Migrants’ NATION-AS-BODY metaphors as expressions of transnational identities

ABSTRACT

The metaphors nation-as-body and nation-as-person have been used widely in xenophobic discourses targeting migrants as diseases, taboo body parts or flawed character traits of the body politic. It may then come as a surprise to find such metaphors back in a sample of migrants' responses in a cross-cultural survey of metaphors interpretation, which forms the data of this article. Migrants reinterpret these metaphors to negotiate their fear or criticism of marginalization and praising advantages of mixed identities. These self-validating strategies may be utilized in didactic contexts to counter traditionally discriminatory discourses.

Die Metaphern nation als körper und nation als person gehören zu den historisch langlebigsten Ausdrucksformen des Nationalismus und sind stark vertreten in fremdenfeindlichen Diskursen, die Migranten und/oder Minderheiten als Krankheitserreger oder tabuisierte Körperteile im Volkskörper oder als schlechte Eigenschaften des Volks-Charakters diffamieren. Dieselben Bildspender lassen sich überraschender Weise auch in den Antworten von studentischen Migranten finden, die im Rahmen eines Fragebogentest zu Metaphern-Interpretationen erhoben wurden. Sie werden hier jedoch verwendet, um rassistische Identitäts-Stereotypen von Migranten umzudeuten zu neuen, gemischten oder transitorischen Identitäten. Sie können als Vorbild dienen, um kritische Reflexion über stigmatisierende nationalistische Diskursen zu stärken.

KEYWORDS:

• Dehumanization
• metaphor
• migration
• nationalism
• scenario
• stigmatization

Introduction

Nationalism, both in its ‘banal’ uses in ‘flagging the nation’ routines as well as in currently emphatically and aggressively reasserted manifestations, relies on figurative language, be it in the form of political terminology (head of state, body politic), the symbolism of national ‘characters’ such as Uncle Sam (USA), John Bull (England) or Marianne (France) or emotionally and polemically loaded narratives designed to ostracize migrants and other marginalized groups (Billig, 1995; Stanojević & Šarić, 2019; Wodak & Boukala, 2015). Within the Western/European cultural context, the metaphors of the nation as a body and nation as a person have been entrenched in nationalist theories and popular imagination of collective identities (both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’) for half a millennium, building on the Graeco-Roman cultural heritage of political thought (Charbonnel, 2010; Harvey, 2007; Musolff, 2010, 2021). By the early sixteenth century the late Latin term corpus politicum was translated into all major European languages, e.g. as body politic, corps politique, politischer Körper. Equivalent terms and concepts are also documented in contemporary and historical usage across many other cultural contexts (Anderson, 2006; Callahan, 2009; Huang, 2007; Kudayisa, 2006; Neusner, 1989; Shogimen, 2009; Toggia, 2004; Winichakul, 1994).

This article is based on a global survey of interpretations of the nation-as-body metaphor, which was conducted (in English) during the period 2011–2020 at 51 universities in 30 countries, generating responses from over 2100 student informants, of which 1772 completed answers remained after elimination of irrelevant cases, which were from 24 different L1 cohorts: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Croatian, Dutch/Flemish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Serbian, Turkish, Urdu. The aim of the survey was to compare cultural patterns in body-related figurative conceptualizations of national identity by Higher Education students (Musolff, 2021).

Within the overall corpus, a subsample of responses by student migrants was identified that proved of special interest for an enquiry into how discourses of nationalism are circulated in national discourse communities, including migrant cultures. These majority of these responses aligned with a general tendency among the survey respondents to reproduce benign characterizations of the (own) nation-body or -person; however, some migrants’ interpretations included metaphors of disease, taboo body part or flawed character that have a track record of dehumanizing and stigmatizing usage (Bhatia & Jenks, 2018; Jenks & Bhatia, 2020; Musolff, 2015; Santa Ana, 2002). It is obviously of concern that such metaphors are part of the self-perception of migrants. This issue, and potential didactic answers to it, will be the focus of the concluding section. As background for it, here follow first a brief overview of the comparative findings for the whole corpus, then a detailed discussion of the migrant sub-sample.

