Where Land and Body Meet: Body Culture and Nature

Abstract

Land and body are intimately inter-related. The ways in which we talk about one are often drawn from, or couched in, the ways (and terms) in which we talk about the other. Both are a rich source of metaphor for figuring and understanding the other. We talk about tongues of land, of a mountain range as a backbone, of rivers as arteries of commerce and communication, of arms and legs as limbs like tree branches, of torsos as trunks, of mouths of rivers, and so on. Clichés like ‘the bowels of the earth’ referring to aquifers and wetlands, and ‘the lungs of the city’ referring to parks and recreation areas are not only the stock-in-trade of the creatively bereft and stylistically outmoded but also indicative of the major source we mine for metaphors of land and places on, or in, it.