The Metaphor of Waves: Indian Fabrics, Music, Dance & Meditation

2009

It was the exercise of the symbolic faculty that brought culture into existence and it is the use of symbols that makes the perpetuation of culture possible. Without the symbol there would be no culture and man would be merely and animal, not a human being.

Indo Nordic Author's colective, 2020

Symbolism n Hinduism

In a world yearning for clarity and understanding, it is time to shed the veil of illusion and confront the unadulterated truth. Brace yourselves, for the revelation is both profound and transformative: waves are the architects of our reality. This is not a fanciful notion or a flight of imagination; it is a truth grounded in concrete evidence that demands our attention.

Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2016

To cite this article: Stephen Muecke (2016) Writing the Indian Ocean, Performance Research, 21:2, 85-89, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1162495 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1162495

This article investigates the use of metaphorical language in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda 1. Vivekananda is one of the most important modern-day Hindu scholars, and his interpretation of the ancient Hindu scriptural lore has been very influential. Vivekananda's influence was part of the motivation for choosing his Complete Works as the empirical domain for the current study. AntConc was used to mine Vivekananda's Complete Works for water-related terms, which seemed to have a predilection for metaphoricity. Which terms to search for specifically was determined after a manual reading of a sample from the Complete Works. The data were then tagged using a convention inspired by the well-known Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije University (MIPVU). Thereafter, a representative sample of the data was chosen, and the metaphors were mapped and analysed thematically. Four of these are expounded upon in this article. This study's main aim was to investigate whether Hindu religious discourse uses metaphors to explain abstract religious concepts, and, if so, whether this happens in the same way as in Judaeo-Christian traditions. One of the key findings in this article is that neo-Hindu thought, as reconceptualised by Vivekananda, relies very little on the FAMILY frame when conceptualising abstract philosophical ideals, and instead draws on the domain of WATER more often.

2009

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014

How many waves are there in the ocean? In February of this year, at a beachside restaurant in Newcastle, Australia, Melbourne-based, Russian-born wave scientist Alexander Babanin ran me through an ink-and-paper calculation: take the mean wavelength of the dominant sort of wind-forced wave in the sea: 100 meters. Multiply that by the width of the average crest (also 100 meters) and get 10 4 square meters, the area of the average wave. Now, divide the expanse of the world ocean, 10 16 meters square, by that wave area and get 10 12 : a trillion waves. There, within earshot of Newcastle's surfing beach, Babanin gave me a mathematical reckoning of what Leonardo Da Vinci once called "the numberless waves of the sea. " Why would one want to tally the waves in the ocean? For scientists at the First International Australasian Conference on Wave Science (where I met Babanin), such accounting may aid in apprehending global wave weather and in projecting long-term wave climate. I had come to the workshop to learn the particulars by listening in on forty or so oceanographers, mathematicians, and meteorologists discussing wave modeling. I had discovered, in previous anthropological work among microbial oceanographers [SLIDE 4], that the global state of the sea can often be illumined through measures of its smallest, composing parts (Helmreich 2009). At this conference, organized by New Zealanders and Australians and playfully named Kiwi-Oz Waves, or KOZWaves [SLIDE 5]), I learned that many scientists interpret water waves (evanescent entities known through buoy and satellite measures as well as through computational models) as signs, as indices, of climate change, and, perhaps, humanly modulated climate futures. Why do I take waves and wave scientists as subjects of study for my newest anthropological research? Two reasons. First, while waves have a manifest materiality to them, they are also only apprehensible through abstractions [SLIDE 6], whether these are deployed by scientists, fisherpeople, surfers, or others; as such, waves are good to think with-and againstrecent calls in social theory to attend to materiality [SLIDE 7: a minibibliography of iconic books on the new materialisms, the call, in recent humanities to attend to the extra-or prediscursive material world in literary and cultural accounts; you'll see underlining these books something of a snapshot from the Zeitgeist, a 2013 Rice University Humanities Research Center call for postdoc applications on this topic]. Such "materiality" is, I think, too often posed, particularly in post-poststructuralism, as some really real outside signification. But the materiality of the world should not, I think, be separated from the formalisms we use to describe it [SLIDE 8: images of recent books on formalism, mostly in cultural studies of literature, art, and math, again underlined by a recent humanities center postdoc call for applications, this one at Rutgers, from 2012]. And, here, just to be clear, is a formalism describing canonical water wave motion [SLIDE 9]. To carry this closer to home, let me pepper in formalisms from anthropology [SLIDE 10], diagrams that might fascinate someone like Tim Ingold, whose 2007 book Lines [SLIDE 11] reads the traces and threads that make up kinship diagrams, rings of exchange and communication, and other anthropological