Scenario data of L1 samples in the nation-as-body corpus

Survey methodology

The survey was based on a questionnaire that included one main question to elicit interpretations of the nation as a body metaphor: ‘The concept of “nation” can be described by way of a metaphor or simile that presents it in terms of a human body. Please apply this metaphor to your home nation in 5–6 sentences.’ In addition, the survey asked respondents only to give basic sociolinguistic information on first language, nationality, age, and gender. As could be expected from an exercise using student informants, the age-range was 18–25. The gender distribution was slanted in favor of female informants, who accounted for at least more than 55%, and in some L1 samples more than 70% of respondents (Musolff, 2021, pp. 54–62).

The open metaphor interpretation task gave respondents almost complete freedom to devise conceptualizations of their nation’s identity in terms of body-related metaphors and to indicate their own relationship with and attitude towards that identity. Accordingly, the number of source concepts ran into hundreds, ranging from hair to toes, encompassing all health and illness conditions and including all manner of character traits and social roles of the nation-as-person (even though the task only asked for body-related interpretations). Many of these source concepts, in particular the most prominent ones, such as head, eyes, heart, belly, arms, legs, were each mapped onto different targets (e.g. head = queen, president, prime minister, government, capital city, allegedly rational or controlling ‘elite’ parts of society). This vast range of conceptual variation made it imperative to group the answers into a more limited set of narrative-argumentative frames or ‘scenarios’ (Musolff, 2006, 2016, 2017), to get an overview of their main semantic and pragmatic patterns and their evaluative stance.

Scenario analysis

A research team of five coders identified (after a pilot run) five thematic source scenarios covering all uses (Musolff, 2017, 2021). They occurred across all samples but differed in their relative strength of occurrence per sample: (a) whole body, i.e. the nation as a unified anatomical and/or organismic entity, ordered from the head down to the feet; (b) geobody, i.e. the national geography as a physical body shape, organized in center–periphery relationships and nation-specific contours; (c) part of body, i.e. the nation as part of a larger international body; (d) part of ego, i.e. the nation as part of the informant’s own physical body and/or personality; and (e) person, i.e. the nation as a human personality, with gender- and age-ascriptions, and allocated family-, professional and/or social roles and character traits.

To illustrate the allocation of responses to scenarios, let us consider briefly the following two responses:

1. The head of the [British nation’s] body represents the Queen of England, as she is in charge of the whole country […]. The features of the head (eyes, nose, mouth, and ears) represent the different […] politicians, the Prime Minister, the Government.

2. England was once like a young person’s liver: healthy and functioning; however over time it has become problematic for the health of the rest of the body (Europe).

The first answer is from a British home student and fits in the tradition of conceptualizing the nation as a whole body (type a), which is pervasive in public discourses of English-speaking countries (Musolff, 2021, pp. 15–50). Whilst not being emphatically praising the British nation, example (1) does present its body politic as a well-ordered and functional whole. Example (2), on the other hand, was written by a British student during his year abroad at a German university. He uses the body part scenario to give a critical assessment of his nation’s health and of further damaging effects on the health of the larger body it belongs to, i.e. ‘Europe’. This is a far cry from the standard assertion of the hierarchical nation as a whole body in example (1); instead, the writer of (2) chooses the liver from the domain of body parts to articulate a critical evaluation of the nation’s international standing.

