Metaphors as instruments of cultural mediation. Uses of the Term ‘blood’ in Edith Durham’s Works about Northern Albania

Blood, the substance and the concept, has long been accorded special significance in both religion (see the different Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions relating to the status of blood and hence how it may be treated or consumed / or not) and in medical science (see Galen, of Pergamon, the Greek Physician, who saw it as the link between body and soul). Consequently, the term ‘blood’ has acquired a series of complex metaphorical meanings in many languages and has come to carry a great deal of “cultural baggage” (Rutman and Rutman 1984) even when used in scientific discourse, post-Harvey. In this study we examine how it is used in the works of Edith Durham (1863-1944), the anthropologist famous for her works on the inhabitants of the Balkans and northern Albania and their traditions (a complex patchwork of different ethnic groups including followers of both Christianity and Islam, still adhering in some respects to much older beliefs). This paper will examine the part played by blood as a metaphor for kinship and descent in Durham’s description of Northern Albanian society in particular the importance of so-called blood relationships within the Kanun (or set of traditional laws, then largely unwritten). The method adopted will be to focus on the terms that Durham adopts and the experiential categories underlying them to expound their theory from the perspective of frame semantics (Fillmore 1976) and cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987/1991), from a corpus four of Durham’s works, and, secondly through comparison of these with others created from a parallel corpora of drawn from the popular magazine Scientific American (1881-1898), The King James Bible, and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”.