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The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 249–266

Nations as persons

Collective identities in conflict

| University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
The paper analyses the construal of collective identities in the Middle East conflict, with special regard to the nation-as-person metaphor. This metaphor has been highlighted by proponents of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis as being instrumental in conceptualizing collective political entities as (pseudo-)personal identities. On the other hand, it has been critically argued that the nation-as-person metaphor should not be over-generalized and it has even been condemned as a fallacious theoretical construct. In view of the metaphor’s controversial status, the paper studies a corpus of ten speeches delivered by the Israeli and Palestinian political leaders B. Netanyahu and M. Abbas to the UN General assemblies in the period 2011–2015. Instances of emphatic use and enactment of the nation-as-person metaphor by the speakers are analysed in detail for their contextual implications and their function in collective identity-construction. The main finding is that whilst the nation-as-person metaphor is not ubiquitous in a statistical sense, it informs the fundamental pragmatic stance of the speakers as personifications of their nations’ collective identities vis-à-vis other nations. In conclusion, it is argued that such collective identity construction both expresses and shapes the progress of conflict communication.
Keywords: body politic, conflict communication, face, identity, Israel, metaphor, Palestine, scenario, United Nations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Speaking for a nation
  • 2.Nations as persons?
  • 3.From “extended” to “outstretched hands”
  • 4.Nation-persons’ social face
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.11mus
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