General results

In terms of frequency, tradition-affirming endorsements of the home nation like that in example (1) provide the bulk of the survey responses (between 60% and 90% across L1-samples) and they occur in all five scenario types, e.g. as a well-ordered body whole, or as a healthy body part, a unified and beautiful geobody, a well-integrated part of the (writer’s) self or a personality with positive character traits. This predominance of affirmative conceptualizations may be seen as empirical corroboration of Billig’s (1995) account of ‘banal nationalism’ in educational and popular culture. However, in some cohorts (e.g. Eastern European, Arabic, and Asian samples), such affirmation rises far above routine endorsement and locates the nation (or its soul) in the writer’s own blood or heart (scenario d) or justifies sacrificing themselves for the mother-nation (scenario e). In such cases, the metaphor interpretation task was used by respondents as an opportunity to express emphatic, not just ‘routine’, identification with the nation. Such critical responses make up only a minority of responses in each L1 sample in the corpus and in some samples fall below 5%. Their highest ‘score’ in a larger sample is that of 41% in the English L1 cohort; it is mainly due to US and Australian informants using drastic condemnations of their nations by likening them to defective or taboo-body parts (e.g. split brain, ass, penis, nether regions). Among British and New Zealand informants such sarcastic depictions were rare; they preferred ironical and humorous distancing from the nation-body (see example 2).

In terms of overall scenario distribution, the responses from the English L1 cohort focused on the whole body and geobody scenarios (44% and 25% respectively). The other samples in the Germanic Languages L1 group showed similarities with the English L1 group. The German L1 sample showed an even higher preference for the whole body scenario (55%) than the English and, in contrast to the English L1 sample, the second-ranking scenario was person (25%). The latter was the focus of the small amount (9%) of critical and/or ironical comments, most of which dealt with the legacy/guilt theme of Germany’s twentieth-century history. In the Dutch and Norwegian L1 samples, body and person, respectively, were also the first- and second ranking scenarios. Likewise, in the Romance L1 languages group, the Spanish and Romanian L1 samples showed a similar scenario distribution to German L1 in prioritizing the whole body scenario as the most frequent and person as the second most frequent scenario. However, both samples scored considerably higher than the Germanic L1 sample in terms of the criticism/irony/humor index, with percentages of 36% and 35% respectively, mostly referencing topical, rather than historical grievances. The Italian L1 sample showed a different distribution with person and body part as its top-ranking scenarios. This preference seems partly motivated by the stereotypical conceptualization of Italy as a leg being encased in the proverbial boot (Nijman et al., 2010, p. 63). The French L1 sample had person and body part in the highest-ranking places, but in reverse order to the Italian L1 sample. Here, the two scenarios seemed to be closely connected, due to the fact that in most individual response statements a specific body part (especially, head, heart) was interpreted both in terms of an anatomical-institutional analogy (e.g. people as heart) and as a symbol of character of the nation-person (e.g. warm-heartedness of the nation-mother). The small Portuguese L1 sample had three scenarios (whole body, body part, and part of ego) in joint first place.

Among the Slavic L1 language samples, the two largest ones, Russian L1 and Ukrainian L1 had in common that body part was their most frequently instanced scenario. For Russian L1, the second-ranking scenario was that of person, with a usage preference similar to that of the French L1 sample, i.e. a double reading of body parts as sources for anatomical analogies and as symbolic indications of character traits. The Ukrainian L1 sample, on the other hand, was characterized by a focus on the relationship of whole body and body part scenarios. The Serbian and Polish L1 samples had whole body in first place and person or geobody in second place, whilst the Croatian and Bulgarian L1 samples had person in first place and geobody in second place. Of the three ‘other European’ L1 samples, the Hungarian L1 sample resembled the English L1 responses most closely, with whole body and geobody in first and second place. Their relatively frequent critical and ironic comments (17%) made use of these scenarios to express resentment about amputated parts of both the national territory and populace. The Lithuanian L1 sample also had whole body in first place but person in second, like the German, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian and Serbian L1 samples. The Greek L1 sample had the highest-scoring person scenario (59%) in the corpus, followed by body part in second place. Again, they were combined to yield an anatomical-symbolic double reading (organ or limb as both bodily entity and ‘seat’ of emotions or other character traits). This sample also had a strong representation of mother-personifications, referencing Greece’s history as mother of democracy or philosophy, and a small group of masculine-gendered characterizations, which together accounted for the high person-score.

