Joanna Overing
"One example was the use by an old man of the metaphor 'distant Guakamaya widowed red person' (otoaerae tuarekua) to express 'let us go bath' (ahe tiahae, or ' let us go to the river'). The knowlodge of neither the young people nor the anthropologist was sufficient to grasp the relationship of bathing and the metaphor.
(...)
Once I understood that the ruwang's main role as leader was that of worldmaker, I then was able to appreciate the precision of his metaphor, and its organizing power in the formulation of the significance of relationships between worlds. In brief, I began to understand the constitutive dimensions of the shaman's metaphors, where his aim was to understand and describe all the significant aspects of something (e.g. a disease) in its historical particularities."
