Captivation, Representation, and the Limits of Cognition: Interpreting Metaphor and Metonymy in Tahitian Tamau

This chapter considers the role of metaphor and metonym in visual representation by conjoining Alfred Gell’s two primary modes of agency. Metaphor and metonymy stimulate the mind, provoking the imagination and creating understanding in sometimes new and unexpected ways. The physical characteristics of tamau, plus the contexts in which they appeared, suggest that the skeins of braided hair indexed the lineage of the artist and the wearer through visual metaphors and metonyms. The tamau works metonymically to represent the lineage because each body, each person, was both the summation and the dissemination of the lineage in Tahitian society. Like metaphor, metonymy exercises the imagination in that it asks the viewer to follow the artist’s creative process of selection. Metaphor and metonymy make clear the contextual and interpretative nature of even such a fundamental process as identifying the prototype represented by the indexical artwork.