In the Middle East group, the Arabic L1 sample had the person scenario in first place and part of ego (i.e. nation as part of my blood/body) in second, mainly to emphasize that the nation’s greatness was worthy to sacrifice one’s one life for. However, some person conceptualizations expressed deep resentment against authoritarian character traits. A similar picture emerged for the Turkish L1 sample, but with body part and person as the top-ranking scenarios, whose collocations provided again the platform for an organic-symbolic double reading. The (small) Hebrew and Urdu/Pashto L1 samples were dominated by the whole body scenario, with person in second place for Hebrew L1. In the Asian group, the Chinese sample showed a dominant pairing of person and geobody scenarios across both the Mandarin and Cantonese sub-cohorts. But the two groups were divided by an almost complete lack of criticism, irony, and humor in the Mandarin L1 sub-sample of mainland (PRC) informants, compared with a substantial occurrence of these features in the Cantonese L1 sub-sample from Hong Kong, which was collected at the time of student protests in the former British colony (2019). Such criticism focused on the perceived overbearing behavior and character traits of the PRC nation-person. On the other hand, those PRC-informants who mentioned Hong Kong or other regions with a history of separation from the central Chinese state (e.g. Taiwan, Tibet) insisted on the urgent need of their integration in the PRC; until then, they were deemed to be cut-off, injured or diseased organs. In terms of overall frequency, however, critical or resentful responses in both sub-cohorts were eclipsed by a majority of those praising the nation-person as a benign and protective mother figure. The Japanese L1 sample exhibited the maximum frequency for the whole body scenario (68%) in the corpus, with geobody in second place. This extremely high proportion of whole body scenario uses may be linked to a culture-specific tradition connecting medical philosophy and political thought (Shogimen, 2009). Another distinct feature of the Japanese L1 sample was references to religious shrines as bones in the nation as geobody and/or as the soul of the nation-person.

Migrant and minority identities in metaphor interpretations

The vast majority of respondents wrote, in accordance with the task, about their respective ‘home country’, either as residents (e.g. British students in Britain, etc.) or as temporary (im-)migrants in the countries where they were studying. Of all universities participating in the survey, 18 had respondents who self-identified as migrants, most of them in the UK (n = 63), followed by Germany (n = 53), Australia (n = 26), USA (n = 19), Russia (n = 13), Austria (n = 6), Lithuania (n = 6), Italy, (n = 6), Norway (n = 6), Serbia (n = 5), New Zealand (n = 5), Spain (n = 3), the Netherlands (n = 3), Turkey (n = 1), Algeria (n = 1), amounting to 216, i.e. 12.2% of the 1772 responses included in the corpus.

Significantly, there were no negative depictions of immigration or immigrants found in the corpus. On the contrary, informants across all L1 samples praised the generous and welcoming attitude of their respective nation-person towards refugees and migrants, often visualizing such a friendly attitude by open arms and hugging, as in the following examples:

(3)	Greek nation gives a hug to the immigrants who have recently come.
(4)	The German nation was a nation of people born in Germany. This has changed since globalization started and now we have all different kinds of people in our nation, one part feeling like a part in our nation others feeling like a part of their ‘home’ nation this makes our nation to a mixed and colorful ‘person’.
(5)	Turkey wants to look after co-religionist Syrian immigrants.

The fact that immigration is overwhelmingly positively viewed in this survey is most probably owed to its demographics, i.e. a 90%+ majority of 18–25-year-old university students of (foreign) language subjects. It is thus by no means representative of the general populace.

Emigration as a large-scale social phenomenon (i.e. not as a temporary experience of migrant students) is, on the other hand, mainly viewed as damaging the health and strength of the home-nation’s body or person. This critical stance is often expressed ironically, e.g.:

(6)	If the [Hungarian] nation ‘loses weight’ we can talk about emigration.
(7)	Lithuanian youth are legs because they usually emigrate […].
(8)	Serbia is a very generous human being because it is like [an] organ donor by giving away well-educated young people. In this way, Serbia is a brain donor.