There is no sea without waves. The openness, the vastity, the amplitude of the immense surface of water is intrinsically associated with the idea of movement, from the little ripples that come ashore in the calm days of the Mediterranean to the gigantic tidal waves of the oceans. Agitated by both internal and external forces, by submarine currents, winds, and, in the Anthropocene, also by human navigation, the sea is perennially striated, as Deleuze would have put it. The liquid essence of the sea makes it the instable counterpart of the terrestrial world, a continuously changing mass of water that, exactly because of this mutability, both fascinates and terrifies. Waves are the visual patterns of the sea. They are a promise of topological order that constantly suggests a rhythm but constantly alters it into a myriad of variations. Waves are, also, the curvilinear result of the encounter between the rectilinear essence of water and the forces that bend it, that move it upwards or downwards, that cause its inflation and deflation, its inflexion and deflection. Waves are, then, an element of conjunction between two worlds, between earth and sea, between land and water, and between water and air. Winds touch the sea, the sea touches the land, and what results is an ungraspable spectacle of particles of water arranged into complex configurations. There lies the charm and the mystery of waves: they break the order of water, yet they also compose the visual order of the sea. They elude any attempt at calculation (thus representing a conundrum even for present-day physics), yet they constantly promise an order, or at least a range of patterns. Waves are also a force in themselves, combining the energies of water and air, of sea and wind, able to destroy but also to create power, that of ancient myths as well as that of modern wave-powerplants. Thus, whenever an instable material is inflected by forces that imprint on it some rhythmic, curvilinear configurations, humans recognize waves, not only in water, but also in air (soundwaves) or in even light, to such a wide extent that a certain quantum physics identifies waves as the primary constituent of the universe. Thus defined, waves are indeed everywhere in nature, in the rhythms and sounds of the human body, in those that are used to compose the voice of language, in the semantic patterns that grow and dwindle in culture, exactly like waves. Yet the most famous waves, the epitomic waves of all, remain those that seem to emerge from nothingness in the middle of an ocean, then run for long distances as delicate white horses, and finally break their crests against the cliffs of the world. The theory of catastrophes seeks to pattern this evolution, yet before modern mathematics traditional cultures too have sought to come to term with waves, denominating them, articulating them into types, naming these types in more or less detailed categorizations depending on how important waves were in the meshes of each culture. Waves are words, but waves are images too, in countless representations, and they are metaphors as well, of a force that mounts and declines, of a sudden burst of energy, of a rhythmic arrival, of everything that is wavy and undulating, that comes and goes, that rocks and breaks, that splashes and washes, that advances and withdraws, in the perennial, liquid oscillation that seems to beat at the heart of nature.

Word in the Cultures of the East. Sound, language, book, 2016

IJOLTL: Indonesian Journal of Language Teaching and Linguistics, 2016

The objective of this study is to see the meaning of metaphors in traditional ceremony in Lodoyo named Kiyai Pradah. This study was ethnography that used qualitative approach. The focus of this study was metaphors identified from the Javanese mantras used for ritual ceremony of Kiyai Pradah in Lodoyo, Blitar. The metaphors were analyzed their literal symbols and their intended meaning based on the Javanese culture. Data were analyzed using category of methapors and interpreting the symbols into the intended meaning. This study concludes that metaphors used in Javanese mantras of Kiyai Pradah ritual consist of 20 kinds. The metaphors are categories into (1) complimentary metaphors, (2) predicative metaphors, and (3) sentential metaphors. The metaphors represent the Javanese teaching values that put respects and harmony among human beings, the ancestors, and God.