Culture as Nature

States of Matter Metaphors and the Study of Mediterranean Antiquity

Abstract

Metaphors are widely employed in academia and beyond to render complex concepts more accessible. This paper investigates the use of metaphors drawn from nature to approach culture and culture contact in the ancient Mediterranean, focusing on examples evoking the three fundamental states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Although the Mediterranean is celebrated as ‘the mother of all metaphors’, this has not attracted any systematic analysis, nor has it been problematized. States of matter metaphors are widely used in the study of Mediterranean antiquity and can be shown to be more than figures of speech or heuristics; they convey particular modes of conceptualizing culture which depend on a range of empirical and theoretical approaches developed across the humanities and social sciences, including some that are outdated and that fail to capture the complexity of culture. My critical examination of such metaphorical thinking covers a heterogenous body of material that has become interwoven through selective and messy exchanges of ideas across different disciplines and between disciplines and popular culture. In such exchanges, the pedigree and conceptual load of associated terms is often forgotten or neglected. My aim is to identify the main threads and investigate how shifts in the use of states of matter metaphors for Mediterranean culture and culture contact relate to broader shifts in approaches to the topic. The exercise reveals how states of matter metaphors are also applied to different phases of the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean, as well as to the periodization of modernity. Liquid metaphors are found to predominate, solid ones are often employed only to be dismissed and gaseous ones are rarely attested. In some cases, the shift from one set of metaphors to another can be shown to relate to broader changes in theoretical approaches.