As these two sets of examples, i.e. (3)-5) and (6)–(8) show, both ‘sides’ of migration can be ‘patriotically’ interpreted, either in terms of the writers’ own nation-person’s generosity to (deserving) outsiders becoming parts of its body, or as regret over losing organs and/or body mass.

These responses still fit the ‘banal nationalistic’ stereotypes of nations as ideally whole bodies and benign personalities. Of greater originality and significance are, however, the altogether 76 responses by informants who wrote about their own personal status as migrants. Due to the small size of this sub(-sub)-sample, frequencies are not meaningful and will therefore not be discussed here. However, they can be grouped into three thematic clusters which are discussed below: (a) perception of the respective ‘host’ nation, (b) experiences of marginalization and/or historical oppression, (c) expressions of mixed, transitory or intermediate national identity.

Perception of the ‘host’ nation

When migrant students describe their ‘host’ or destination nation in terms of the nation-as-body and/or person metaphors, their depictions of it are mostly positive and express admiration or gratitude. A Turkish student in Germany, for instance, praises that nation’s mediator-role between East and West in terms of its centrality as the heart of Europe:

(9)	Germany is the ‘heart’ of Europe […] since the heart is the place where all other parts are connected to and get the oxygen that is needed from. In a similar manner, Germany isn’t only the geographic center of Europe, but also the one that combines the differences between the East and the West […].

Two German students in Italy praise their host-country for its generosity and friendliness, in terms of a big heart or a mother’s hug:

(10)	Italy can be compared to a big heart due to its open minded people there and the lifestyle.
(11)	Italy is as hot and soft as a mother’s hug.

A student from India in New Zealand combines body part and person scenarios to praise his host:

(12)	New Zealand has a strong cultural identity which is built upon past successes and failures which grow, hence giving the people a form of pride and knowledge. […] ‘nation’ forms part of the hand and relates to how [New Zealanders] think and work.

Here, hand is used in a double function, both denoting the achievement of the nation’s thinking and working, and at the same time symbolizing it as a ‘form of pride and knowledge’. Another migrant to New Zealand, an 18-year-old female student from Sri Lanka, gives a mixed but still fascinated appraisal of her host country’s nation-person, as she sees it:

(13)	New Zealand is a young body, small, and kind of rugged. She is wild, her hair messy, dirt under her fingernails, Her appearance is somewhat messy, relaxed. She doesn’t wear shoes.

In this example, the body and attire description (rugged, messy hair, barefooted), the feminine gendering, and ascription of character traits (wild, relaxed) may be viewed as a mildly patronizing but nevertheless friendly characterization.

Experience of xenophobia and colonial oppression

If the previous examples showed some migrants’ positive perceptions of their host nations, there is also evidence in the corpus of responses that reflect experiences of discrimination. Two such answers are provided by Romanian students who returned to their home country after stays in Britain and Germany, respectively:

(14)	[…] nowadays saying that you’re romanian [sic] in a foreign country is like saying that you are a convict. […] We, as any other nation, have our problems but we try to fix them, but as usual, there must be a ‘black sheep’ in a group of 10 people, let’s say. Anatomically speaking, if our nation was a body, we wouldn’t function as one.
(15)	I would say that Romania is seen as a limb that crippled Europe. UK was not hesitant in rendering Romania the image of a parasite. I prefer to see it as a vital organ of the European Community, as I believe all members are supposed to be: equally important to make the European Body ‘work’, and not just a disposable appendix.

The experience of discrimination during the Romanian students’ stays abroad may have been reinforced by knowledge of hostile media reports in these West European countries that had used similar racist metaphors targeting Romanian migrants, based on the source concepts of parasite and criminals (Neagu & Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu, 2014). In example (14), the writer refuses to accept the reported Other-perspective of Romanians as convicts, but concedes that her country does (yet) not work as a unified body, due to the presence of black sheep, which still needs ‘fixing’. In (15) the writer refers to three stigmatizations of her country, all couched in anatomical metaphors, i.e. as a crippled limb, parasite, or appendix. These ascriptions with their connotations of uselessness or damage to the body which they are part of, are ‘countered’ by a depiction of Romania as a vital organ of the European Community that is essential for its well-functioning. Both statements strive to revalidate the nation-self, one by explaining that black sheep-versions of the nation-person are being reformed even if they are not fully integrated yet, or, more assertively, by contradicting and replacing them with a counter-scenario version of a vital organ that keeps the whole body functioning.

