has been a powerful means of structuring the argument that American Indian nations are subject to the authority of the United States simply because those nations are conceptualized as being located "inside" or "within" the boundaries of the United States. The container image-schema employed in Kagama illustrates a metaphor commonly found in federal Indian law discourse: "inside the boundaries of is under the authority of." It is partly on the basis of the part-whole and container image-schemas that any given Indian nation is conceptualized as being subject to the plenary power and jurisdiction of the United States.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pagans in the Promised Land by Steven T. Newcomb. Copyright © 2008 Steven T. Newcomb. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Foreword ixPreface xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction xxi
A Primer on Cognitive Theory 1
Metaphorical Experience and Federal Indian Law 13
The Conqueror Model 23
Colonizing the Promised Land 37
The Chosen People-Promised Land Model 51
The Dominating Mentality of Christendom 59
Johnson v. M'Intosh 73
Converting Christian Discovery into Heathen Conquest 89
The Mental Process of Negation 103
Christian Nations Theory: Hidden in Plain Sight 115
Conclusion: A Sacred Regard for All Living Things 125
Notes 139
References 171
Index 181