Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life by Michael Carrithers

Author:Michael Carrithers [Carrithers, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857458001
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2012-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

‘AS IF GOYA WAS ON HAND AS A MARKSMAN’ 1

FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE AS A RHETORICAL AND CULTURAL PHENOMENON

Brigitte Nerlich

Mary had a little lamb

Its mouth was full of blisters

And now it’s lying in a ditch

With all its brothers and sisters.

Schoolyard rhyme, March 2001

INTRODUCTION

Foot and mouth disease (FMD), a highly infectious animal disease, broke out in the U.K. in the spring of 2001 and swept through the countryside for seven months. It attracted long and intensive coverage in the press, on television and on the web. From the start the government declared war on the disease and implemented a slaughter, culling or killing policy, combined with a policy of shutting down the countryside to prevent the spread of the virus. Although this war frame might initially have been useful in rallying support for the slaughter policy and to create a feeling of acceptance, solidarity and control, the metaphor later backfired when a metaphorical war turned into a literal and all too well documented holocaust. This might have made it almost impossible to argue for or to implement more environmentally friendly alternatives to slaughter, such as vaccination or a combination of vaccination and slaughter.

I will argue that both the metaphor of war and the slaughter policy tapped into a wide network of cultural narratives, metaphors and potent images. Only by looking at the cultural context in which the policy and the metaphors and images surrounding it interacted can one understand why politicians stuck to this policy throughout the epidemic and how farmers and the general public reacted to this policy (see Döring and Nerlich forthcoming). I will attempt to show how FMD as a cultural phenomenon became caught up between what some might argue was an effective way of managing risk and what many saw as an exceedingly crude and largely counterproductive exercise in risk communication (see Donaldson, Lowe and Ward 2002: 32).

This chapter was inspired by three research traditions: cognitive linguistics and the study of metaphor, which has become a popular area of linguistic research since the 1980s (Lakoff and Johnson 1980); cultural, social and symbolic anthropology, where the study of the social and ritual uses of metaphor has become popular since the 1970s (Turner 1974; Sapir and Crocker 1977); and the study of social representations in social psychology (Harré 1984; Moscovici 1984; Wagner 1994). I will examine how both the policy of slaughter, used to eradicate FMD, and the media reaction to the outbreak and to the policy, were framed by a repertoire of metaphors and images which draws on both universal and historically and culturally specific reservoirs of narratives and symbols.

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