Four statements relate to the historical background of colonialism as a lingering burden on the writers’ national identity. Three of these responses are by Algerians who, like the Romanians in (14) and (15) above, had by the time of writing returned to their home country from study stays abroad:

(16)	Our nation is still carrying the colonialism wounds.
(17)	The hands of our nation are still holding the French’s [sic] hands.
(18)	Algeria beats in my human body because millions of martyrs and fighters defended it during the French colonial [war].

Here the whole body, part of ego and body part scenarios are invoked to highlight the colonial legacy of long-lasting damage to the own nation (16), or its continuing dependency on the colonizer (17), or the emotional commitment on the part of ego (18). In one further case, a student from Burkina Faso who lives in the USA highlights the colonial legacy in terms of the person scenario, again with France as the oppressor:

(19)	My country is like a person that has a heavy push on his head while his body is in the water. We have been colonized linguistically, politically, and economically.

There were no strongly critical or negative comments by migrant students about the host country in which they were resident of at the time of writing. This dearth of critical comments (and the observed frequent occurrence of favorable comments, see 3.1) cannot, however, be taken as ‘proof’ of a wholly positive migration experience of all respondents. In the first place, the delivery context of participation in a survey conducted at the host university is likely to have stimulated a positive bias among the informants. Furthermore, as the examples in the following sub-section will show, the identities construed even by respondents with an overall optimistic outlook on the future can be more complex than a mere passive acceptance of the new identity offered by their host-nation.

Experience of the writer’s mixed, divided or transitory identity

The third cluster of interpretations produced by migrant informants allocate diverse body parts to ego’s ( = the writer’s) home/heritage nation on the one hand and to the host nation on the other, often with explicit interpretive comments:

(20)	I feel the US is like a stomach. Always wanting to consume and in need of digesting the many substances that come our way. […] Israel is my second home and is the palm of a hand. It can be opened and closed.
(21)	Russia is a stomach. I believe that this is so, because in the stomach there is often a coup, and everything is unstable. I want to talk about my homeland. For me Georgia is a heart. In Georgia people are very hospitable, kind and sympathetic.
(22)	I’m from Syria, but I was born in Russia. So I have two native countries. Syria [is] to me like a hair because of family ties. And Russia for me [is] like eyes because I’m growing here, and my future is here.
(23)	I’m from Azerbaijan, but I live in Russia for 18 years. Russia associates with brain because here I receive education. Azerbaijan is associated with heart, because Azerbaijan is my homeland. And I love my homeland very much.

In examples (20)-(23) the home nation’s identity is conceptualized as palm of one’s hand, heart, or hair, and the host nation’s identity as stomach, eyes, or brain, respectively. The first group of body part concepts appears to be highly emotionally invested, especially the concept of the heart. This usage ties in with other answers in the corpus where the heart is associated with the core of the respondents’ political and emotional identity (Musolff, 2021, pp. 120–124, 151–152). It corroborates previous research on the near-universal association of heart and emotion, which is based on the well-established stereotype of this organ as the ‘seat’ of personal identity and feelings (Foolen, 2008; Gutiérrez Pérez, 2008; Musolff, 2013; Niemeier, 2000; Pasamonik, 2012; Yu, 2009). The palm of one’s hand is also highly individualized (Foolen, 2017) and epitomizes the holder’s power to reveal their identity or not (‘can be open or closed’). The hair in (22) is linked to ‘family ties’, which also individuate them as part of the writer identity.

By contrast, the allocations of host nation-body parts do not necessarily invoke wholly positive connotations, viz. examples (20) and (21) depicting the stomach as ‘always wanting to consume’ or being ‘unstable’. The eye- and brain-allocations (examples 22, 23) are of positive polarity but focus on the respective writers’ education and career prospects, but not on their core identities.

Whilst most migrant respondents maintained a positive or at least neutral stance towards their home national identity or blamed xenophobic and/or colonialist Others for its perceived problems (see above), some informants voiced concerns about their home nation’s healthiness and coherence (see also example 2):

(24)

My nation [ = Ukraine] is the stomach of divided nations. It has to digest the conflicts. The heart of it is split between East and West but the mind is still stucked [sic] in Eastern doctrines. It’s [sic] eyes look for independence.

(25)

I have a bit of a problematic relation with my home nation [= Belgium]. Comparing it to a body part, I say it is the neck. I often have awful neck pains, yet of course I cannot do without that part of my body. The reason why it hurts to think of my home nation (Flanders in Belgium) is that ‘flemishness’, for me, stands for a number of things I do not wish to identify with: it means right-wing, provincialist […] The neck-metaphor suits the relation to my home nation also because the neck is located halfway between the heart and the head. So, how much my head is saying that I will not be ‘that kind’ of sour Flemish […] the truth is that I only feel really at home in Flanders. Flanders is in my heart and in my head, my aching neck reminding me that home is not where I live now, and at the same time, that it is not what I would like it to be.

In example (24) the writer highlights Ukraine’s internal heterogeneity, as she perceives it, by invoking first the stomach’s digestion of conflicts and then reverting to the stereotypical heart-mind opposition to describe what she sees as the main cause of division. In (25) a PhD student (female, age 37) in Norway relates her emotional state of simultaneous alienation and attachment to her home nation to her literal neck pain, which is then further interpreted symbolically as representing the half-way situation that she finds himself in as a migrant who both longs for her home nation and at the same time rejects parts of that national culture. The aching neck is halfway between head an heart, not fully reconciling the rational thought that she need not be ‘“that kind” of sour Flemish’ and her feelings of home-longing. Neither does it endorse or embrace a new, host-country identity; instead, it provides an elaborate reflection of a partly damaged national identity without offering a quick solution.

A possibly even more complex example of conceptualizing the relationship between himself and the host nation’s body is supplied by a Romanian student in Italy who construes himself as gut bacteria. This concept has a history of usage (alongside parasite-, virus- and disease-metaphors) to stigmatize minorities and migrants (Musolff, 2010, pp. 64–65; O’Brien, 2018; Sontag, 1991, p. 67), on account of their supposedly ‘low’ status in the ‘body hierarchy’ of physical or figurative organisms (Waśniewska, 2020). It might therefore be considered to be an unlikely candidate for identification. Still, it serves in this case to denote a useful body part:

(26)

I’ve currently been living in Italy for 10 years now, and if I were to describe my life here in terms of a human body, I’d say I feel like gut-bacteria, in the sense that even though I don’t consider myself ‘part of the body’ as a muscle-cell might be, I still feel pretty comfortable and integrated inside the system, as a productive and relatively comfortable organism.

Although this self-depiction as gut bacteria ends on a self-reassuring note, the frequent hedging (I’d say, relatively, pretty, belittling comparison with muscle cells, conditional and concessive constructions) betrays a hesitant meta-stance on the part of the writer in declaring full satisfaction with his status, which is reinforced by the explicit comparison with a more prototypical ‘part of the body’ such as muscle-cell. Nonetheless, as an answer to the survey question it fits the whole body scenario for the host nation, and gives a plausible and vivid appraisal of his position in it.

Examples (24)-(26) provide highly personal descriptions of their writers’ intermediate or transitory position between home/heritage-based and host-related national identities. For these respondents, there seems to be no full integration in either culture, leaving them with contradictory emotional and social loyalty issues. Their identifications with a divided stomach or heart, or an aching neck, or gut-bacteria, seem less self-assured than the neatly divided allocations of body parts to the home and host nation identities in examples (20)-(23). Instead of affirming a well-functioning, if heterogenous, national identity, examples (24)-(26) articulate experiences of a broken or challenged national body, person, or ego/self-identity.

Applications for metaphor reflection in raising national identity and diversity awareness

The metaphor interpretations discussed in the previous section link up with research findings about the central role of migrants’ own narratives and figurative language in (re-)constructing identity during and after migration (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017; Catalano, 2016; Clifton & Van De Mieroop, 2017; Du Bois, 2011). However, whilst such studies involve highly conscious self-reported descriptions of the migrant experience, our metaphor survey presents a different type of data. Whilst they, too, were consciously produced as part of an academic exercise, its task did not mention migration as a target topic at all. Hence, the elicited answers can be viewed as relatively spontaneous, largely unmonitored in terms of that topic. The majority of these responses are of neutral or positive polarity and reproduce standard nation-as-body scenarios, but roughly one third of the respondents took the opportunity to formulate critical concerns about challenged or changing national identity in terms of special interpretations of the metaphor prompt (see section 3). They either used it to express solidarity with their host nation (closeness to heart, mother’s hug), or to voice experiences of victimization, marginality, and/or historical oppression (parasite, convict, crippled limb, drowning body), or to construe a mixed or transitory identity (diverse body parts or digestive ingredients within one nation-body, aching neck halfway between head and hart, ‘comfortable’ gut bacteria). Despite including stigmatizing source concepts, these answers are testimony to a creative effort to formulate original, authentic reflections of national identities in terms of the body/person metaphor complex, which go beyond ‘banal’ nation-flagging symbolism and instead provide vivid scenarios of complex, damaged and dynamic nation-identities.

Such responses resemble the creative use of figurative language that has been studied in mediation, counselling and conciliation communication across diverse professional, pedagogic and therapeutic contexts (Creed & Nacey, 2020; Malvini Redden et al., 2019; Semino et al., 2018; Tay, 2013). Together with the aforementioned studies of migrants’ own narratives, they have shown that raising awareness about metaphors and enabling their co-construction in client-expert or small group conversation can have beneficial emotive and cognitive effects. They help individuals experiencing challenging situations of identity change and adaptation (e.g. on account of physical and mental illness, bereavement, changing work environment) in coping with new life and work circumstances.

Against this background, the findings reported above could be used for didactic tasks inviting migrant students to conceptualize themselves as parts of a nation-body and comparing. Examples (20)-(23), for instance, showed that differential figurative organ-allocation to identity-aspects (e.g. hand/heart vs. stomach/brain) is a readily accessible pattern of highlighting divergent national loyalties and/or aspirations. Informants could also be encouraged to add explanatory notes expanding on their choices, e.g. by adding argumentative and/or narrative text elements and referring to sources. As examples (14) and (15) showed, migrant students may be well aware of stigmatizing metaphors for their nation, whose stigma effect they can neutralize, as it were, by constructing alternative source concepts. A ‘stigma neutralization’ effect could also be observed in the gut bacteria example (26) but there it is achieved by involving humor. In other cases, such as examples (6)–(8) and (16)–(19), the nation-as-body metaphor is used to identify and highlight losses of limbs, brain drain, injuries on the body politic, which can serve to raise awareness of damaged identity, as a step towards reflection and empowerment. Inviting migrants’ own identity (re-)constructions in terms of nation-as-body or person-scenarios may thus provide a) access to unmonitored expression of challenged identity and b) a platform for a possible renegotiation of those identity aspects that are felt to be damaged and/or stigmatizing, i.e. through alternative body conceptualizations. Such an exercise could be integrated into curricula of intercultural communication (Byram et al., 2020), with the aim to review concepts of nation-based identities and loyalties, not by denouncing them as inherently threatening forms of aggressive nationalism but as opportunities to validate experiences of transitory and diverse identities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Musolff

Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK). His research interests focus on Intercultural Communication and Public Discourse Analysis. He has published widely on figurative language use in the public sphere, e.g. the monographs National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic (2021), Political Metaphor Analysis – Discourse and Scenarios (2016), Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust (2010), Metaphor and Political Discourse (2004).